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Dedication. The only way to work.

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on February 15, 2011. Filed under about us, Blog, Future gazing, production, project management, work. Tagged , , , , , , , , . 19 Comments.

We’ve got lots of pretty big projects on at the moment, all quite varied and all for very different types of clients. We’re hoping to be able to share some of the stuff we’re doing very soon on this website, so stay tuned kids. Exciting times for WEIR+WONG! In the meantime, I have a fantastic and revealing insight into the way we are are working. I guess that nobody has ever thought about this before, let alone implemented it, so please hold on to your hats. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you……… dedicated resource. Tada. Booooooooooooooooom. I thank you.

At WEIR+WONG we have been working with some fantastic designers and developers. These guys are simply the best in the business. They uber-rock. We have allowed them to rock harder by simply giving them one job to do on a day by day basis. No daily interruptions so they can just have a quick think about ‘this other project’ or upload some changes for something they didn’t do in the first place. Robin and I are producers that like to protect our team from interruption, and dis-information.

Why is this a revelation? Because we know that from speaking to and working with other agencies resourcing is a nightmare usually based around booking up 1 hour slots. An unmanageable task for the poor resource manager and a false economy anyway. The way forward is one job, one day per any one person.

How do we do it? It’s quite simple really:

  1. We book resource per job and not based on a bunch of time that can be used up on a multitude of different projects.
  2. A morning scrum. What did we do yesterday, What are we doing today, What’s stopping me do it?
  3. An open channel of communication throughout the day with the rest of the team. Don’t go to the producer if you need a design asset. Speak to the designer. Remember that building complex stuff should always be a conversation between creatives and techies. If it isn’t then something is wrong.
  4. Limited interruptions from producers. Save them up for the next Scrum.
  5. A prioritised list of functionality and features. If you finish something early, get working on the next bit and don’t ask anyone for permission.

So what benefits have we seen. Lots. We can’t think of any negatives either.

  1. Creative people have the head space to think laterally and focus on the proposition and user experience. We don’t really care when, where or how they arrive at the solution. In fact we trust them to arrive at the solution, and we seem to be finding better solutions faster these days.
  2. Technicians and developers can get themselves in the ‘coding zone’ without interruption. We’re being delivered better, more robust code that is tested and clearly has had more love given to it.
  3. Client and agency feedback is turned around much quicker. We can react quicker to change and produce more robust and thought out solutions.
  4. People like working with us. Their day is less stressful.
  5. We like working like this. Our day is less stressful.

But I guess that everyone knows this already. It’s pretty obvious that dedicated workers can only be a positive thing. So what gives with my sarcastic take that this is a new insight. Well, if you aren’t doing it yet it is a new insight. And most agencies and production companies aren’t.

This can change. Believe.

The online banking itch

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on October 6, 2010. Filed under Blog, production, project management, Review, Uncategorized. Tagged , , , , , , , , . No comments.


What is the overall image that a bank wants to portray online? Friendly and trustworthy? Accessible to all? Or just secure, solid, impenetrable. I ask the question because I am only ever left with the latter impression. that my experience when banking online has to be difficult, cumbersome, obtuse – in order to gain the impression that there are solid walls of steel, concrete, marble around me and that a security guard is monitoring my every move whilst I am ‘in the bank’.
A comfortable, efficient user experience is something the banking website designers simply don’t address. Are they told not to? Do they have Information Architects? Will it get better?
Let me explain a bit about some of the experiences I have had with a couple of different banks. Some of these just simply would not be stood for if they were any other product / brand?

  1. A customer number, my surname, a card reader, a passcode, a memorable word. All of them just to enter the site. Talk about ‘barriers to entry’. How is this attracting people to use their services?
  2. Immediately after logging in being displayed an add for a loan / extra credit etc. the equivalent of a pre-roll, extremely interruptive and very much like having a leaflet thrust in my face whilst waiting in the queue at the bank for the teller. Not nice.
  3. Viewing statements. Why are they only available for a month? Surely this data just exists anyway in the same database? Why can’t I see it? It just means that I will carry on requesting paper statements – costing the bank more money in print costs (which I really don’t want).
  4. Paying someone for the first time. After going through the extensive security previously mentioned, on paying someone I haven’t paid before I then have to use my card reader again to verify their account details to make the payment.
  5. Not being able to give an individual payment a reference number. Surely that’s just one extra data field. It doesn’t really help me or the recipient of the payment to identify the payment.
  6. Help. The help sections on banking websites are the most useless sections ever. They rarely answer your specific enquiry – meaning that you have to phone up the bank and use their telephone banking system (which deserves a separate blog post of it’s own). The telephone banking guys must know the kind of questions that come up time and time again. Maybe they’d get less enquiries if they disseminated some of the information online.

