Hello Group

Adobe MAX award: Best Enterprise Application

annesofie — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:39:21 GMT

MAX Award 2008
NASDAQ Market Replay won the Best Enterprise Application at the Adobe MAX Award 2008 at the MAX conference in San Francisco.

So what does the NASDAQ Market Replay do?
The Powerful NASDAQ Market Replay application enables investment professionals to replay the market by slowing it down to the millisecond level for moment-in-time insight into trade histories.

Adobe interviews Claude Courbois of NASDAQ OMX
http://max.adobe.com/blog/

Learn more – and try it the application here:
https://data.NASDAQ.com/MR.aspx

What did Hello do then?
Hello helped Adobe design the NASDAQ Market Replay application, which helps investors by providing a validated replay and analysis of securities listed on all major U.S. equity markets.

It is an essential part of a trader’s job to keep pace with the fast changing financial markets. As market data is played out over time on the trading floor, we wanted to represent this visually.

We took our inspiration from sound editors when we designed the user experience. Similar to a sound sampler, you can replay a snippet of the entire data.

One of the challenges was that a whole day of trading, for example in Apple stocks, can result in a 45 MB text file (trades are recorded down to the millisecond). Due to the massive amount of data that investors have to deal with daily, we used the Adobe Air framework. This platform lets you work with data offline, and only updates when a user requests it from the server.

What came out the other end was a seamless user experience, allowing for data to become tangible in a smooth zooming algorithm that constantly redraws the screen as the user moves in and ponders the finer details of a market-play.

User needs drove the feature set here, making sure that we ended up with a focused, easy-to-use application and an elegant interface. Hello produced the IA, interaction design, algorithm – as well as the visual user experience for the NASDAQ Market Replay.

Alongside Adobe and NASDAQ, Hello took the challenge of making intangible mountains of data into an innovative and useful solution that resulted in giving a very high brand value for NASDAQ.

Adobe MAX 2008/2009
http://max.adobe.com/

‘My Home’ - won at Adobe MAX in Milan

annesofie — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:07:02 GMT

Tuesday, December 2nd ‘My Home’ went all the way and won the prestigious People’s Choice Award in the Envision category. All of us at Hello are very proud of being part of this success and thank Elsparefonden (The Danish Electricity Saving Trust) for letting us do the job.

The ‘My Home’ interface is a rich internet application (RIA) with features that allow consumers to reduce their carbon footprint while saving money on their energy bills. Created with Adobe’s advanced programming technology, ‘My Home’ creates a virtual power meter that monitors consumer’s personal habits and provides real-time analysis of where they can make changes and how to make them. It easily identifies energy-hog appliances and recommends small changes that add up to big energy savings. This core function, electricity monitoring and advise, is coupled with green focused home automation to enable remote monitoring and control of the home’s appliances and lighting. The entire system makes use of Z-Wave compliant devices, home appliance data, address information and user input to create a managed electricity savings environment.

Consumers are presented with a well designed Flex Use Interface and are walked through a series of setup steps where they can use a Sketch-Up like tool to create their virtual home, drop appliances into this virtual home and setup home automation network elements to create a comprehensive Electricity monitoring and control application. Once application setup is complete, users will begin to receive tips about which parts of their lifestyle, or which appliance choices will serve best in helping to achieve maximum electricity savings. Daily and ongoing consumption is continuously monitored with data provided to users in clear charts and graphs that indicate where the best electricity savings may be obtained.
When combined with Z-Wave Automation gateways the ‘My Home’ Flex application allows users to make intelligent choices about when to turn on their radiator or to change their lighting usage remotely or according to a schedule. This control gives consumers the lifestyle convenience of home automation while striving to achieve lower electricity consumption. If a consumer goes on holiday and forgets to turn off the lights or radiator, no problem. They can simply log in to ‘My Home’ from their iPhone, look at streaming video of the house, turn off unneeded lights and turn down the radiator.
By using this intuitive personalized application the consumers of Denmark will provide an example for the rest of the world to build energy conservation directly into their daily lives in an intelligent and cost effective way.

With this green tech application, the Adobe Flex team at Hello Group beat out hundreds of other entrants for inclusion in the final round of the prestigious Adobe MAX 2008/2009 awards.

About Elsparefonden
Elsparefonden (The Danish Electricity Saving Trust) was established by law in December 1996 as an independent fund with its own board, and activities within the guidelines of the law and related provisions. The fund compiles an action plan every year based on conditions from the Danish Energy Authority. The fund’s purpose is to promote electricity conservation in homes and the public sector in accordance with social and environmental targets. Its tasks include implementing the goals of the energy policy to make it simple, safe and cheap to be energy-efficient. It has been remarkably successful, with over ten billion Danish kroner worth of electricity saved to date.

