Microsoft has announced that IE is to start automatic upgrades across Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

It’s brilliant news.

Users will be automatically updated to the latest version of IE for their version of Windows (IE8 on XP, IE9 on Vista and 7) ensuring that they will be experiencing the web at it’s best. This is also great news for website owners, managers and developers, who will need to support fewer old browser versions.

Users user’s home page, search provider, and default browser will unchanged when the browser updates, and if users prefer not to update, they can use an Automatic Update Blocker to ensure they only update when they are good and ready. Good news for Microsoft’s enterprise customers. Users can also choose to uninstall the updated if they wish.

The main benefits of this move are cited as security, a better experience for users and less development overhead for website stakeholders.

Ryan Gavin, Microsoft’s senior director for Internet Explorer explains:

“We want to make updating to the best protection possible as fast and simple as we can for Windows customers. IE is how millions of Windows customers connect to the Web, so keeping that part of Windows updated at all times is critical to keeping them safe online. With automatic updates enabled through Windows Update, customers can receive IE9 and future versions of Internet Explorer seamlessly without any “update fatigue” issues.”

“Wider deployment of the most up-to-date browser benefits the Web in other ways as well. Developers and online businesses can rely on better browsers to deliver richer and more capable Web experiences. We built IE9 with a focus on modern web standards and interoperability so that developers could spend less time coding for specific browsers and spend more time building the next big thing on the Web. More of the Web running an HTML5 capable browser, vs. something built ten years ago, is a great thing for developers and the businesses they support.”

This move will help reduce the amount of people on IE6, something Microsoft are promoting, as discussed in Suzanne’s article, Be Browser Smart.

This is a win-win situation for everybody. Huzzah!

Read more on Microsoft’s blog

For some reason business-to-business (b2b) customers are often treated differently to business-to-consumers (b2c). The way services are presented to business customers tends to lack the finesse of consumer-focused services. The user experience for business customers seems to have lost out to productivity and profitability, but I think it’s time for a change.

I have wondered for a very long time why so many businesses consider the communications they have with other business so differently to those with consumers. It sometimes seems as though while consumers are considered as a group of individuals, business customers are treated in a far less personal way. This can lead to a far less engaging experience for the people in business that experience brands aimed at business. Luckily many companies have cottoned on to this and have improved the way they market to b2b customers.

But whilst many business-to-business brands have upped their game over the last few years with slick websites and marketing communications, spreadsheets and business applications, forms and reports still often lack the sophistication of consumer applications. Why shouldn’t business processes be as engaging and efficient as iTunes, Flickr and Facebook?

The user economy in general is demanding a better user experience and as brands apply the same elegant digital, social and mobile efficiencies that are driving modern consumer applications to b2b products, they’re creating deeper loyalty and brand value.

There are a growing number of online products that are aimed at the B2B market that incorporate better UI design to deliver a more engaging experience. The design industry, ever being an early adopter of such things, and seeing its value, has seen a fair few well designed products offered to them, a good example being solo by thrive software (below) which is aimed at freelance designers.

Apple, of course, do some great, easy to use, beautifully designed business applications in their iWork suite. They are also releasing an online version, currently in beta, known as iWork.com

Marketeers and product managers take note; these and other products that are leading B2B communications and applications into a shiny new age of slick, user focused user engagement so it makes very good business sense to invest in good UI design for your apps, websites and other digital communications. Does anyone have any more examples of good UI design in B2B applications or communications?

The powerful link between music and fashion has been cleverly explored in this award winning campaign promoting a Singapore based online music store. When clothes are tried on, the fitting room automatically plays music that suits the garment, tells the shopper about the music, and allows them to purchase it online.

Electronic tags are added to clothes labels that are detected by readers installed in fitting rooms of fashion stores. The contactless Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tag then transmits data about the item of clothing’s style and type and automatically plays a track from the StarHub Music Store that matches the fashion style.

The heady mix of music and fashion was followed up by beaming a proximity text message to the shopper’s mobile inviting them to download the track. The results were stunning, with an average click-through rate of 84%. Paid music downloads increased by over 21%. Not to mention how cool this made StarHub in the eyes of young shoppers.

Watch the video to see how they did it.

Where can I buy frozen soybeans in Brighton? Where’s the place to stay in Koh Samui? Anyone know any good food photographers? There are some questions that search engines struggle to answer, but there is a revolutionary new search engine that has a better chance of answering those tricky questions.

