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T O K E E P R E C E I V I N G Y O U R C O P Y E V E R Y Q U A R T E R

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WELCOME TO INK383 Roundup

Canvas Round Up

Crazy for Reg

Taking Control

Making a Smarter Web

Hydrahack Roundup

Good Culture for innovation

Lifting the Lid on UX 4 The Win

Studio Updates

I N T H I S I S S U E

B Y : JOHN NEWBOLD

Welcome to the first edition of INK in 2014. For those that don’t know, INK is a quarterly publication from us at 383. It’s filled with things we’ve been making, knowledge we’d like to share and thoughts on what’s next. This edition focuses on the future of web personalisation, UX and creating a company culture that supports innovation.

Whether you’ve been receiving INK since day one, or a new subscriber, we hope you find something useful here. This time round, there’s a little form (in case you’ve missed the huge advert opposite!) that we’d love you to fill out online if you want to keep receiving INK in 2014. This helps us know that we have the right contact details for people who may have moved jobs and ensures we’re not sending dead trees to dead addresses. Enjoy!

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ROUNDUPB Y : JACOB DUTTON

INTRO:

2013 ended with 383 being named Digital and Creative Agency of the

Year, picking up an Innovation Award for the ever divisive Brian, the Social Pigeon and taking the

team away to Bruges (a gallery of censored snaps can be found later in

this issue) to celebrate what, all in all, has been a pretty epic year.

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We’ve resisted the lure of ‘that London’ for almost five years now but we think the time is right given that we have a really interesting mix of partners and clients in the smoke.

Plans are also well underway for an awesome series of events in 2014 including our quarterly Byte Breakfasts, a book launch and of course Canvas which will return for the third time this year.

With an office move, an interesting new proposition for 383 in the offing and some significant hires to come, the next few months are likely to be the most exciting yet.

As ever, thanks for picking up INK and enjoy the third edition!

After the relative peace and quiet of a well deserved two week break over Christmas and the New Year, 2014 has started with somewhat of a bang. We’ve been appointed by Lafarge Tarmac to re-imagine their intranet system for around 6,000 of their employees, Marketing Birmingham have asked us to lead on digital for the upcoming Year of Science festival (as if we needed more of an excuse to unleash our geeky side) and we’re cracking on with some exciting social experience work with General Motors across Europe.

In amongst this, we’ve also been busy shaping our new home in Victoria Works which we’ll hopefully be settled into by the time the next edition of INK ships. Not content with the upheaval of moving offices in Birmingham, there’s also plans for an space in London by the end of the year so that we can be closer to our friends at Hammerson, Channel 4 and RBI.

DIGITAL & CREATIVE

AGENCY OF THE YEAR

UX FOR 6000+ USER INTRANET

DIG ITAL LEAD FOR B IRMINGHAM

YEAR OF SC IENCE

JO IN US FOR

BREAKFAST IN 2014DADI

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ROUND UP :

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B Y : TOM MART IN

IT ’S STRANGE WORKING IN AN INDUSTRY WHICH IS

STILL EVOLVING. As designers and developers we’re

constantly changing our tools, techniques and technology to adapt to the shifting

landscape of the web.

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expand our audience of not just designers and developers but also the community of marketeers. During this years opening presentation, John from 383 talked about looking beyond technology and focusing on the bigger ideas which were having an impact on customers and the wider industry.

Our aim has always been to find the most interesting people working with the web today. People that are doing the hard work and who have a story to tell. This year we were joined by some fantastic speakers from Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, BERG, O2 and The Guardian.

Technologies which enabled simplified realtime communication between users, CSS techniques which enabled more power and flexibility for designers and a world where stories could adapt to specific audiences.

So we decided to create Canvas, a conference were we could share the things we were interested in with other designers and developers. Our 2012 event had some fantastic speakers from BSkyB, Twitter, Opera and BBC R&D.

For 2013, we wanted to include more people in the conversation,

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At the start of 2012, we saw an opportunity to explore technology which we thought would have an impact on the web over the next five years.

