The Smart Electricity Meter (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) rollout is starting to pay data dividends for Victorian electricity users.

Beginning with the Jemena Electricity Outlook Portal (on which we worked with DiUS) and most recently with Origin Energy’s revamped Origin Smart, Victorian energy distributors and retailers have worked hard to deliver energy-use data so their customers can make better-informed decisions about their energy use.

Instead of data, they need to deliver value.

The portals tend toward the same type of information display — a dashboard of bar and pie charts that show energy use over hours, days and weeks. It’s data, sure, but is it enough?

Because of the way the government privatised its monopoly electricity company, Victoria has the most-contested retail energy market in the world. In excess of 25% of Victorian electricity customers change retailers every year.

Energy retailers have bet large sums of money that building these Smart Meter portals will begin to build a relationship with customers so they ‘churn’ less often. On the face of it, that makes some sense — at the moment customers don’t have a true relationship with their energy retailer. But why would they? Who has loyalty to the company that doesn’t do anything more than bill you for electrons that a different company generates and that flow over yet another company’s networks?

Nobody does.

But portals on their own won’t help all that much.

They won’t help because at the moment, they’re just data streams, and increasing the volume of data without giving people tools to manage it is an increase in noise, not signal. Rather than giving people control, it gives them yet more busy-work.

To build a relationship with customers, a relationship that will make customers think twice before changing electricity providers, smart retailers will deliver more than a firehose of data. Next-generation tools from retailers will need to inform, educate and delight customers.

In the future, they’ll link with other data sets, like weather forecasts, to tell people when to turn their heating up or down to maximise efficiency. They’ll alert customers to spot price hikes and give people a chance to temporarily turn off less-efficient appliances to avoid brownouts. They’ll alert you at work to let you know if there’s been an outage during the day. They’ll offer incentives for changing the time you run the dishwasher. In the shorter term, they’ll let you know if your energy use has spiked before you get an unusually-large bill in the mail.

Instead of data, they’ll deliver value.

The first retailers to market with a series of tools that help customers to actually harness smart meter data — rather than just view it — will have taken the first step toward building a meaningful relationship with their customers. If a retailer gives its customers energy-management tools that other retailers don’t have, and that are annoying to do without, then they’ll have made the first steps toward building brand loyalty.

In a market where customer acquisition costs are soaring, that’s worth real money.

The post Next steps for using information from Victoria’s Smart Meters. Insight and actions beat data dumps every time. appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

Now that we’ve posted our second (or third depending on how you count these things) episode, it’s time to tell you about our podcast, The Nudge. Way back when we started The Nudge events, we wanted to be able to share the ideas behind them with more than just those people who were able to attend on the nights.

So we recorded the events.

And then we started thinking about a podcast where we talked about being a better designer (and making the world a better place). And the result is the Nudge Podcast. On our podcasts Josh Kinal, Jerome Lebel-Jones, and Ross Floate grapple with the issues related to being a better designer, and we ask special guests from around the world for their perspective as well. What kind of issues? Issues like inspiration, trust, being wrong, and the nature of responsibility.

As we continue to present our events, we’ll keep including the audio from the live interviews as special episodes to our podcast – you can hear Elise Peyronnet from Melbourne Music Week on Episode 0.

Future episodes of the podcast (yes, they’re already recorded and in the can) include Ned Dwyer from Tweaky.com, Chris Clarke (now of Black Pixel), Brad Ellis of Pacific Helm, Jayne Lewis of Two Birds Brewing, and Associate Professor Peter McGraw of the Humor Code. You can listen to the podcast at the website, follow via rss or you can subscribe on iTunes.

Are you interested in being a guest on The Nudge? Do you have something you’d like to hear discussed? We’re all ears. Drop us an email, or let us know in the comments.

The post Officially announcing The Nudge podcast, and a call for guests. appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

I spend a lot of time lamenting the unwillingness of designers to get on the telephone and actually talk to clients or suppliers. Apparently so does Greg Storey at Happy Cog. He recently wrote a great post about it and rather than re-hash it, we thought we’d make a nice motivational poster. Greg, hope you see this, and hope you like it.

Illustration by our own Marty Cook.

The post Pick up the &%#$& phone! appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

At Floate, we employ three developers. There is one full time developer and two designers who can also develop.

None of us are ninjas. Nor are we rock stars. The mere suggestion we are brogrammers is likely to get us seething.