Aardvark is a new kind of search engine that’s powered by humans! And not just any humans, it uses the brains of all your online friends and friends of friends. The idea is that you log on at vark.com, providing details of your social network (Facebook and Google contacts), then ask your question. Ardvark then seeks out the people most qualified to answer your question and gets back to you with the answers it finds from real people.

The service doesn’t blanket the web to get answers, rather, it forwards your question to a few people that have expertise on your subject, and then only people who are in your social network, a few at a time, saving you ‘social capital’ compared with blanket email, facebook or twitter questions.

Microsoft are currently advertising bing.com as a cure for ‘search overload syndrome, but ‘Where can I buy frozen soybeans around Brighton?’ comes up with a forum subject about buying tofu. Close, but not close enough.

Using humans to answer your questions has distinct advantages over even the cleverest search algorithm, in that it can give you answers that aren’t posed in the question. For instance, ‘Where’s the place to stay in Koh Samui?’ could come back with ‘It’s monsoon season in the east, you could try this place in Phuket…’ You also may be more likely to trust the judgment of people you know, or their trusted friends, than complete strangers in services such as Yahoo Answers.

I haven’t tried using the service yet, but it certainly sounds interesting. The startup has been aquired by Google, so expect to hear more about it in the future.

Do we still need a ‘home’ link in the top-level navigation? It is a long established custom to have a link to a website’s homepage included in the top-level navigation, but why do we do this? Is it really a good idea? And can a website work with a home link in the top-level navigation?

A number of websites have been doing away with the traditional ‘home’ link in their top-level navigation. A couple of examples include apple.com, johnlewis.com and facebook.com all lack a link saying ’home’ in the top navigation. So where did the home link go? And how do you get home in sites that lack a ‘home button’? Well, it is a fairly well established convention that clicking on the logo takes you back to the website’s homepage, and many sites rely on this to let users navigate back to the home page. Other sites use a breadcrumb, which is typically a horizontal line of text providing links back up through levels of the site up to the home page. Breadcrumbs typically look a bit like this:

Home page / Section page / Subsection page

The John Lewis site is a good example of how breadcrumbs work.

You could argue that having a ‘home’ link on the home page doesn’t make much sense. Imagine you’re driving down a road, let’s say it’s the M4 motorway, and there is a signpost for the M4, next junction. But you’re on the M4. Pretty confusing. Who wants to go to a page they’re already on? But in real terms, I don’t think this confuses many people.

Others websites, including www.bbc.co.uk, lastminute.com, myspace.com and vgroup.com have kept home link in the top-level navigation. On these sites users have the same set of top-level navigation available wherever in the site they are. Considering a large proportion of users arriving at a website will not be arriving on the home page, perhaps it makes sense to have this link in the top-level navigation.

Certainly the last few sites I have designed have had a home button in the top-level navigation, but I think it’s worth considering whether it is really necessary.

Salix are the UK’s largest producer of native wetland plants and integrate Ecology and Civil Engineering to provide “Ecological Engineering” systems. VGroup were approached by Salix to re-fresh their brand identity and subsequently to roll out their new image across all communications materials including stationery, company brochures and website. In addition to this, we will be working with them to develop a truly integrated approach to their marketing communications over the coming year. Although we’ll be showing you more of this over the coming months, we’d thought you’d like to see how we ‘evolved’ their logo – the first stage of the brand re-fresh.

Firstly, as you can see in the old logo the symbol used to be the dominant feature. For legibility issues, as well as ensuring the new logo reproduced clearly on various applications from livery to letterheads, we reversed the dominance, making the wordmark larger than the symbol. Also, to help the balance we crafted the wordmark in a cleaner, bolder and fresher typeface. We removed other visual clutter, such as the illustrative grasses, replacing them with the introduction of green to the brand colour palette instead. The well-recognised s-shaped river symbol was redrawn in a softer circle, harmonising with the new typeface.

Salix also required a new strapline which represented all areas of their business, and “Eco Engineering” was a perfect way to simply and clearly communicate what they do.

As well as the new logo, a new visual identity has been created to complete the brand. Fluid, organic shapes representing water, landscape, environment and growth will be adapted to be used across the new collateral. They will also be used as placeholders to showcase various Salix projects and images.

With the new logo and visual identity approved, we have also completed the important scoping phase for the website. As Salix offer a vast array of products and services, it was vital to firstly complete an extensive audit of their old site to restructure the content for optimum usability and search. As well as the design and build phases for the website, we will also shortly be commencing with the marketing collateral, which as a complete package, will really see the new brand spring to life.

We are delighted to see that our site www.baringa.com has been listed in a collection of ‘the best grid-based designs’ over at grid-based.com

Created as part of a branding and renaming project, designed and built in-house by VGroup, our V:CMS allows Baringa to edit all content and categorise news articles so that users can filter the news by the industries Baringa Partners work in.

