How to be a campaign site IA in 3 easy steps

It's not an easy thing: information architecture for a conceptually and creatively lead online campaign site. Despite being one of the more common species of sites, the online campaign stubbornly resists taming and will quickly revert to it's native state (a 10 mb initial file size and no discernible navigation) if left to it's own devices.

Even the most intrepid information architecture will usually try to avoid these stubborn critters. However, sometimes, through no fault of your own, you may find yourself required to wrestle with one. If that is so (and you have my respect in advance), I recommend you follow the 3 golden rules of campaign site IA. Follow these, and all shall be well. Get the team to actually do these, and you deserve a medal:

1. Skip intro button is mandatory. This is tricky since to a designer, what this dreaded button actually means is bypass all my creativity and work.
   
2. Link to the product page. If the campaign is there to promote a product, link to it! And make the link visible! (6 point type in the footer does not count).
   
3. Toggle audio button.
   

And one last thing... don't forget the metrics

The Symbian Foundation

Very interesting move by the numerous folks behind Symbian, with the creation of the Symbian Foundation.

Everyone (principally Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens, DoCoMo) has decided to sell their shares to Nokia. In turn, Nokia will open source the operating system. 

Given the growing mind-share of iPhone and Android with mobile application developers (despite Android's delays), something like this was needed. Symbian, despite its current market share, lacks the coherence of the other two platforms, requiring developers to put in more effort. And more importantly, it lacks the server-side smarts that will really create business value in the mid term. This move gives Symbian a fighting chance, at least, and that has to be a good thing.

One downside I see though... the only company on the list that really has to see this work is Nokia. The rest have or are putting out Windows Mobile devices as well as Symbian (and some are even using Linux). The result: they're backing several horses so they can afford to have one fall. Nokia needs to be careful, it may find that it's new open source allies turn out to be fair-weather friends only.

Additionally, Symbian will need to come up with some server-side service architecture to match Android (with all of Google's services to fall back on) and iPhone (with the app store, and their ingenious 'push notification' service).

How to marry a millionaire

Toxic attitude coming out of 20th Century Fox, a comment from the producers of the upcoming remake of How to Marry a Millionaire, with Nicole Kidman:

"The original Millionaire was about a girl who was, frankly, kind of fat," the producers explained. "Nicole is thin and perfect".

Disturbing and sad. Go Fox.

Great piece of information design

Everyone and their second cousin (twice removed) are talking about electorate demographics at the moment. The NY Times cooked up this tidy little graphic that visualizes this better than I've seen yet...

Much too much has been made of individual slices... "Hillary is doing well with middle-income non-college graduates with three+ kids and SUVs". To focus on an individual 'slice' like this is to miss the wood for the trees. It's similar to the mindset we get into when we over-think the 'page-level' in site design and miss the user flow. By animating the demographics, as the NY times has done, you get a feel for the overall shape of the electorate: much more illuminating than any slice.

PS: not such a fan of the embedded video player? Click here for a quicktime movie instead