10 years ago we were building interactive experiences in Flash and packaging them on CD-ROMs, 5 years ago we were starting to see a rise in people using mobile devices with tiny screens. Now we’re in a world where some people don’t even own a desktop computer and customer experiences are purely mobile. The only thing we can guarantee is that in five years, everything will have changed again.

LEARNING FROM CANVAS

W R A P P I N G U P O U R A N N U A L C O N F E R E N C E

WE ALWAYS TRY TO SEEK

OUT TALENTED PEOPLE WHO ARE

ACTUALLY MAKING THINGS OUT OF THE WEB, NOT

MAKING A LIVING TALKING ABOUT

THE WEBTHIS YEAR’ S SPEAKERS : D A V E B I R S S - ADD IT IVE A L I C E B A R T L E T T - BERG M A R T I N B E E B Y - M ICROSOF T T E R R Y R Y A N - ADOBE | M A T T A N D R E W S - GUARDIAN R U T H J O H N - THE LAB AT O2 | H A R R Y H U R S T - QUB IT M A R K W H E A T L E Y - NOK IA MUS IC | H A N N A H W O L F E - GHOST

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R E S P O N D I N G T ON E W W O R K F L O W S

R E B O O T I N G H U M A N - C O M P U T E RI N T E R A C T I O N

In the past, a designer would create every single site template at a fixed size and with pixel-perfect accuracy. With the world using more and more devices with unique screen sizes, this workflow is no longer viable. Designers and developers need better tools and workflows to adapt to a responsive world.

Matt Andrews explained how The Guardian has been busy re-building its mobile site, into a beautiful responsive experience, which can work on almost any device. By throwing out all of the existing desktop website features and starting from scratch, it’s made the organisation carefully consider which features make it onto it’s new responsive website.

Terry Ryan showed some new authoring tools and technologies that Adobe have in the lab. Tools which bring the rich editing experience of past products like Adobe Flash into a modern and responsive workflow.

Sometimes the only way to see things from a new perspective is to start over.

Smartphones have been with us almost 15 years. While most smartphone platforms are written in low level programming languages, Firefox OS (built by Mozilla), is one of the first platforms to be truly made out of the web. Creating an app for the Firefox OS is as simple as writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Ruth John from The Lab at O2 demoed how Firefox has built an entire smartphone platform using web technologies, allowing web developers to create apps using skills they already have.

Hannah Wolfe shared the story of Ghost, a new blogging platform which was born out of the frustration of existing platforms like WordPress and Tumblr. Using Kickstarter, the team raised £190,000, with backers getting early access to the project. Uniquely, it’s set up as a not-for-profit, so it can’t be bought out by big media companies like Facebook or Yahoo.

Our next session looked at the way that computers and humans interact.

Martin Beeby is an advocate for developers integrating more natural human interaction into their apps. Martin argues that, as the web gets smarter, we should be making use of more human technologies like speech and motion recognition to build a richer and more natural web.

Alice Barlett gave us an introduction to Little Printer and BERG Cloud. Little Printer is a web connected printer which prints out little bits of the web throughout the day. Alice explained how BERG had shifted the complicated ‘big brain’ responsible for fetching the publications outside of the device and into the cloud. This allows the printer to be easier to manufacture and allowing BERG to make the device smarter without replacing the hardware.

SO WHAT DID WE COVER?

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S E E Y O U I N 2 0 1 4

D A T A A N DP E R S O N A L I S A T I O N

Our afternoon session looked at how Nokia and Qubit were using data to understand customer behaviour.

Harry Hurst from Qubit gave us an overview of some of the work they’ve been doing with e-commerce personalisation, giving retailers tools to easily serve up dynamic recommendations based on past interactions. Harry ran us through 8 fast ways to personalise an e-commerce store, from giving new customers a warm welcome with offers, to highlighting new page functionality and strategies to deploy helpful widgets at the right time.

Mark Wheatley gave an overview of the work he’s been doing at Nokia Music. He shared some of the work Nokia has been doing with robots and humans in the search of the perfect playlist, trying to strike the balance between discovering new songs and old classics.

