New York — April 11, 2014 – Fusebox was proud to announce today that the agency has been honored for its work on the GE Capital Bank Website (https://www.gecapitalbank.com) in the “Financial Services/Banking Websites” category in the 18th Annual Webby Awards. Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by The New York Times, The Webby Awards, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), is the leading international award recognizing excellence on the Internet. The IADAS, which nominates and selects The Webby Award Winners, comprises web industry experts, including media mogul Arianna Huffington, Skype CEO Tony Bates, Mozilla CEO and Chair Mitchell Baker, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, mobile-phone inventor Martin Cooper, and the Creator of the GIF Steve Wilhite.
“Honorees like Fusebox are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet,” said David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of The Webby Awards. “It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the 12,000 entries we received this year.”
The 18th Annual Webby Awards received 12,000 entries from over 60 countries and all 50 states. Among the 12,000 entries submitted, fewer than 15% experienced the privilege of being deemed an Official Honoree.
Fusebox
Fusebox is an independent agency focused on the digital customer experience. Founded in 1999, and located in New York City, Fusebox specializes in Retail Banking and Financial Services, delivering expertise in business strategy, user experience design, marketing, programming and mobile development.
About The Webby Awards
Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by The New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award dedicated to honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, Interactive Advertising & Media, Online Film & Video, Mobile & Apps, and Social. Established in 1996, The Webby Awards received nearly 12,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide this year. The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS). Sponsors and Partners of The Webby Awards include: Microsoft, Dell, Vitamin T, MailChimp, Engine Yard, Funny or Die, AdAge, Percolate, Mashable, Business Insider, Internet Week New York and Guardian News and Media. (more…)
Abraham Lincoln is experiencing a bit of a renaissance this year, due in no small part to Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film, “Lincoln” — a labor of love for the director that is already generating Oscar buzz. And as Veteran’s Day approaches, an important new exhibit will put the 16th president in the spotlight yet again… literally!
At dusk on November 9th, in collaboration with Krzysztof Wodiczko and 14 veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, More Art is launching a public exhibit at the Abraham Lincoln statue in Union Square Park entitled, “Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection.”
The bronze statue has stood silently in the park since 1870, commissioned in the years following the close of the Civil War. Wodiczko’s aim is to bring Lincoln’s figure to life through three-dimensional projections, featuring the until-now-unheard stories of those who have fought bravely on our behalf.
Wodiczko spent months speaking to dozens of veterans and their families about the toll of duty and service on their lives, and ultimately filmed conversations with 14 of them. For the next 31 days, these conversations will be projected via sound and light onto the statue, allowing each person’s own words, voice, and gestures to convey their experiences in an unforgettable way.
As our troops begin to return from Afghanistan, there is a tremendous opportunity to start a dialogue about the impact of war on our nation, and on those individuals who serve in our stead. “Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection” provides a powerful glimpse into the hearts, minds, and lives at the core of that conversation — and compels a response.
As a More Art board member for over 6 years, I am thrilled to be a part of this special exhibit launching Friday, November 9 at dusk in Union Square Park, New York City.
“Vision, trust, and transparency.” This was Stowe Boyd’s summary of the current state of the new “Post Normal” Era of Business. His perspective was a recurring theme throughout Pivot Con.
Some other thoughts…
On Vision: Be flexible on details, and stubborn on vision. A great example is Marc Benioff’s vision, which is all about the future. He speaks about the future as if it is the present, allowing his employees to fill in the details. Vision must be rooted in the future and not the past.
On Workforce: Embrace the “3D” worker who is distributed, decentralized, and discontinuous. It’s about being mobile, utilizing tablets and ultra notebooks.
On Leadership: Smaller groups with a fail fast mentality towards risk taking result in less management and flatter organizations.
On Social: All employees are the voice of the company, creating a company wide endeavor. While management will set the tone, the employees will be trusted to convey the messages. The new employee brand ambassadors receive extensive training in how the company’s messaging is executed. This creates a culture of collaborators having perpetual conversations. These conversations are happening internally as well as externally. Social is here and it’s not simply a department!
On Facebook: Coke shared some insights into who are the ultimate fans of the brand. At over 50 million fans, Coke has the highest number of Facebook fans than any other brand. They used brand connections, the ratio of the number of people in their network and how many of their friends also follow the Coke page. They took a sampling of the fans and looked at low noise fans .66 brand connections, and high noise fans 30+ brand connections. They found that engaging the high noise fans demands disproportionately high connectivity, 30 times more than the lower noise fan. They effectively identified small clusters of fans with strong influence on their friends, rather than targeting influencers.