I guess the bigger question here is whether banks actually care. How many times have you changed your bank? It’s most likely that the same bank that gave you a free pencil case, ruler and eraser when you opened your junior savers bank account at the age of 14 is probably the same bank you have now.
So what would it take for someone to change their provider. Clearly the banks think that the online user experience isn’t going to have much of an influence over these types of decisions. Unless we start demanding an easier user experience and threatening to leave to find pastures new, I’m not sure anything will change. So Barclays, Nat West and RBS – you have been warned. I, for one, am getting a ’20 year itch’.

WhatTheFont for iPhone

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on July 28, 2010. Filed under Blog, mobile, production, project management. Tagged , , , , , , . 12 Comments.

42 days, 17 hours and 20 seconds. A conservative estimate of the amount of time I’ve wasted over the years hunting high and low, trying to identify a specific font.

No longer. A dream.

Future Inputs

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on July 20, 2010. Filed under Blog, Future gazing. Tagged , . 22 Comments.

input devicesWe live in a world where the keyboard, mouse and button rule supreme, very little comes close to the rates of human interaction these devices get, other than potentially keys, door handles, steering wheels, knobs and taps. Have a think about what other things your hands touch in a day to get another inanimate object to do something. Clearly as humans, we use our other senses and body language for communication, but we’re not quite there with those sensory inputs for inanimate objects like computers are we?

or are we?

News is just out that NEC has built digital billboards in Japan that use face recognition to work out your gender and age (to within 10 years) and then serve you a more targeted ad. Mobile and social media apps increasingly want to pin you to a place and a time to give more relevance. Sound activated devices (think lighting in a cheesy 80s bachelor pad) have been around for ages. Motion sensors can be found in burglar alarms the world over. Come to think of it, it’s everywhere, it’s just not in many devices yet.

Like the billboard, all these devices try and give you a more personalised experience.

I personally love the idea of ads so targeted that you want to see them. In fact if your e-clone could help arrange this, I wouldn’t mind at all, if someone wants to tell me whilst I’m out of the house about a cheap holiday deal last minute that I could surprise my family with, or that a particular place I like is doing a special deal on my favourite sandwich, it would be great!

But how far would people go? would you like it if every device you owned could use any number of input devices to make a more compelling and useful experience for you? Would you like it if your web browser sniffed not only your flash player version, but your breath, make of aftershave/perfume, looked at the clothes you were wearing in terms of styling, colour and age, and then served you some ads that would make you look, smell and feel great?

I bet someone out there is making a computer that can detect these things, and if they’re not, surely it’s a whole new industry of device creation, gadgets, data collection, marketing data and advertising to be taken advantage of!

The Technological Horoscope

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on July 14, 2010. Filed under Blog, Future gazing. Tagged , , , . 41 Comments.

The Chinese Horoscope

What Chinese Star Sign are you?

I’m a Snake, specifically a Fire Snake (1977).

That’s down to the 60 year cycle of the Chinese lunar calendar, which passes through 5 elemental states (Metal, Wood, Fire, Wind and Earth), and 12 creatures (Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and the Pig).

The soothsayers of our modern age have been proclaiming that this year is finally the “Year of the Mobile” for quite some time now. And I for one feel like this has now arrived and is officially here to stay. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been living not in the “the year of the mobile”, but rather “the Decade of the mobile”.

With any technology, by the time it hits the peak point, its value as a marketing medium for innovators and advertisers diminishes. No longer will be people be so wowed and turn their attention to this technology, because it’s plateauing out and the market has hit saturation point.

And what makes something the leading technology of that year? It’s reach? It’s percentage growth? It’s wow factor? The Marketing spend? The amount of noise people make about it? Well, surely all those things and more.

But what about last year, or next year. If one was to chart what has actually happened and see what people have said, what would each year be called in terms of the Technology that’s captured the imaginations of the most people? is 2010 the year of the Tablet? was 2009 the year of the App? that’s a whole post in itself that I’m going to have to come back to.

Now based purely on supposition, inspired somewhat by this post about the future from Mr Russ Tucker, and where we are with devices like smartphones, iPads, and the rate of increase of broadband speed etc., I’m going to throw out some ideas about what future years might be called.

The year of the networked earth – broadband and wifi technology becomes so pervasive that even giant squid at the bottom of the sea and eagles above Everest could log into their gmail if they needed to. The cost of broadband drops through the floor, and the industry becomes state-run whilst some governments try to cling onto the thought that they can control information. This “Dataflow” raises the possibility of every single object on earthbeing able to talk to each other, providing a record of every living and inanimate object in time and space.

The year of the uncomputer – further advances in nanotechnology, superconductors, quantum computing, and micro-kinetic power sources will see high powered computers woven literally into the fabric of daily life. Always on, always plumbed straight into the internet, always working harder to change the way we live. Your socks will recognise when one of their thread’s circuits breaks when they wear out, and send a signal to your watch, which in turn will tell you that it’s time to get some new ones, and order them for you, in the right size, in time for the next time you need to put some socks on (your socks know your daily movements after all).