We’re in the early stages of planning Canvas for 2014. We’re still obsessed with the web, but we’re also interesting in hearing about the stories behind the world’s most interesting digital products and services. Learn from the amazing people behind the sites we use every day to help us get stuff done, share a moment, entertain us or help us discover something great.

Dave Birss finished off the day, insisting that within agencies, the term ‘digital’ has lost it’s meaning. Agencies which offer purely ‘digital’ services are being edged out by advertising, sales promotion and direct marketing agencies who are also offering digital services. He sees the big opportunities are in how digital agencies can invade the world of advertising.

A N D F I N A L L Y. . .

THE TERM DIGITAL’ HAS LOST IT ’S MEANING

NEW WORK :

We’ve been really busy in the studio (and out) working on an exciting project for 123-reg, so we thought it would be good to share the creative process behind our latest campaign.

When briefed with finding a way to convince people to register their .com domains with 123-reg, we had to identify what set them aside from other companies. With the backing of their existing customers, 123-reg are the number one domain business in the UK; mainly due to their outstanding service. So with that in mind, great customer service was the obvious starting point for our campaign.

B Y : JACK BENTLEY

WATCH

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www.383project.com/blog/crazy-for-reg

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Using mockumentary style footage based on a recent Channel 4 documentary around a certain young boy band, we invited people to get to know some fictional super fans collectively known as ‘Regheads’. We follow their weird world and discover how they have developed an obsession with Reg, a seemingly average, everyday guy from 123-reg customer service. Using support lines, live chat and any way possible to get in touch with him, the film shows how these fanatics have really been affected by him.

The video is a humorous hint towards the level of care 123-reg offers it’s customers, without becoming overly officious; we let the audience gradually discover why these fans are so infatuated. With the film part of the campaign only living online, it gave us the opportunity to create a piece of content that could be mistaken for authentic documentary footage, adding a level of intrigue.

To work alongside the film we’ve also worked on art direction for the above the line campaign that will introduce people to the Regheads and direct them to the video.

It was such an enjoyable project to work on, and slightly bizarre at times – particularly when we were decorating the sets! It was excellent to get so much freedom from the client during filming, which has allowed us to create something a bit different.

We’re proud of the final product and hope you enjoy it too.

USING MOCKUMENTARY STYLE FOOTAGE... WE FOLLOW THE REGHEADS AND DISCOVER HOW THEY HAVE DEVELOPED AN OBSESSION WITH REG, A SEEMINGLY AVERAGE, EVERYDAY GUY FROM 123-REG CUSTOMER SERVICE.

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TAKING CONTROL

B Y : L EON BARRETT

A P L A T F O R M T O P O W E R T H E U K ’ S B I G G E S T R E T A I L C E N T R E S

NEW WORK :

The Content app collects RSS, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube content for localised curation and re-publishing.

For creating and sending campaign emails. The app integrates with third parties to source data, schedule and send.

The task began with understanding the internal digital requirements for each shopping centre. How could we innovate usefully in this area?

A phase of research revealed that each centre’s marketing team used a separate suite of tools, with differing levels of data management, functionality and legacy contracts across the portfolio. This lead to the teams spending more of their time and resources battling with confusing and outdated software, rather than it positively impacting how they wanted to work.

We saw this as an opportunity to massively streamline how Hammerson’s marketing teams used software to acquire and communicate with their audience, and to help reshape their day to day processes.

Control Centre was born.

C O N T E N T E M A I LT H E P L A T F O R M ‘ A P P S ’

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After becoming lead agency for Hammerson last year, we got straight to work on a large UX programme for their shopping centre portfolio.

We identified a set of common tasks that all marketing teams needed to perform and split these into separate applications.

Control Centre is a collection of digital tools and bespoke services which have been brought together in a central, cloud based product, making it easier for Hammerson to control, access and maintain activity across their digital channels.

We had a clear vision that Control Centre should form the central pillar of the marketing teams’ activity and three key principles were established to guarantee this; users should only need to login once, specific tasks should be easy to perform in no more than 3 steps and the UI needed to be unified and familiar across every single interaction.

