Merry day-after-Christmas everyone. Today my kids will enjoy their first full day with our new Nintendo Wii gaming system after cracking it open yesterday morning. What a revelation … and a revolution. On December 24 they sat cross-legged on their rear-ends with that deer-in-the-headlights gaze into the so-called action on their previous-generation GameCube. Today, they’re not only standing upright but also punching, swinging, throwing and bowling. On a chilly mid-winter night both boys come running upstairs with their shirts off because they actually broke a sweat from all the exercise. Merry Christmas, indeed.

For those of you who are not familiar with Nintendo’s latest gaming console and the paradigm-shifting user interface I’m referring to, check out http://us.wii.com. Not only can you take full-motion control of the action, but you can also custom-create an on-screen avatar of yourself (a “Mii” — what else?) that can appear in multiple games.

We’ve heard the PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360’s on-screen graphics are much better than the Wii, making the blood, guts, and mature content more realistic. Uh, no thanks. Instead, let’s congratulate Nintendo for focusing their product development on bona fide user experience innovation that makes the PLAY seem more realistic. Let’s hope the Wii continues to dominate market share and shift game-makers’ creativity back toward kids and families where it belongs.

Elexicon will continue developing online Help and technical marketing materials for X-Rite, Incorporated in 2007. We were awarded two new projects supporting the company’s color quality and management software products. In 2006 we were recognized for our X-Rite ColorDesigner Easy Reference tool with an award from the Society for Technical Communication.

Ah, let’s not worry about that question right now. Heck, it’s the end of the year, and you know what that means! Time to roll out Brion’s top ten iTunes downloads released in 2006 (except there are 12).

FROM NEW FRIENDS… “Get Away” by 120 Days; “1 Thing” by Amerie (killer drums — steering wheels beware); “Wicked Gil” by Band of Horses; “Just One Breath” by Devics; “All Sparks” by Editors; “Dividing Island” by Lansing-Drieden (listen 3-4 times — let it come to you); “Young Bride” by Midlake; “Enemies Like This” by Radio 4; and “Catastrophe” by Rainer Maria.

… AND FROM OLD FAITHFULS: “Map of the Problematique” by Muse; “Wet Sand” by Red Hot Chili Peppers; and “The Eraser” by Thom Yorke.

For those of you who are curious enough to wonder if I’ve made an iMix, here’s the iMix (iTunes account required). Happy new year!

For all those of you who have a passion for both graphic design and team sports (I know for a fact my peers are many), you probably already know about the Uni Watch column on ESPN.com and its parent Uni Watch blog. If not, you must, frankly, be standing on the fringe of this demographic. So dive in!!!

Lukas calls his work the “Obsessive Study of Athletics Aesthetics,” with “obsessive” being a titanic understatement. For example, did you know the British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League introduced an all-new helmet design just for the post-season, featuring a Clemson Tigers-style “paw” logo? I know … isn’t it great!?!?!

This information really is great fun for design-oriented sports fans. Who among us creatives didn’t cut our identity-system-design teeth as youngsters drawing our favorite sports team logos? Or better yet, inventing teams and making up our own? The logos, the colors, the nicknames … good practice.

More often than not Lukas’ columns involve more than just the latest tweaks to stripes on sleeves and socks. In mid-October two consecutive columns featured downright fascinating (to me, at least) discourses on the real cause of Bill Buckner’s botched Mookie Wilson grounder for the then-cursed Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series (October 17) and a little, shall we Detroit Tigers fans say, “theory” about Kenny Rogers’ equipment choices during the 2006 baseball season and postseason (October 23). (This column goes on to provide an intriguing and cool study of the greatest monogram-style logo in the history of professional sports: The “Old English D.”)

Yet another example of the power of the web to inform, engage, and entertain. Uni Watch is one of my short little slices of The Long Tail. What’s yours?