On Content: Consumers love stories! No longer relying on press releases and product pitches, It is all about storytelling. Stories engage the consumers, thus allowing the users to personally connect with the brand.
On UX: The user experience is not just your website or mobile application. It’s everything your company does, including customer service, social engagement, etc.
On Development: If you don’t ship, it doesn’t exist. Ship fast and ship often. Sephora ships every 6 weeks, with new features and enhancements.
On Devices: One word, mobile! While the desktop is not dead, it is on life support. The process is now: mobile, tablet, desktop. As the tablet market increases that might change to: tablet, mobile, desktop. 44% of all sales will be done on a mobile/tablet device with 80% taking place on the tablet.
On Search: YouTube is the number 2 search engine! It is also the number one place people go to find out about companies and brands, they do not go to brand websites or even Facebook pages first.
On Engagement: Without engagement a company does not have a pulse! Engagement is not an ROI metric, but more of a company health metric. This is very important. Your company’s digital IQ directly reflects in shareholder value.
On Advertising: Consumers have more trust in Earned Advertising rather than in paid ads, resulting in an ROI 14 times greater for the earned versus the paid. A growing trend is a combination of the two forms and a hybrid of the two to amplify the earned ads.
On Cool: What makes a product cool and how do you measure it? The impact of cool is important to all demographics, but it differs between them. Cool is something that is below the conscious ability to measure with traditional tools. It’s more reliably measured on non-conscious methods. Buyology has come up with a method of having people ask questions about a product. They can then determine where that product falls on a coolness factor. Cool characteristics: Authentic, Inspiring, Creative, Attractive, Edgy, Rebellious, Mysterious, Surprising, Takes Risks, Unique.
Often times we’re asked to perform system usability studies to derisk the launch of a new site. If it’s late in the process (not atypical) one of the first things we’ll do is come up with a high level subjective view of usability. We use our in-house team as well as our network of usability consultants to come up with a simple assessment.
Our assessment uses the popular system usability scale (SUS) framework to come up with an industry standard score that evaluates the system as a whole. SUS comprises a high level questionairre that by design is quite general. We want to identify if the system in question is inherantly problematic or not. If it is problematic, we’ll dig deeper, if not, we’re ready to move on.
The questionairre asks a user to respond from a list of statements using a five-point Likert scale that ranges from Strong Disagreement to Strong Agreement.
Here’s a sample per question response that I’m sure you are all familiar with:
Here’s the standard questionairre. You can also find it over at usability.gov.
I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
I found the system unnecessarily complex.
I thought the system was easy to use.
I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system.
I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
I found the system very cumbersome to use.
I felt very confident using the system.
I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.
Scoring is simple and normalized to a 100 point scale. There is a possible score per question of either 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. In order to ensure no bias towards any of the statements with respect to agreement or disagreement, questions 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 give more points to Strong Agreement (ie Strong Agreement = 4 points), while questions 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 give more points to Strong Disagreement (ie Strong Disagreement = 4 points).
In order to base this on a 100 point scale for the 10 questions, we simply need to sum the score for each question and multiply that number by 2.5. One great aspect of the SUS is its ability to give you a simple single usability score that you can compare across products and systems (your competitors, best of breed solutions, your old website, etc.).
Scoring
But how do you know what score is sufficient? If you are greater than 50, 60, 70, or 80, are you at an acceptable level? There isn’t to much literature out there on that topic but the folks at the measuring usability blog have done some interesting analytics and comparisons across industry. We generally take a simple back of the envelope analysis which suggests that if you were to receive 3 points on every question (that is, above the median, but not perfect), you’d score a 75. We take this as a proxy for a job mostly well done. For general purpose websites, we like to see scores that hover around that point and generally 70 is a number that we like to accept.
You won’t necessarily get too much insight into what the drivers causing issues actually are with SUS, although in practice, it’s often times easy to know where to start. We’ll often use SUS as a filter to let us know whether we need to dig deeper into all the tape, heatmaps, and screens that we captured during detailed usability studies. We talk about details in our next post.
At Fusebox, we’re in the business of making things amazing to look at and use. If your users can’t enjoy the things we create using the tools they have right now, we haven’t done our job.