Wherever possible we integrated with existing tools and services, finding API providers for common processes such as Email and SMS. This gave us the ability to swap out services based on

Displays data collected from the other apps within Control Centre, to provide a single view of activity with options to filter by source and date.

Responsible for creating and sending SMS campaigns. It is also responsible for receiving SMS messages.

A COLLECTION OF DIGITAL TOOLS AND BESPOKE SERVICES

A N A L Y T I C S S M S

UX: UNDERSTANDING USERS

DETA I LED, USEFUL ANALYT ICS

Tracks influence, reach and sentiment across social networks and provides a way of responding directly to users.

S O C I A L

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business requirements without users needing to learn a new interface, process or username and password. This architecture also allows us to add more applications to Control Centre in the future, again without users needing to learn a new system.

Control Centre is centred around a bespoke API and permissions system which all applications hook into. We built it using the Laravel PHP Framework to power the API and backend processes, and the Backbone JavaScript framework to provide a fluid and responsive front end experience. This separation of concerns means that we can build the front end of the applications using a structured set of API’s, but then have the flexibility to use another programming language to actually power the API. Put simply, this means that we aren’t restricted by a particular technology for future unknown developments, but that the system is future proofed by design. Control Centre itself also has an API which can be used to power other applications, and is currently being used to provide social content for Hammerson’s Kudos mobile application.

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Interfaces needed to adapt to their context so that the user could always get the best experience possible, regardless of what screen they might be using.

T H E Y E A R O F P E R S O N A L I S A T I O N

In 2014 we can expect to move on from merely how the design alters to fit your screen, to how the overall experience responds to you as a person. Personalisation like this takes into account circumstances like your current location, your past likes and dislikes and your browsing history or content that you interacted with previously. With the introduction of Google Now back in 2013, we already began to see this tailoring of experience. Google Now knows your location and will show you interesting spots around you or places nearby to visit. It updates you with local news or how your favourite team is performing in the league. If you Google search a location on your desktop, when you look at Google Now on your mobile device, there will be directions on how to get there. It’s all intertwined and responding to you and your interests, making logical connections between the information it has already aggregated to predict what you should see next.

I think we’ll see an increasing emergence of this personalised, ‘Smarter Web’ over the coming months. For example, imagine loading up a shopping website; it already knows your size, your past likes and purchases or that you recently

TRENDS :

MAKING A SMARTER WEB

B Y : MORGAN JONES

searched Google for a new pair of jeans. It knows the average cost that you tend to spend on clothing and starts adapting its catalogue to show you things within these filters before you apply them. It’s responded to you as a person and is helping you to discover what it already knows you will like.

S M A R T S I M P L I C I T Y

Progressive Reduction is another trend which has started to take my interest of late.

With Progressive Reduction, the design, be it a website or an app, learns how much you use it and as you become more familiar, starts hiding the unnecessary details, providing the user with a much simpler and cleaner design.

For example, you load up an app for the first time and are greeted with the logo in the title bar, you see thumbnails with names alongside them and you have a button, labeled with text and an icon, plus a tutorial showing you where to start. The more that you start to use this app, the more the app begins to change; the logo shrinks down to a small icon, the labels next to the thumbs disappear and the button shrinks in size. The user has already learnt the functionality of these assets and doesn’t need as much visual guidance as they did when they first started using it. The design is reducing down to its essential minimum.

In 2013 we saw the internet being increasingly consumed on different screens and devices.

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B Y : L EON BARRETT

The last HydraHack in December provided a nice opportunity to look back at 2013 and round up of some of the trends and patterns that influenced web development over the year.

The Internet of Things saw the gap between physical and digital close with a number of platforms and services gaining in popularity allowing web developers to use their existing skills to build connected devices. A plethora of web services including Temboo, Parse from Facebook and Xively provide a set of API’s and platforms taking care of back end infrastructure allowing developers to focus on creating amazing products. Micro-controllers such as the Arduino Yun with built in WiFi and Ethernet provide an easier way of connecting ‘things’ to the internet.

JavaScript has often been described as the language of the web and 2013 really saw the language stand up and be noted. This language can run in the browser to power interactivity, on the server thanks to Node to provide backend logic and on the desktop in the form of tools such as Grunt to automate and run tasks.

