Gmail wrote yesterday on their Gmail blog about a new feature that allows you to undo send. All you have to do is turn on ‘Undo send’ under the settings in Gmail labs and you’ll get an ‘Undo’ link on every sent email confirmation. Pretty nifty!

The good and cheeky one, sending nice bespoke messages – Virgin Trains

image from http://community.brandrepublic.com/photos/virgintrainsgiant/default.aspx

Virgin Trains have created a giant talking poster outside of Liverpool station and writes bespoke messages to everyone walking or driving past. A giant cursor points to the person/vechicle in question and all of the messages promote Virgin Trains. Cute and sweet.

The bad and cheeky one, shaming you to go to the gym – Fitness First

image from http://gizmodo.com/5169348/bus-ad-shames-you-into-joining-a-gym-by-showing-everyone-your-weight

It’s a bus ad for Fitness First in Rotterdam. You sit down on the bench cause you’re tired, want to rest your legs. But, the bench holds a scale and it shares your weight with everyone walking past. How rude! Definitely doesn’t make me regret swapping to Virgin  Active.

Hitta.se, a Swedish search engine, are doing the same thing in Sweden, though it’s currently only available in Stockholm.

Here are some other examples of lovely pieces of animations with an educational purpose:
Explaining everything about dry skin
ACO’s “Allt om torr hud” campaign currently running in Sweden, developed by Prime PR where my oldest friend Hannah works.

Explaining the credit crisis

It’s quite common that things get wiped after an account has been inactive for a longer period of time, especially email accounts. Between my BSc and MSc I went travelling  for 6 months and I remember being in Airlie beach, Australia, at an internet cafe looing in the sent folder of  my hotmail account for an email that I’d, well sent. I’d taken it for granted that it’d still be there but it turned out that Hotmail only kept sent emails for a certain number of days and so the email I was looking for was gone. Equally, my student webmail account got closed during that 6 months break, even though I’d told them I was coming back. They’d sent an email informing me that the account would be closed in 30 days, but since I was out travelling I got this email too late and all my emails and contacts got wiped. I tried everything to get it back but they couldn’t help me.

It’s worth thinking about in this digital age where we often don’t think twice about the things we “save” on various sites and more importantly, we take it for granted that they’d be there forever. I, for one, can imagine that the day will come when I no longer check my facbook account on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean that I’d never want to access it again. It might merely be a break and a few years later I’d really value loggin on again having a peak into what’s happened lately in my facebook friends lives. But what if Facebook, by then, have decided that I’ve been inactive for too long? Or what if  they, or some other sites we rely on, for whatever reason, all of a sudden would close down? Who looks after our digital life and interests and ensures it’s kept safe?

From www.resume.se/nyheter/2009/03/04/magasin-lanseras-med-unik-/

Though I haven’t seen it live and some of the comments say that the design/execution is a bit clunky, it’s a brilliant idea hatched by the agency Häger Fredlund and JCDecaux, who has carried out the installation.

If any of you are in Sweden before the 15th of March and has a play with it, let me know what you think of the interaction.

Today, by accident, I came across this nice solution. I was telling my Danish friend Sophie about Westfield (she loves shopping) and was going to send her the link. Going to the site I noticed that they’ve come up with a neat and nice looking way that in some cases can address and solve the constant battle of minimising vs. maximising copy.

The default view of the signpost modules at the bottom of the page is as per e.g. ‘Getting there’. On mouse over more the box expands and more information is given to the user as per ‘Deluxe dining’

Discussed it with my lovely colleague Rachael and we both agreed that they should include a visual cue letting the user know there’s more hiding under the surface. It’s not that it isn’t clear enough on mouse over that something happens, it’s to ensure that people who may not mouse over the bottom part of the page are told that there is more to be seen.
This could easily be done by adding a little overlay arrow icon or the like which would disappear on mouse over and it w0uld do the job of indicating to the user that there is more to be seen than what meets the eye.

A very exciting technology that is really starting to make its mark. Bound to be very exciting, not the least when integrating it with mobile is becoming more developped.

I accidentally spelt my email address wrong and didn’t notice it. The next time I logged into twitter I saw this little message which I thought was really lovely. If you, or your clients, insist on not having a confirm email address field, at least do something like this and make sure your users don’t miss out on what they’ve signed up for.

When it comes to registration and sign up, there are some very simple things to do to ensure your users get what they want, nothing more and nothing less:

• Confirm email address field – don’t allow copy paste
  If you do include one of these fields in your form, don’t make it possible for ther user to copy the email address and paste it in the ‘confirm email address field. That, though it makes completing the form quicker, defeats the purpose of the ‘confirm email address’ field.  E.g. a speedy typer like myself may not notice a spelling slip and copy paste the address, including the spelling mistake, into the confirm email address field and hurrah, you’ve gotten them to confirm the misspelt address rather than catch it. Bad form.
• Implement double opt in on newsletter sign up
  Send out an activation email to the user after they have signed up for a newsletter. This ensures that the user confirms that they actually want to receive the newsletter before you start sending it to them and it also ensures that the user only gets what they want and doesn’t get spammed.
• Reference account details in the confirmation email after registration
  Referencing the username/email address that the user has registered with, as well as linking back to their profile page, is good practice. With so many sites that we register for, this provides the user with a reference that may come handy in the future, if you like myself have problems remembering what you actually put down when you registered.
• Provide a hint to what your username may be
  When some sites use the email address as a username and some lets you specify a username, how on earth are you supposed to remember what site is using what.
  A simple thing like including a word or a few on the login page, e.g. next to/underneath the username field, reading along the lines of ‘This would be the email address you registered with’ can really make a big difference and prevent the ‘forgotten username/password’ pages from being the most visited pages on your site.