That’s where Flash 3D comes in. You’ve heard of it, no doubt, but here are a few things you might not know:
Adobe Flash is installed on 99%+ US personal computers
Flash is one of the standard plug-ins developers use to show more expansive, rich content
Flash is a desirable web format for games, applications, video, advertising, and interactive content. In fact, Flash 3D is being used more and more in the development of the next generation of online games and websites to create more engaging graphics and experiences
Flash is capable of creating content for iPhone, Android and many other mobile devices
Click the grid button to toggle between a 3D sphere and grid view
While an open standard for 3D content for the web may take years to be created and adopted, for now, Flash 3D is one of the most available, supported solutions that can be displayed in browser.
In fact, the upcoming Flash Native 3D library (code-named “MoleHill”) is capable of utilizing the GPU (or the video card) to process a thousand times more information than the computer processor or software rendering is capable of.
We welcome you to get in touch with our team to get started on your interactive project—and find out if Flash 3D might be the right solution for your needs.
The Discover Mobile Banking Site provides a targeted destination for mobile traffic generated primarily via organic and paid search. While Fusebox designed the mobile banking site specifically for Discover Bank, the framework actually scales seamlessly across all Discover properties.
The Discover mobile banking site was developed using a combination of Javascript and a set of core web services implemented via JSON. JSON was the first choice for a couple of key reasons:
It’s more readily parse-able by Javascript.
It’s lightweight.
We’ve been able to implement the ‘P’ specification and can therefore call services without a proxy. (The utility of this in certain environments shouldn’t be underestimated!).
The Discover mobile banking site communicates with the RESTful Discover Interest Rate Service to support real-time interest rate feeds. Further integration with the Discover email system enables asynchronous messaging directly to customers who might prefer to review additional information on their time, or open an account later.
The Discover mobile banking site was designed and optimized for smartphones—more specifically, the iPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms. All other mobile device traffic is redirected to an older style feature phone user interface, reminiscent of 1995. And as always, the Fusebox team worked closely with the Discover Bank team on all aspects of the mobile project, from studying best practices and emerging standards, to a careful analysis of mobile traffic across the Discover properties (it’s been doubling every quarter!), through to the web server rewrite strategy that implements business rules around mobile detection and redirection at the request header level.
The Discover mobile banking site launched on-time, and was a huge success—all thanks to great teamwork and collaboration by everyone involved.
And if you’re looking for a great Savings Account that is over 5X the National Average1, the Discover Mobile Banking Site is your best place to get started!
1 The APY for the Online Savings Account as of May 31, 2011 is more than 5 times the national average APY for interest-bearing savings accounts with balances of $500 as reported by Informa Research Services, Inc as of May 31, 2011. Although the information provided by Informa Research Services has been obtained from the various institutions, the accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Rates are subject to change at any time.
“It’s all the same to be, when I’m driving free, the worlds my home when I’m mobile”
40 years after Pete Townsend sang those immortal words on arguably The Who’s best album, we’re finally untethered from our desktops and we are truly @home on the Internet. To us, the Golden Age of Mobile Computing began with the first release of the iPhone 3 in June of 2007 and this year is proving to be shattering mobile expectations.
At Fusebox we’ve been aggressively building out our mobile practice. Like many in our industry, we recognize momentum in the overalll device market now favors smartphones and tablets. Ubiquitous computing is led by devices running Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iPhone (iOS). In fact, projected smartphone usage in the US will reach 73.3 million by the end of 2011. This represents 31% of the total mobile user population. By 2013, this number is expected to more than double.
Currently, a minority of mobile users, specifically smartphone users, command the majority of attention from developers and marketers simply because of how they use their devices. Unlike feature phone users, these users actively engage with the mobile web, yet the user interfaces needed to properly address their needs often consist of:
an amalgam of custom solutions that lack standardization across the enterprise,
must constantly be tested,
and are costly to develop and support.
In the mobile space, there are often multiple codebases in order to deal with this lack of standardization.
The US mobile browser market at this moment appears to be a three-way race between Safari, Blackberry, and Android, with the latter behind but showing the fastest growth. The important news to recognize is that with Blackberry’s move to the WebKit browser in its 6th generation O/S, is that the WebKit browser represents over 65% of the mobile smartphone browser market. In turn, Windows devices and others are playing catch up and could shift the market if they can come up with some radical innovation.
Safari 26%
BlackBerry 20%
Android 30%
Other (including Windows, webOS and others) 24%
It’s important then to implement a mobile web initiative in a consistent web framework. This is different, yet complementary to a mobile application development framework which we’ll discuss in another post (ie an iPhone or Android app). The most promising framework we’ve implemented is JQuery Mobile.