Being able to re-use modules of code in multiple places improves portability of code and streamlines the developer workflow. Keep an eye out for some upcoming projects that rely heavily on this versatile language. MORE

www.hydrahack.co.uk

The world of online payments was another big area for 2013 with Stripe expanding it’s availability to the UK and Ireland, providing developers with an easy, robust and reliable way of accepting payments, in turn allowing developers to monetise products and services which may have previously proven too difficult or costly to do.

This is only a short round-up of the last HydraHack meetup, be sure to RSVP at hydrahack.co.uk for future events where like-minded folks discuss the latest trends and techniques in web design and development.

RECAP :

GOOD IDEASDON’T CAREABOUT COMPANY HIERARCHY

B Y : JOHN NEWBOLD

CULTURE :

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Over the last few years we’ve spent a lot of time collaborating with clients on fairly difficult innovation projects. Whether inventing something new from scratch, or optimising existing products to create a better user experience, there’s been one overriding thing I’ve been left with; company culture (at the client’s end) is one of the biggest factors contributing to the success or failure of making good things. Looking at some well known companies and thinking about innovation programmes with large organisations that we’ve been a part of, here’s the four main things I think are important when trying to create a culture which encourages innovation.

CREATING A CULTURE FOR GREAT USER EXPERIENCES

4STEPS TO SUPPORTING INNOVATION

end users together to make new things collaboratively in open one or two day sessions. As well as feeling rapid and agile, Connected Studio is built around the skills of BBC staff, as well as BBC suppliers. Rather than commissioning new user experiences in the same way you might commission content at arms length for broadcast, this process blends us in to a team of BBC staff with a common goal of innovating together.

Many organisations have incredibly talented teams internally who are equipped with not only the skills to ideate, but also the technical capabilities to make things. Organisations who have in house developers, designers and product managers should lean on these skills heavily to make new things.

1 . C H A L L E N G E T H E S T A T U S Q U O

In large organisations, better end user experiences emerge when everyone is invested in a common goal. If that goal is for everyone to innovate and improve the product then team members feel liberated to do so, irrespective of the level they sit hierarchically within the organisation. Love them or loathe them, at Facebook innovation is encouraged at all levels and a culture of making is an attribute of every employee, not just the guys on the board. Prototypes such as Chatheads are good examples of this culture in action. The idea, which emerged from a team of two people, was conceived in a few days and prototyped in about the same. No one stopped to ask for approval, they knew they had license to pursue an idea and they knew that the best way to demonstrate it to others was to start to build it. Large organisations such as Facebook and Spotify have both been able to scale this culture from a few people to several thousand employees. At Facebook, initiatives such as bootcamp give an intensive

induction for new engineers to all parts of the business over several weeks. At Spotify, their team structure enables teams to work across tribes, squads, chapters and guilds. These different team structures enable people to innovate around different aspects of the product in different ways. By making every person in the company a stakeholder of the end user experience from day one, everyone benefits. More people, making more things.

2 . U S E E V E R Y O N E ’ S S K I L L S

T O M A K E T H I N G S

It’s easy to raise organisations like Spotify and Facebook up the flag pole every time you’re talking about culture, but how are other older organisations changing the way they work? Over the last few years we’ve been heavily involved in a number of interesting programmes with the BBC and Channel 4. Described as ‘a new approach to delivering innovation’, one of the most positive experiences for me has been BBC’s Connected Studio. The programme brings agencies, internal BBC staff and real

FOCUS ON YOUR SKILLS, RATHER THAN YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION

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COLLABORAT ING AT BBC ’ S

CONNECTED STUDIOS

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F I N A L T H O U G H T S

Culture affects people’s overall attitude to end user experience in myriad ways. It determines if employees feel empowered or entrapped in their roles, it can cause mass disruption and innovation (in a good way) or be like being stuck in the mud; missing business opportunity within your sector, making people feel demotivated about their job and ultimately threatening the overall health of the company. I believe that company culture is something that can be consciously shaped and improved. Too often culture is thought of as a passive background ‘force’ that just happens, really there’s no dark art to shaping it – decide what changes could work for you and find a team of people who believe the same thing.

