The pulse of Alexander Interactive

Ai has a unique holiday tradition: on Halloween, the office exchanges costumes, Secret Santa-style. Everyone gets dressed in full upon arriving at work, and we spend the day in costume, including an all-hands trip into Madison Square Park.

Among the notable costumes this year:

• Several impressive homemade costumes, including human sushi, an oompa loompa, and a person dressed as Facebook (my favorite)
• Three men in tights
• A banana and a monkey, who chased each other in public at lunchtime
• Several personality-appropriate costumes, most notably the official Hofstra University mascot (although we all love Mario from Nintendo)

Our park trip included lots of showboating and laughs, and culminated with engineer Skottey, dressed as the Burger King, ordering lunch at the Shake Shack. “Don’t tell anyone I was here,” he said to the cashier.

We’re a convivial bunch, so you’re invited to check out our photos of the day and a video of our lunch excursion. Don’t miss the races in the park.

IDEO’s toy group generates up to 100 ideas in a 60-minute brainstorming session.

Each week at the Onion, editors propose as many as 600 articles before settling on 18 to write.

Creative organizations need room to experiment. Give people space to think, propose, iterate, attempt. From the many sparks of creativity come the flames that burn brightly.

Ai adheres to this mantra. We rcently developed a logo for a client that began with 94 different suggestions (and 30 or so concepts in the first revision). Had we done less, neither we nor the client would have found the best solution.

Do you give yourself room to be creative? How?

I am pleased to announce the release of Ai’s first whitepaper, Free Shipping: Holiday Hit or Headache. As the title suggests, this paper summarizes the research and opinions across the ecommerce industry about free shipping for the 2008 holiday season.

Following the research is an eight-point list of suggested holiday strategies. We cover free shipping, as expected, as well as discounting, loyalty programs and repeat-purchase incentivization.

Since this is the blog, I can tell you I had great fun researching and writing the whitepaper, and that I have more topics in the works. Look for them here and on the Ai news page in the coming months.

Today’s item is a guest post by Ai fender Skottey Forden.

The visual components of a website are, quite obviously, the primary impact on a user’s impression of that site. Ai takes pride in creating visually compelling sites while taking an immense amount of care with the gears grinding behind the scenes. One aspect of the visualization that is often overlooked is the shortcut/favorite icon, more simply referred to as the favicon.

This tiny 16×16-pixel icon shows up in the address bar of nearly all modern web browsers, and is generally also visible in tabs when using tabbed browsing. One might notice a favicon, but chances are good that users never dwell on it or consider it to be of much use.

When a website does not make use of a favicon, it is potentially decreasing usability and a branding opportunity. That little 16×16 symbol adds value. It is a branding element and a visual component to which a user can associate a favorite website. This holds true especially when a user opts to bookmark that site. When applied to an e-commerce website, a favicon is a crucial element.

Online businesses want customers to access a site with as little effort as possible. If a favicon has not been set, the site it will show up in lists and browsers with a generic icon, or none at all. If a user has multiple sites with a generic favicon in the list of personal bookmarks, a site will fall into a pile of other “generic” sites. This may seem mundane, but it can limit accessibility as well as brand.

Over the past month I have performed a spot-check of Ai’s client sites to validate if a favicon has been implemented. If one existed, I checked to see how up-to-date it was, based on the most recent design of the website itself. If it needed an overhaul, it got one. If there was no favicon present at all, I created one. It is not a difficult process (and it’s fun!), but one must also consider that a favicon essentially sets a brand for a website, so it’s not a trivial item, even within the confines of that tiny square.

To date, a large percentage of Ai’s client sites, as well as our own internal sites and browser-based applications, have favicons. All future Ai sites will have a favicon implemented before the launch date.

Someone at Blockbuster thought it would be great if its movie categories were easily found, perhaps with on-rollover navigation.

Someone else at Blockbuster insisted on preserving the company’s intricate category format.

Which begat this second-level menu item:

Click to zoom, and note the many “See All” links. Even at this level of detail Blockbuster couldn’t fit everything in.

Original is here. Happy browsing.

The blogosphere has noted at length recently the prevalence of sad stockbrokers in news item photography in recent weeks.

The stock markets finally had a good day today. To support the story, Yahoo News used this accompanying photo:

I had just finished a terrific bowl of Farro Soup at Spiga, a small Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side, when the kitchen runner appeared with the entrees for our table.

My wife got the orata. Placed in front of me was a large, cheesy, white mass of pasta–not at all what I had expected.

“What’s this?” I asked the runner.

“That’s the lasagna,” he said.

“That’s not fettucine bolognese?”

“No sir, it’s lasagna.”

“But I ordered the fettucine.”

At this my wife piped up. “No you didn’t,” she said. “You ordered lasagna.”

“I did?”

“You totally ordered lasagna.”

“But I hate lasagna.”

“Well, you ordered it.”

“Why would I order lasagna?”

The runner, equal parts confused and amused, asked me if I wanted to exchange dishes.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Can I? I mean, if this is what I ordered–”

“I can check, it’s no problem, if you don’t want this I will see.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling extremely guilty. “Please let the chef know it’s my mistake and not yours. I’ll eat the lasagna if I have to, since I guess I ordered it.”

“Oh, you ordered it,” my wife said.

“I think it’s okay. Let me see,” said the runner. He took the lasagna and disappeared into the kitchen. My wife gave me a who-are-you-and-what-did-you-do-with-my-husband look, and we waited.

Not five minutes later the runner reappeared with a piping hot plate of fettucine bolognese. I thanked him profusely.

“We’re happy to do it,” the runner said. “The chef said if it’s busy, we might not be able to, but since it’s quiet we want you to eat what you like.”

The chef voluntarily took back an $18 entree for no reason other than a customer’s mental error. No allergies, no spoilage, no poor preparation–just “oops, I didn’t want that,” corroborated laughingly, yet replaced at no additional charge, and with a smile. Several smiles, in fact, as our waiter ribbed me good-naturedly after the fettucine arrived.

In exchange, our very good meal became an outstanding one. The flavorful meal was enhanced by the excellent service. We left with a story to tell about our experience, which will encourage friends to try the restaurant for themselves. We will certainly be back.

Does your business dedicate itself to this level of customer satisfaction? What would you gain by doing so? What are you missing by not?