When we develop, we are developers and we’re good at our jobs. We don’t need escapist language to pretend we’re something we’re not.

A client won’t decide to employ someone because they have a ninja cartoon or guitar motif on their business card. They’ll look at past work and for professionalism.

It may be my bias, but I think claiming to be a ninja or a rock star makes one look unprofessional.

The bigger problem

In February, a number of women wrote posts titled ‘Speaking Up’: Sarah Parmenter’s and Relly Annett-Baker’s made the biggest impact. Some time ago, Rachael Andrew wrote about the backchannel’s different treatment of men and women.

The web development industry is very sexist; every month there is one controversy or another.

Ninjas and rock stars are both masculine archetypes and a brogrammer is male by definition. Females can be actual ninjas and actual rock stars but you won’t find many cartoons of females on development job or agency sites.

The frequent use of male archetypes to describe web designers and developers allegedly at the top of their game, means the bias against females is built in from the start.

Why should women spend three or four years learning a profession, if the best they can hope to be considered is second best?

It’s a job

As Mike Monteiro has explained in simple to understand detail, design is a job, so is development. Instead of treating your job as a teenage fantasy, start treating it, your colleagues and your industry with the respect they deserve.

The only way to be seen as a professional is to behave as one.

The post There are no ninjas here appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

We’ve written before about the importance of strong mobile designs for hospitality websites. Over the past year, we’ve launched a number of responsive sites, including large-scale work for ANZ and Origin Energy. More recently, we’ve built and launched sites for some much smaller (but still fantastic) organisations that are very close to our hearts. Having had these sites online for some time now, we can tell you some of the things we’ve learned.

If you’re a destination, mobile is huge.

It may seem obvious, but for venues and personal services business, the number of unique visitors coming from mobiles is astronomical. For the Rainbow Hotel, more than 65% of their visits are from mobile. That makes sense – if you’re out having a drink then you want to know what’s on at the local pub. But even Blonde Tiger, a nail salon that operates mostly on a booking basis, receives more than 50% of its visitors from mobile.

Mobile has a higher proportion of initial visitors than it does total visitors

Let’s put that more simply – the first time people look at your business’ site, they’re probably on a phone. They may check it later from their desktop or laptop, but if you’re in the business of getting people on seats, you have to think mobile first. That means you need to deliver the full content of your website in a rich experience for small screens and devices. Everything you write for the site should be conceived with an understanding that your customers are probably going to view it on a small screen. For some types of information, that can be difficult, but the extra effort is worth it. For Feldman’s Bar in Fitzroy, we managed to design their menu so that it works well on a tiny iPhone screen, and for the Rainbow Hotel we built a responsive design that showcases their entire beer range in the same screen space. It just takes planning and care.

iPhones and iPads are absolutely dominating mobile.

If you ever travel on public transport you know this already. In Australia, iOS devices dominate the mobile market. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t support other devices (hey, the web should work on every device) but it does tell you where to focus your energies right now. There are other devices, though, and you should be future-ready for them.

Responsive Design is your friend.

If web design isn’t your business, then you’ve probably never really heard of responsive design. But you’ve been on sites that use it (hint, you’re on one right now). You don’t need to know how it works, except that a well-designed responsive page will format itself to the best size and layout for the device you’re using without the requirement for multiple discrete sites to support different devices. Do it right, and the same pages appear differently, but just as good, on devices as disparate as an iMac and an iPhone.

The post The importance of being mobile. appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

Karen McGrane kicked the day off speaking about content, for want of a better word. We need to plan everything we produce for metadata and use on multiple devices and syndicated to multiple platforms. That’s the only way to ensure longevity and flexibility.

A future in which we take control of the wrong things was the dark vision Bruce Sterling showed us. The web has passed 2.0 and we are currently in a depression era, was his thesis. So we were taken to a time in which our bad decisions led to a meaningless future. It inverted Tom Coates’s manipulation of the mundane and sped towards an outcome he described as a "dark euphoria" but also felt like an episode of Black Mirror.

Government efforts to control the web have not worked to control the dissemination of information and expressions of individuality in China, according to Tricia Wang. A whole generation of Chinese are learning the importance of leading a secret life online to have more control over their real life.