SPEAK ING AT RB I ’ S UX DAY

A version of this article was recently given as a talk at Reed Business Information’s internal User Experience conference. Titled ‘Creating the right culture to deliver great user experiences’, 383 spoke alongside other RBI agencies Frog and Method.

3 . I N V O L V E U S E R S E A R L Y

A N D O F T E N

Good user testing programs can ensure that large organisations feel confident in developing new products and services and bringing them to market. ‘Fail harder’ is a great rallying cry for engineers, but mis-interpreted can be sorely misunderstood across other areas of a business. When acceptance of failing becomes confused with shipping bad or ill conceived products, the end user inevitably suffers. Involving real world users from the start enables companies to make things quickly, but then learn and iterate from the user feedback of actual customers who will be using the product. Companies who consistently nail good UX have a culture that understands customer problems to solve, can identify new market opportunities and has the ability to involve users in the development process early and often.

4 . S H A R E

Finally, sharing is a much overlooked and incredibly valuable attribute of organisations who are focused on user experience. The Government Digital Service have done a pretty incredible job of overhauling the .gov.uk range of digital products (formerly direct.gov). They’ve changed not just the output, but the way in which the work is done. Their focus is the needs of the end user, not the needs of the government.

They are highly principled and focused, sharing their Service Design Manual publicly to organise people around common goals. They also have an amazing culture of knowledge sharing, both within their teams and within the wider web industry. Each week video updates, articles and product write-ups go live on the GDS blog to tell the story of how the user experience of the Government’s digital products is being improved. Through this process of sharing and reflection I believe many organisations can benefit their organisational culture – sharing the story of the companies output, rather than writing press releases on ‘finished things’.

FAIL CULTURE ISN’T ALWAYS THE BEST EXPERIENCE FOR USERS

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Only when we are confident that we have a deep and thorough understanding of a client’s offering, their history, brand values and future strategic plans do we speak with their current users to understand the nature of their engagement and to shape their experience.

In the next issue of Ink, we’ll be looking at the next area of our UX process and how we engage directly with end users to curate experiences built around their needs, goals, limitations and expectations.

B Y : P ETER HONNOR

As products and services evolve and users become increasingly savvy with their choices, more and more clients are realizing that the quality and integrity of their end user experience is a key differentiator.

Here at 383, we’ve had an extremely busy few months working with clients to help define, refine and deliver great user experiences for products and services across a wide range of sectors and industries.

So what makes a great user experience? Well, its more than a great design, its more than a solid process, its more than a business strategy, and its more than understanding user’s needs when they choose and use a service.

At 383, we understand that the curation of a great user

experience involves the close partnership of a wide range of disciplines, ranging from design research, human factors, marketing, business and content strategy, right through to user testing, brand definition, interaction and visual design.

To deliver this, our internal mantra of ‘Think First, Design Later’ underpins our UX approach to create a strong understanding of a client’s business needs and requirements, whilst also working to understand how we anticipate users will engage and interact with any given service.

Quite often, our clients are surprised that one of our first questions in our UX process is ‘What is your Business Strategy for the next 3 years?’, but we strongly believe that only by looking inwards to understand how a client views itself and its future strategy, can we create an experience that not only meets their immediate needs, but also lays the foundations of how a client is experienced by its users for years to come.

PROCESS :

GREAT USER EXPERIENCE INVOLVES THE CLOSE PARTNERSHIP OF A WIDE RANGE OF DISCIPLINES

NEXT T IME :

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T H E 4 H A C K T E C H N I C A L B R I E F

Channel 4 allowed us to play with a bunch of backend APIs, from the more standard Programmes and Identity API, to some interesting new realtime services for 4OD usage and recommendations. After the technical brief there were lots of interesting ideas floating around the room; everything from a time travelling version of 4OD to building interfaces which responded to voice commands.

I teamed up with Alex and Sergio from Smesh and Mark from Adaptive lab. We’d all had some similar thoughts on how the social viewing experience might be improved. While other teams immediately started hacking away, we spent the morning of the first day locked in a tiny meeting room trying to nail what we wanted to build.

