Mint Digital

Following the recent launch of IT'S MY TIME for Benetton, I wanted to give a little insight into our UX process with snippets from our approach and how we've tried to apply this thinking to IT'S MY TIME. I'll start with the obvious...

There are two very distinct phases to UX design:

It's the WebApp Weekender 2010! Except, it's not on a weekend and we're not building web apps...

Benetton's IT'S MY TIME launched just over 48 hours ago and we couldn't be happier with the response. So, we thought we'd share some statistics with you.

Two weeks ago, Tim made this video contrasting the tech buzz of so-called Silicon Roundabout with the dire tech scene in South London's Vauxhall.

Bizarrely, reality has just caught up with fiction. This week, Tim and the rest of the Football3s team have moved to Clerkenwell. A new company has been spun out from Mint to develop Football3s and other real-time sports games.

The first job? Build desks.

(By the way, they are looking to hire a developer interested in real time games).

Buon giorno! For the past few months, Mint Digital has been collaborating with a great team to create a unique global casting competition. We're buzzing with excitement as we near 8 February, the launch date.

For now, check out the teaser.

Meet Lammie. A client (who wishes to remain anonymous) sponsored her in Mint's name. We thank you.

We are hoping she will be friends with Tom the Alpaca and his defunct Twitter account.

We are looking for a couple of outstanding individuals.

HTML/CSS/JS developer who wants to learn Rails (London or New York)

Football3s Marketing Intern (London)

I know I'm talking our own book but Mint is a great place to work. Everyone gets involved in brainstorms. Every February, we head off to the WebApp Weekender. Our London office has a pub built-in called 'The Open Sauce'. We pretend we're squires.

The details to apply are on the job listings. Don't hesitate to get in touch!

When making a web page load faster, one of the most commonly cited front-end techniques is minimizing the number of HTTP requests. In fact, it's Yahoo!'s number one rule. Each HTTP request is slow; making many requests is very slow.

Last Friday, the 20,000th bug was entered into our tracking database. As Christopher commented when we reached bug 10,000, this industrial-scale error generation is not cause for recrimination. Quite the reverse, it is time to celebrate.

By that logic, it should be a double celebration: we've doubled our rate of bug creation. Mint's first 10,000 bugs took 26 months, the second 10,000 took under 14 months.

To get this online party started we are holding a prize sweepstake. Guess the date Mint hits bug 30,000 to win (enter in the comments below).

The prize is fumigation for life.

Kevin Slavin, co-founder of Area/Code, spoke at the RSA's Playing The City event on Wednesday night.

Area/Code's initial focus was creating games that use technology but take place in the real world, like PacManhattan. Some of their recent work has had a TV focus, like Parking Wars or Sopranos A&E Connection.

Mint has gone in the opposite direction. We started in TV and, with Football3s, are moving closer to the real world. It felt like we are interested in the same things but from different perspectives.

I can't do justice to his talk, but here are a couple of nuggets.

Who would believe it? 5 years old and still in business.

A few months back, I read Visual Decision Making. It's all about the role of visual aesthetics in web design. The author, Patrick Lynch, talks about how "classical aesthetics stress orderliness and clarity in design", and "expressive aesthetics emphasise originality, creativity, and visual richness".

I'm a huge advocate of the classical aesthetic. In fact, I believe it's the best aesthetic model to adopt when designing a social website. Here are four reasons why.

A couple of weeks ago documentary film maker Adam Curtis spoke at BBC Vision Forum on his latest work, a co-production with installation theatre group Punchdrunk, called It Felt Like a Kiss.

A few notes:

1. The internet is changing the dominant sensibility from wanting to be told stuff to wanting to experience stuff.
2. Punchdrunk has cottoned on to the fact that personal experience is the most important thing. Everything else, TV included, feels thin.
3. The internet, on its own, can't do stories. Hybrids of TV and the web may be the way forward.

Apparently, two Mint projects for Channel 4 have been nominated for the Royal Television Society Innovation award for UGC.

Both projects combine TV audiences with web mass-participation. For the last four years, we have been convinced that this combination provides great opportunity. It is great to see these ideas come to fruition.

Where did these ideas come from?

In the corner of our New York office, a guy called Joel has spent the last two years beavering away on rocket software.

Yesterday his team qualified for Level 1 of the X Prize Lunar Landing Challenge.

Congratulations, Joel and Masten Space Systems... that's an awesome achievement!

Last Thursday, I presented at 2-screen.

The presentation was broken down into 3 parts:

1. About Flow
2. Flow as a framework for design
3. TV programme patterns

This post discusses parts 1 and 2. Part 3 will arrive in a separate post.

Last night saw 120 people cram into Hoxton Hall to see if TV & web could make a baby. OK, so there was no actual baby-making, but there was plenty of ideas and discussion on how we can seize the opportunity this new kind of user behaviour presents.

The 2Screen event has reached capacity. If you'd like to come and haven't got a ticket, you can add yourself to the waiting list. We'll do our best to fit you in.

Thanks to everyone who bought a ticket. Look forward to seeing you on the 24th.

More and more people watch TV with their laptops open.

Groups of web and TV producers are attempting to create experiences that make use of this new behaviour.

The area is ripe with possibility. Most recent web successes have social interaction at their core. Nothing beats TV at getting large audiences to congregate.

It also throws up new problems. How can you create an experience that is compelling on both screens, but not distracting on either?

We thought it would be good to talk. 2Screen is an event that gathers a bunch of innovators who are doing interesting things in this area. Each speaker has 10 minutes to present their experiences.

The evening aims to answer the burning question: 'Can web & the TV make a baby?'

It is at Hoxton Hall at 7pm, 24 September. There will be a party afterwards.

Sign up now!

Until yesterday, one of our in-development applications was routinely taking over 4 minutes to run its full test suite (without running our Cucumber tests). Four minutes per run can pretty easily turn into an hour per day when testing every commit. I was beginning to think that "testing" is the new "compiling".