In order to form a unified mobile experience, that can easily deploy features and functionality, we @fusebox now leverage a touch user interface framework that seeks to monitor and deploy solutions that track against the product road maps of the popular browsers and operating systems as well as cover the remaining 35% in a both a cost-effective and useful way.
The JQuery Mobile solution we integrate seeks the goal of “One Codebase, all Mobile Platforms”. For those of us who have and continue to experience the effects of the “browser wars” and the large amounts of coding and recoding necessary to address each user interface/browser combination, the solution is a more than welcome one.
The JQuery Mobile platform seeks to address the following mobile operating systems to accommodate a consistent application programming interface and a small footprint. To business owners, this is distinguished as a) easy maintenance, b) consistent user experiences and c) fast user downloads. The platforms addressed by JQuery Mobile include:
iOS (Apple)
Android (Google)
Blackberry (Blackberry)
bada (Samsung)
Window Phone (Microsoft)
palm webOS (Palm/HP)
symbian (Nokia)
MeeGo (Open Source)
Why go with a solution from JQuery? Well, quite simply, JQuery has revolutionized the way in which javascript has been used on the web and shows no sign of slowing down. Not coincidentally, the latest statistics reveal that JQuery is by far the dominant javascript framework. At the time of this post it is used by over 30% of all websites. The next closest JS framework has a market share of less than 6%. An introduction of the JQuery Mobile framework, which is built upon the JQuery core is then a natural progression. JQuery project sponsors include:
The Filament Group
The Mozilla Corporation
Palm
Blackberry
Nokia
Device Atlas
Adobe
dotMobi
From a technical perspective the framework offers branded experiences through consistent theming frameworks ensuring sites do not need to be cookie cutter interfaces yet will offer similar experiences across platform. This allows web developers to focus on features, functionality, user interface design and content as opposed to worrying about accessibility and inconsistencies across devices. This often takes up to 50% of the level of effort in developing a mobile initiative along with the corresponding maintenance and upgrade headache.
The framework also satisfies the concept of ‘progressive enhancement’ which is a “strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic HTML markup, and external stylesheets and scripting technologies. Progressive enhancement uses web technologies in a layered fashion. It allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection while also providing those with better bandwidth or more advanced browser software an enhanced version of the page”.
The only downside we see in the JQuery Mobile as an emerging javascript framework is that it is currently in an Alpha framework and thus carries some of the risks and challenges of alpha frameworks including: a) fast development lifecycles b) user interface bugs and c) often changes to core API requiring code rewriting. The good news is that JQuery Mobile is fast approaching Beta and a Release Candidate (“RC”) is on the horizon.
Further analysis and testing shows that the alpha release currently supports many of the modern smartphones which is the mainstay of the mobile web anyway.
iOS
Android
Blackberry 6
WebOS
Win Phone 7
There are a few complementary and competitive frameworks out there and to not mention any of them would be a disservice to. You may want to consider Sencha or JQtouch as an alternative and PhoneGap is a fantastic solution to wrap your JQuery Mobile website as native mobile application but that’s another post.
Enjoy Going Mobile with The Who on iTunes or watch it on YouTube.
The cloud and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture has enabled a whole new breed of applications to fulfill a variety of both standard and custom requirements. In this post, I will write about so-called ‘edge applications’ in context of one of our real world deployments. We’ll define an ‘edge application’ as one that mixes and matches cloud services with co-location services that enable the application developer to control and directly manage the risk of the underlying security, data, or any other component or service of the stack one desiresThe one example we use is a digital asset management system we developed and continue to maintain for a client. The application is roughly broken up into the following components:
Web-based asset collection from suppliers (millions of photos ranging in size from 0.5 to 5 MBs each)
Image curation including meta-tagging, editing, categorization, and organization by client editors
Image publishing and distribution to a variety of channels including public and private (ie, lightboxes)
End user consumption via web, email, and FTP
Basic and advanced search
End user invoice creation and payment management
Client reporting
The application is about five years old so its fundamental architecture was developed before the cloud was a feasible option. The platform is a traditional Microsoft .NET web stack including redundant application layers, a high performing database, and an asset repository (image files) residing on a storage area network (“SAN”).
Over the last two years, we’ve been able to introduce two edge components into the application that leverage cloud services to drastically improve key components of the architecture, specifically distribution and storage.