Last year I headed down to Channel 4 to take part in 4Hack; a two day event to build interesting new stuff with Channel 4 APIs and data.

Day One: We started in pub quiz style, identifying some of the main Channel 4 theme tunes. I’ve got to admit that I failed to identify Hollyoaks, but I did know my Brookside from my Grand Designs.

ANNOUNCING :

4 H A C K 2

Some of the themes we wanted to explore centred around how we might translate a more traditional TV viewing experience in a video on demand environment. In the not too distant past, friends and family would crowd around a single screen to have the experience of watching together but in the world of multiscreen, and when we’re separated by time and space, this can prove pretty difficult. With many of us divorcing live TV in favour of VOD, how do we recreate the experience of watching with friends?

We’d also all faced a similar problem with watching long series on VOD: Spoilers. You don’t want to accidentally leak a plot twist, so unless you watch live, many people basically end up not discussing a show until it’s over.

B Y : TOM MART IN

A W I N A T C H A N N E L 4 ’ S H A C K A T H O N

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What does it mean to have a social viewing experience when one of your friends has time shifted a live broadcast?

How do we keep interaction spoiler free?

Does Twitter really enhance every viewing experience?

How do we make a second screen experience which isn’t distracting?

4 hours and many alternative user journeys later, we emerged with a concept and a bit of a brief for what we were trying to build.

How can we build a platform that allows users to create events around watching and discussing programmes, with the people they care about and whose opinions really matter, by recreating the experience of watching a TV together?

There was some fascinating stuff being built by other teams: voice activated interfaces, platforms for positive action and experiments which monitored your facial expression. Time to get on with our hack.

Day two: Instead of building a fully functioning prototype, we decided to focus on a specific user journey which would best demonstrate our concept. I focused on hacking up some of the existing Channel 4 pages, Alex and Sergio built out the player pages and Mark built our mobile interface. We opted to bolt our mobile experience into the pre-existing 4Now

application; why build a separate application when users already have an app in their pockets?

4 H A C K 3

Our target audience were users who were more interested in drama like Homeland and documentaries like Dispatches, than Made In Chelsea. We decided to focus our demo on a particular moment in Black Mirror which we knew would provoke a lot of user reaction.

After finishing up our interfaces and scripting some interaction across our desktop and mobile experience, it was on to the 5 minute presentations. Our concept showed how users can interact with a group of friends, who may or may not be watching at exactly the same time, while still keeping the chat spoiler free.

4 H A C K 4

All teams showed some really fantastic ideas and concepts. Everything from a hands-free Channel 4 Food app for the kitchen, a platform to take positive action in response to documentaries, a mobile discovery engine for content and some crazy real time factual sentiment / mood aggregation (with added GIFs).

After some deliberation from the judges, our concept won the overall prize; much work is needed to take this hack from idea to finished product, but we’ll keep you posted as the idea develops on the 383 blog.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE A SOCIAL VIEWING EXPERIENCE WHEN ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS HAS TIME SHIFTED A LIVE BROADCAST?

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The months running up to Christmas are normally pretty busy for everybody and 383 was no exception – a number of new starters, a Christmas weekend away and four new additions to the 383 team made for an exciting time in the studio.

In October Tom Mansell joined us as Search Manager, as well as new developer Stephen Nolan. In to the user experience team arrived senior producer Karl Randay who brings a wealth of knowledge and creative insight, and producer Julia Ivorra Harrison who will help run user testing programs. 2014 is shaping up to be an equally busy year and I look forward to sharing a lot more with you over the coming months.

Remember, we’re always on the lookout for the best people, if you’d like to join the team, keep an eye on our careers site for the latest vacancies - 383project.com/careers

B Y : HANNAH FOX

STUDIO UPDATE

AGENCY L I FE :

TOM

STEPHEN

JUL IA

KARL

MORE

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December arrived and it was time for the annual 383 Christmas weekender. This year we headed

abroad and took the team away to Bruges. There was bike riding, ice skating and boat rides as well as some lovely food and a few cheeky drinks.

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