About Adobe and the MAX Awards
For more information about Adobe Rich Internet Applications please visit http://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/

For more information about the Adobe MAX 2008 conference please visit http://www.max.adobe.com

How many times were you bitten by a werewolf this month?

annesofie — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:17:11 GMT

Peter Svarre is the user experience director here at Hello and he has a blog and a profile on practically every social networking site, including Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo, Kforum and MySpace. What he doesn’t know about virtual social networks isn’t worth knowing. So when Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin wanted to know if you could make money on Facebook, he was the obvious person to ask. His answer is a very definite “Yes”

So, why would you turn your brand into a Facebook application and set it loose in cyberspace? Because you want to boost its profile for free. And why would you give your employees an hour every week to update their Facebook profile? Because Facebook is the free intranet that employees love to use. Another example is NGO DanChurchAid’s project “Giv en Ged” (Donate a Goat) which materialized into a Facebook application as well. The application allowed users to give their friends a virtual goat, which in turn meant more money collected for the DanChurchAid cause in real life. Furthermore, DanChurchAid’s work got free publicity, and many users went on to donate a real goat to the developing world.

Advertising revenue
Peter says that Facebook’s potential as a provider of lucrative business opportunities is huge. The first and most obvious way to make money is to build a popular application then sit back and watch the advertising revenue roll in. A group of Stanford University students did just that and in just six months 25 million Facebook users added applications such as Kiss Me, Oregon Trail and Secret Admirer to their profiles, netting the students around 500,000 dollars.

Boost your brand - for free
But Facebook applications can also have a less obvious commercial aim. Take the “Which Disney Princess am I” application, where users’ responses to this question cause Snow White, Cinderella, Tinker Bell or some other Disney character to appear on their profile. With about 100,000 users clicking on the application daily, Disney has seriously boosted its brand, without spending a cent. The company showed courage in setting their brand free in cyberspace, but as Peter says, companies can’ t control their brand in this environment, so they should be smart about it and play with the brand themselves.

Free intranet anyone?
Very few companies have mastered the art of making their intranet an interesting place to visit; so most people only use it when they absolutely have to. These same people will happily visit Facebook several times per day. Along with many other companies in the US, Serena Software recognized Facebook’s potential as a company intranet. Employees were given one hour of working time every Friday to update their personal profile and the response was huge. The company went on to develop applications that effectively created a company intranet on Facebook. Employees can now share knowledge, information and ideas on Facebook, and even access protected documents with security codes. The result is a ready-made intranet that really turns the workplace into a community.

Virtual golf
Peter Svarre compares Facebook to a golf club: A place where meet and enjoy doing something that seems to have nothing to do with business. But in a golf club, plenty of deals get done on the fairway, and Facebook mirrors this. It’s an informal environment, where business relationships can be established.

New world, new rules
Facebook is a new environment, and needs a new business strategy. Here are Peter’s tips for success:

Just do it. It only takes a few minutes to create a profile and you need to know the basics before any real or profitable communication can happen
Don’t try to do business with zombies or princesses. Choose sensible applications and friends with a similar, business-minded approach
Tear up the classic advertising formula. Communications 2.0 is the future, and social networking sites are the acid test of whether your company understands it. Facebook is not something that’s imposed from the top down. It’s a playground for companies that want to connect with modern consumers and employees. Get it right here, and chances are you’re succeeding elsewhere.

Hello Introduces UXBASIS

annesofie — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:45:35 GMT

UXBASIS is a process model and toolbox which takes User Experience to the next level.

Once upon a time there was a thing called Usability, which was a term that described whether a user could use a website or not. Usability was relevant in a world where users visited websites by entering the front page, navigating the hierarchical structure of the website and then leaving again after buying the product or having obtained the necessary information.

Today things are a little different and hence Usability has become User Experience.

In a world where the communication of brands and businesses have become deportalized, users no longer just visit company websites – they interact with company webspaces which spans many different entities including social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. etc.

In this world the User Experience consultant needs a wide palette of tools and processes to create the optimal user experience for the people interacting with brands and business in the digital space. UXBASIS is a toolbox which provides a framework and a number of tangible tools, which will guide the user experience consultant towards better digital communication strategies and implementations.

Learn about UXBASIS at www.uxbasis.com.

Hello Ignites Fall 2009

annesofie — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:30:24 GMT

Want to be a fly on the wall at Hello? Every week we meet up for an Ignite. Below you can see a handfull from the fall 2009.

Guerrilla v. Marketing v. Now by Alex Cassoni held Oct. 26. 2009

A Tribute To Retro Design by Simon Vinther Nielsen held Sep. 28. 2009

The Power of Flash by Sophie Barbon held Sep. 14. 2009

Intelligent Ambience by Jørgen Juul held Sep. 07. 2009

What, when and why of wireframes by James Kelway held Aug. 17. 2009

Web analytics and how we can use it in UX

annesofie — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:26:55 GMT

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. See the slideshow to learn more.

By Mikkel Schultz held Feb. 15. 2010

Overall Best Ranked Digital Agency in 2009

annesofie — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:24:47 GMT

In a recent image survey published by Bureaubiz, Hello stands out as the agency that excels at utilizing the latest digital knowledge as well as being in the Top 3 in 8 out of 9 qualitative statements. This makes Hello the overall best ranked digital agency in 2009?

Read the whole article here:

http://bureaubiz.dk