Two years ago our client’s requirements drastically changed as our clients needed to begin heavily using a ‘distribute via FTP’ method. The data to be delivered increased roughly 100 fold over the course of a month and then began to be consistent in total volume per month thereafter. The system was not designed to support such an increase and consequently performance became an issue. This could have been addressed by procuring additional high performing servers and increasing the bandwidth at our co-location facility but we felt (and ultimately measured) that the peak demand was highly variable and needed significant resources (ie, up to 50 times our mean usage) for about 5% of the day, albeit a very important part of the day. We did not want to overextend capacity (translate that to ‘budget’) to be able to hit performance requirements over these short intervals. Our instinct and eventually our analysis, revealed there was a better way and ultimately Amazon Web Services enabled us to arrive at we believe to be the optimal solution.
We leveraged the EC2 cloud and it’s on-demand resource allocation to distribute hundreds of Gigabytes of data a day to paying clients across the globe in what is considered near real-time for this particular industry. The pay-as-you-go model meant that we incurred relatively high hourly charges over a very small timeframe which is in direct contrast to the traditional method of amortizing the costs of dedicated servers over their lifetime. In this case, it became simple Calculus as we simply needed to figure out the area under each curve to determine which solution should be implemented from a monetary standpoint. In this case, the cloud came out heavily in our favor.
Just as important as cost to us was performance. We’ve been able to bring down our mean-time to asset delivery to just under ten minutes from over an hour due to previous backlog queues associated with pulling assets off the SAN and our relatively modest pipes at the co-location facility. These two components coupled together were a win-win for us and the client—better performance at a fraction of the cost. In the end, two key aspects of cloud computing were important to us and they can roughly be defined as:
Unlimited bandwidth
Unlimited server capacity (processing and throughput)
In our case ‘unlimited’ simply means the ratio of what’s easily available to us in terms of bandwidth and server capacity compared to the resources we might need at any given time is extremely high, essentially unlimited. By programmatically bringing on resources at predetermined threshold levels and then dropping those resources when not needed, we’ve been able to closely match resource supply with actual demand ensuring that we do not:
Over invest in capacity thereby incurring high costs and
Under invest in capacity thereby not meeting delivery requirements
Once we had that win under our belt, we then realized our storage capabilities of our SAN were fast becoming scarce. After a relatively simple cost-benefit analysis, we’ve decided to migrate the assets from the SAN to cloud storage over the next several months. In this case, as in previous, we utilized AWS again. This time however, we levered the Simple Storage Service (“S3”) in order to remove the need to purchase and maintain yet another SAN. A pure $/GB of storage comparison was not enough to bring to the cost in favor of the cloud but the relative ease of backup storage, redundancy and the additional maintenance costs our client would have to pay turned the odds in S3’s favor as well as having a highly durable solution.
It’s worthwhile to note, that the core application server and database server, in this case a Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise 2005 database (an instance type not yet available on EC2) remains housed in our leased SAS70 Type II co-location facilities. Unlike the cloud, we can visit the facility on demand and our client is comfortable with access privileges to the hardware and software via our firewalls. Our database sits behind multiple firewalls which protect and secure the data within the database from any potential real or perceived contamination of data from shared or virtual environments. The database is regularly backed up, encrypted and then pushed over an encrypted channel to the S3 service for backup. In all cases, AWS’s .NET SDK was instrumental in programming and deploying out cloud management services.
Time will tell what and when other parts of the application are moved to the ‘edge’ but we’re sure glad we have that ‘real option’ available to us to make the move at any time.
For you data Junkies out there, Linkedin launched a new tool, inMaps on linkedinlabs yesterday. This new tool helps you visualize your social graph by grouping people you are connected to and color codes them. For example it grouped all the past and current Fuseboxers into one color group, too bad you have to accept the default color scheme as I would have preferred the Fusebox group to be orange. It also identifies the influencers in your network by making their bubbles larger. Clicking on one of your contacts results in seeing all their connections. I’m looking forward to exploring my network a bit more in-depth. Check out my inMap.
Chardan Capital Markets provides a full suite of global investment banking services designed for micro, small and mid cap emerging growth companies. Chardan is also an industry leader in SPAC transactions and became one of the first firms to establish a presence in China.
Fusebox was retained to reposition, rebrand and redesign their website to better serve their customers and provide them with a competitive edge in the industry.
Fusebox helped streamline their business process by creating a website that could be self managed. Built on the Drupal open source platform we provided Chardan with a robust content management system. The new website features a custom “tombstone generator”, providing their team with tools to generate tombstones on the fly to display as deals are completed. A “How can Chardan help you?” wizard was developed to assist clients in determining which division would be most appropriate to contact for assistance. A robust user management system was developed that allows Chardan to publish their proprietary research content to existing clients and collect registration information from potential clients looking to retain Chardan for their expertise.