The messages were coming thick, fast, loud and clear. Don’t let a smart city be the end of your individuality and the extension of a government’s suppression of its citizens’ voices, said Adam Greenfield. Jason Scott told us how important it is to keep control of our data because the cloud doesn’t care about our memories.

The day finished with Mike Monteiro telling designers that we are responsible for the decisions we make. We’re not just pushing pixels or suggesting the existence of a checkbox. The decisions we make in our work will have an impact on somebody else’s life.

It worked as a perfect bookend to Clay Johnson’s opening talk about taking responsibility for what we consume. We also need to take responsibility for what we put out in the world and what we fail to put out into the world.

In among all of that, we learnt about data visualisation from Eric Rodenbeck and the importance of balancing stable talent with volatile talent to produce the best work possible from Michael Lopp.

The sentence that brought it all together, though, was Mike Monteiro’s: "We need to love responsibility more than we love our ideas."

Webstock 2013 was a wake-up call that the adolescence of the web is over. We can’t afford to be dictated to and we need to be vigilant. It’s an exhausting thought but it’s time for us to be grown-ups.

The post Controlling what we put into the world appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

Everyone thinks the way they’re doing things is the right way and they ask us to do the same. It’s confusing because often the message is ‘be yourself by being more like me’.

Still, there’s a reason those people are on stage and we’re in the audience and it can’t just be because they’re American. They’ve each done something extraordinary to be in a position to give that kind of advice.

Clay Johnson began the day with an inspiring talk on being a conscious consumer. The idea being that we create our own environment; if we want fewer stories about Kardashians, we should not reward the sites that rely on page views for commerce by clicking on their link bait.

Jim Coudal told his personal story of building things that matter to him and how it’s the best thing he could have done for himself. At the age of 53 he finally learnt to trust his instinct.

Jason Kottke followed that with the story of how he built his own web app, stellar.io.

They were all different talks but the theme was the same: we have the power to make the world we want.

This can sound like a lofty goal, and it’s quite a lot to hit people with first thing in the morning.

When we think about being better designers, these are the goals we reach for. We want to make changes and solve problems. There were times during the morning when the room felt more like a self-help seminar than a web design conference.

But the truth is that as designers we spend a lot of time solving small problems. Sometimes these problems are as small as 1pt kerning. We understand these minutiae are important but often we lose sight of how these small actions affect the greater picture beyond the screen we’re looking at.

Miranda Mulligan talked about it with design’s role in lifting modern journalism and Craig Mod spoke about it with the small changes needed to effect the future of publishing.

It’s easy to be eye-rollingly contemptuous of these messages but we’ll get a lot more done if we listen to what they had to say and act accordingly.

The post Taking charge and producing appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

I’m very proud to announce our launch of the new floate.com.au. We have redeveloped our brand and identity, and created an entirely new website.

The brand

We set out to create a brand which expressed our design methodology. What the brand represents is the same as the process that we used to create it:

• iteration through exploration;
• multiple ideas being explored concurrently;
• problem solving to find a visual language to express the brand; and
• interaction across all of our disciplines and knowledge.

The design

To create the site we iteratively designed and coded in parallel. After sketching some of our ideas at our Floate Playground staging server, we critically analyzed the merits and fallbacks of our user experience concepts and formed concrete ideas of how the visual design would compliment our code. We revisited this process several times – discussing what worked and what didn’t. As a result, these interaction experiments allowed us to quickly throw away weaker ideas and identify the strongest ones and develop them further.

Technologies and techniques

Responsive design

We’re now incorporating responsive design into most of our projects, and our own site is no exception. As screens and platforms diversify, we want to ensure that our site looks great no matter what device you use to view it.

For us, it is important to provide the best experience possible to our visitors, and provide our content in a format relevant to them and the device they are using. By not limiting pinching, zooming, and panning on tablets and mobile devices we do not inhibit the way visitors would normally use their devices – as these are core interaction elements for using handheld devices as web browsers.

Progressive Enhancement / Graceful Degradation

We’ve designed Floate.com.au with lots of new CSS technology to enhance the experience of the site, but not at the sacrifice of semantic markup or accesibility. Features supported by newer browsers such as transitions, animations and aesthetic options like drop-shadows help add to the site’s appearance, user delight and usability. Our executions of new technology do not obscure information, or make features like menus inaccesible for browsers that do not support these new technologies.

So if you’re wondering, will our new website look the same in Internet Explorer 8 as it does in the latest version of Google Chrome? The answer is no. But, do websites have to look exactly the same in every browser? The answer is, again, no.