The year of the HUD (aka the year of the iGlasses, and then the year of the iBall). Apple will invest heavily in Head-Up Display technology and eyeglass nanotechnology, aiming to miniaturise the display device for their now ubiquitous app platform, and beam their products straight onto the lenses of their legion of fanboys. Augmented Reality will become an actual reality, and brands will fight to become the person controlling yours. Location awareness on the micrometre scale means that people will be able to see in the dark, and overlay all the data of the internet on the world around them. Apple dub their first prototype iSee. This is all just a diversionary tactic though, as the real surprise is that Apple’s been investing even more money via a shell company in visual cortex biotechnology, and whilst their competitors have been trying to build rivals to iSee, Steve has had his retinas fitted with a nanochip in an operation akin to laser eye surgery, so that with the blink of the eye, he can switch on his HUD and truly be the first layer between the brain and reality.

The year of the voice – A new generation of oxbridge and MIT students raised on the appalling voice recognition technology used in call centers enhances the existing technology by tapping into the research that’s been carried out on alpha waves and brain patterns during communication. Combining the two by capturing alpha wave radiofrequencies in a new kind of earpiece receiver designed to capture a much wider band of the aural and radiomagnetic spectrum, the voice recognition technology combines the information to capture not just words, but intent as well. A whole new dictionary of emotions is searched alongside the databases of words and sounds giving rise to a whole new industry, “Communication recogniton”.

we live in an 80s digital landscape

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on February 22, 2010. Filed under Future gazing. Tagged , , , , , , , . No comments.

As a society, we’ve always been fascinated about gazing into the future through the lens of sci-fi filmmakers and writers. I’ve certainly wondered from an early age when some of these ideas could become reality. I can remember watching 80s films like Star Wars which were packed with robots, augmented reality, cybernetic implants, laser technology, and then eagerly watching 80s TV shows like Tomorrow’s World to see whether someone had done it yet.
Nowadays, thanks to the power of the internet, vastly superior computing power, collective information gathering and a lower cost of experimentation, a lot of those imaginary concepts are coming to life, at least in the form of prototypes, and at a startling rate. In the same way that we’ve seen an 80s revival in fashion of late, I am sure that the next decade will see the revival of 80s ‘future’ technologies.

Back to the future

In fact there’s so much that’s already here. Here are a few great sci-fi technology moments, and some corresponding recent technologies in the fields of digital advertising and communications, you’ve probably seen many of them before, but it goes to show how far we’ve come.
hologram chess
Holographic games – Microsoft surface – AR interactive avatar webcam battle – neurosonics
terminator augmented reality
Augmented reality – Layar Mobile
The Matrix Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality – Photosynth+Flickr+Video
Tron Laser Technology
Laser technology – Laser Graffiti
Kitt talking car
Talking cars – TomTom iPhone
Minority report gestural interface
Gestural interaction – Multitouch surfaces

Now whilst there is a fair splash of optimism in this next thought, after seeing what has already been done, it definitely feels as though there is little holding us back from a lot of those seemingly far-fetched 80s ideas.

It was acceptable in the 80s

Of course, some of those ideas should stay in the 80s, being absolute usability nightmares (think giant dashboards of hundreds of flashing buttons), visual cliches (again, flashing boards of lights, fancy flash intro-style animations of CIA satellite surveillance or star trek visualisations), and some might still be a little costly to create (not sure the death star is a viable alternative to WMD or advertising yet either), but nonetheless, this shouldn’t stop creative folk harking back to this era and its goldmine of ideas.

See, Hear, Smell, Touch, Feel

The creative possibilities are huge for these technologies, not least because they escape from the confines of the various screen devices that we’re all hooked on, but also because the engagement levels could surely be much higher because the context for interaction can surely be more relevant. We operate on so many different levels to take in information – visually, aurally, via touch, smell, emotion ñ and each of these levels work on thousands and thousands of different cues. We’re only working on a few of each of these in any medium.\n\nThese types of technology could take not only digital campaigns but also integrated campaigns to a whole new level. What’s great is that many of these ideas are already ingrained into the psyche of the western world. Everyone from kids to grown-ups are expecting these kinds of technologies to be available anyway, because the TV told them so, and they can probably work out how to interact with them more easily than something like Photoshop.

Contextually relevant technology

One of the reasons we started WEIR+WONG was to take full advantage of this explosion of technologies, and place more focus on providing relevant experiences for consumers and users in different contexts. The future’s not just going to be a series of windows on Kevin Kelly’s machine, it’s going to be a whole series of sensory devices and experiences giving access to the machine. The more people understand their brands and the ways that people use and enjoy interacting with them now, the better they’ll understand this context, and the better they’ll be at using technology to enhance that experience and give new meaning and value to consumers.