Found an Apple ad archive on macmothership.com. In 1977 they had a brochure cover with liberal use of white space and the headline “Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.” 1977 … talk about sticking to your guns.

http://blog.elexicon.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/apple.gif

One advantage of the web is the ability to control the content being viewed.  This really comes into play when trying to compare products or services online.  Being able to compare features effectively helps the customer make the right choice.

You have probably seen those web pages that include a huge list of features with check marks in the columns that represent products to be compared.  Often a company will place its products next to competitor products and then stack the deck by inventing features it can claim that the competitors cannot–the advertising technique called differentiation.

A few sites allow you to filter a list of products by choosing particular attributes such as products within a particular price range, but most online efforts have not impressed me.

Well, I stumbled across a site called WikiMatrix, which helps users select wiki software.   The comparative tools are fantastic. The features that mean the most to me are the fact that you can choose which products are compared and you can choose which features are compared.  The later is key.  The user determines which features are important and can limit the comparative list to just those features.

I think there is still more that could be done.  One thing would be to let users define or apply their own features to products and then compare them.  For instance, the user might add an endorsements attribute or certain personally-defined pros and cons.

Either way, there is a lot of potential here especially for complex products like insurance plans, cell phone plans, automobiles, and computers, etc.  The web is the perfect medium to accomplish it.

Instant messaging (IM) is a useful tool for ad. hoc. real-time conversations with contacts. You can quickly ask a question, get answer and continue working. However, the problem with instant messaging is that all your contacts probably use different networks and each messaging client is a separate software installation.

There is a solution to this dilemma, which I thought most people already knew about. However, since I have met several people recently that did not know about Meebo, I thought I would post about it.

The website Meebo.com offers an incredibly slick IM client hosted in a web browser. It requires no installation and it works over port 80–the standard web port. I believe it uses only JavaScript to work its magic so you will want a modern browser like the latest versions of FireFox, Opera, or IE.

The good news is that it supports Yahoo, Google, MSN, and the AOL IM platforms. It does not even require an account to use, so you can just navigate to the site, login to any or all of the supported IM platforms and you are on your way.

To save preferences and customizations you can create a Meebo account. Nice!

As a web consultant I help companies create web-based applications. This often involves either automating some business process and/or exposing an internal data asset, such as a catalog of products, to the world.

In order to do this, a discovery process takes place to define what data, actions, people, conditions and exceptions are required to accomplish a particular business process. What I have discovered will shock and surprise you. Ready? Often what a company thinks is happening is either far from the truth or severely underestimated.

There are several reasons for this that often stem from the simple fact that people do what they must to get the job done. Sometimes they cut corners; sometimes they make mistakes. Often the business applications they use have productivity flaws that inspire creative workarounds.

For instance, data visibility is often a problem. Users don’t have the information they need when they need it. To get around this they type text into an “unused” field, add special codes to an existing field or, worse yet, they create separate documents and try to keep them synchronized manually.

Overtime the corporate database and business processes become an esoteric mess that is hard to maintain. The problems survive primarily because they are only visible to employees and even 90% of them “dare-not-tread”. This happens whether there are legions of DBAs or not.

As with most things in life, a little accountability will often motivate people to do the right thing. The solution is to kill two birds with one stone. If you automate a business process through a web application, inevitably you will have to expose a portion of the corporate database to the world. Often it is product information, scheduling, or order status. For instance, a nightly refresh of product data could send product descriptions and pricing straight to the web site.

Suddenly, that once hidden data will be visible to the world. If things don’t look right, customers will be calling; senior executives will be calling; You get the idea. Suddenly the visibility of problems will force some action. Senior executives will suddenly find funding to improve operations. Users will be more careful when entering data and will find more satisfaction knowing that their efforts to keep the database clean do not go unnoticed.

There is nothing like millions of web users to provide some accountability. In the end, they will appreciate your new customer focus through accurate, real-time information. The new visibility will help improve your data and the application itself should automate the process and improve overall quality.