Whilst many people will experience the site in its entirety, with its bells and whistles and cosmetic treats, those who do not see these will not have their browsing experience interrupted – and we are still proud of the site they are looking at, even if a few corners aren’t rounded. The only thing they’ll truly miss out on is a blinking marquee that we’ve hidden somewhere on the site. But I’m not you telling where that is.

We hope you enjoy using the new Floate.com.au.

The post The New Floate: branding, responsive design and progressive enhancement. appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

We’ve just released Bivouac, a small iOS tool we’ve been using internally for the past few months. It’s a simple todo browser and checker for your Basecamp account. It’s not a very complicated app, but we’ve found its count-on-one-hand feature set makes it ideal keeping up to date with our task lists with ease. You can find out more about it at our dedicated mini site or download it for free on the App Store.

Bivouac’s design was always meant to be as clean as possible, consisting of a very simple gesture system and two logical methods of displaying your to-dos. The app’s visual design mirrors this approach as much as possible, favouring simplicity over skeuomorphism or visual over-design. But as we developed the app and started to test it on a daily basis, we realised that the stark minimalistic nature of the product had a certain unfinished or empty feel to it. We found that although it was useful, the experience was mundane. We realised that  we needed to give it personality, something to differentiate it from other productivity apps.

The first obvious choice was photography, and we found that despite an immense catalogue of stock available, we were making compromises in the app’s branding and interface by introducing photos. So we turned to illustration.

We prototyped a few characters, all based around Basecamp’s and Bivouac’s identities and metaphors and in the end, we settled on an anthropomorphised mountain goat. Invoking qualities of simplicity, stability and calm, the Bivouac goat’s personality is a rather transparent communique of the goals of the app. We used a Disney-inspired vector illustration style to create shapes that would be immediately recognisable at small sizes (like in an app icon).

Bivouac’s goat ended up serving two purposes within the app. He illustrated the app’s introduction and was used to delight users, cropping up occasionally within the app. As a result, Bivouac stands out in the app store against other Basecamp apps, whilst still maintaining a close connection to the aesthetic of the service it relies on.

We’ve worked on a number of mobile projects now at Floate and we’re using what we’ve learned from each to scope out ideas that could make Bivouac even more useful. But in the meantime, Bivouac is available now on the App Store. And it’s free.

The post Bivouac: Bringing Identity to Simplicity appeared first on Floate Design Partners.

Plenty of people have spoken eloquently and hilariously about what is wrong with hospitality websites, but getting it right isn’t rocket surgery, and it shouldn’t cost you a fortune. Over the years we’ve learned a few things both through our work and because we’re a studio full of people who enjoy good food and local watering holes. Here are our three commandments of good hospitality websites:

1. Mobile First: While most stats put mobile restaurant searches at around 30% of total hits, we’ve found that this can be much higher. One of our clients has reported a whopping 68% of traffic coming from mobile devices, with two thirds coming from iPhones. So while bars and restaurants should be adopting responsiveness in their websites, the story doesn’t end there.It’s not enough to ensure that a site is viewable at all screen sizes; you have to ensure that your content is organised in a way that highlights the information that mobile users need to see. Location is king, so contact details and a map should always be on the front page of your mobile site.

    

2. Menus in the body of the site: For a long time, some designers and developers have sold the idea of downloadable PDF menus as an easy option for hospitality, but ultimately this approach isn’t great for venue owners or users.Aside from adding an extra step (Home Page → Menu Page → Menu Download) to the process, PDFs can load slowly if they’re too large and don’t re-size to fit the user’s screen. It takes a bit more effort, but any good web developer will be able to set you up with a good, easy to use CMS and teach you how to update your menus yourself as needed.

    

3. Avoid Flash, elaborate intro pages, animations and music: While most other industries have moved on to cleaner designs that are less imposing and more user-focused, the hospitality industry still relies on tools and technologies that aren’t appropriate for a mobile first approach. Instead of providing good customer service, these technologies impose an experience that impedes the users’ ability to find the information they need on your site.

Restaurants should always try to work with designers and developers whose core concern is what people need out of a website and how to give it to them in a way that will help bring in business. Your website should create a great first impression, not frustration and missed opportunities.

The post Three Ways To Make Hospitality Websites Better appeared first on Floate Design Partners.