The site was designed on a ten column grid giving the site structure and allowing use of plentiful white space.

We also spotted our own vgroup.com listed by grid-based.com too!

Anyone who follows anyone who could be described as a geek on Twitter has probably seen the hashtag #sxsw this week and may have wondered why it was so ubiquitous. South by Southwest (SXSW) is an interactive conference that takes place in Austin Texas every March – literally thousands of geeks descend on the Lonestar state to meet and discuss the myriad of opportunities in the tech world. Doesn’t sound terribly fascinating to those who don’t live and breathe digital media, but because of its reputation for being the place for tech start-ups to launch themselves, it’s definitely the place where you’re most likely to see the Next Big Thing.

Last year it was Foursquare, a location based social networking service that allows users to tag where they are (and was dubbed in some quarters ‘the burglar’s friend’!). This year it’s stickybits, which involves tagging objects in the real world with little barcode stickers available from stickybits (or using the existing barcode assigned to an object), and then uploading all kinds of content and attaching it to the object using the free stickybits app on their iPhone or Android. Users can also view what other people have attached to a barcode by scanning it with their phone.

Now, on the face of it sticking a barcode on an item and then uploading information to that barcode seems a bit pointless: so I put a sticker on Suzanne’s coffee mug and upload a picture of Suzanne. It’s nice, but why would you bother? But imagine if you could scan a barcode sticker on your fridge or washing machine and get instant access to the user manual, guarantee information and energy usage statistics. Now that would be handy.
Other real world applications of stickybits are already flying around the TechBlogs, here are just a few

• Stick a barcode on a birthday card and upload a video greeting to your Mum.
• Never lose the assembly instructions for your Ikea bookcase (because you know you’ll need them again one day); just scan the barcode and there they are (and in video format too, for extra help).
• Get the benefits of online shopping offline by swiping the barcode with your phone and getting instant access to user reviews and ratings, not to mention discount vouchers and special offers.
• Create a box inventory by taking a photo of the contents and then sticking a barcode on the outside and uploading the picture to it – could make unpacking after a move a whole lot easier.
• Run a competition where people attach their favourite recipe involving cornflakes to the barcode on the packet.
• A simple barcode added to your brochure or business card could give new customers access to more company and product information quickly and easily.

At the moment stickybits is just starting out, but I bet in a year’s time you’ll be seeing their barcode stickers appearing on all sorts of things and the ability to ‘read the story’ of an item will become second nature. Meanwhile, SXSW will have moved on to the next Next Big Thing.

Bob KNEIP (of KNEIP, one of our clients) gives an interview about a recent acquisition

I recently read ‘If a picture paints a thousand words, how many words does a 30 second online video paint?’ In 2010, I believe that video will become more accessible to small businesses through online outlets. This will prove especially useful if you are building brand reputation; you can give visitors a welcome introduction, provide product demonstrations, online training to employees, affiliates and users of products and services or use video to attract talented employees by broadcasting key messages quickly and cost effectively.

Online video is interactive, memorable, widely accessible, easy to create and highly shareable. The investment happening around video means hosting and serving methods and costs are well within the reach of even the smallest business.

The marketing possibilities are great for businesses, but it is not a substitute by any means for text. Rather, it should be used as a tool in the correct context and to provide a specific requirement. Rachel, our Head of Digital Media, is always on hand to discuss online video and digital requirements so do get in contact rachel.adler@vgroup.com

As well as having created the identity, image art direction and naming for Vocademy, we have just finished their website too. Vocademy are a network of singing schools, responding to a revitalised interest amongst young people in finding their voice outside of formal, traditional singing classes. Television shows like X Factor, Pop Idol and Britain’s Got Talent have given people the confidence to have a go themselves at singing, either just for fun or to potentially get into the music industry.

Vocademy provide a relaxed and fun environment to show off and improve skills in pop and rock vocals, with further courses for those who decide to take their talents further, including the opportunity to sing in front of a live band.

With the target audience in mind, the website included a cool parallax effect, making the imagery appear 3 dimensional when the site is scrolled. The word parallax comes from the Greek word parallaxis meaning “alteration” and the effect refers to the difference in angle or position of two points from different views.

Website content was displayed in panels and again, as different content is selected from the navigation a parallax effect is seen in the background of the site as the panels scroll. This helps differentiate the school as something different and something new.

The photography from the shoot we art directed can be seen scattered around the site as well as some illustrative flourishes which are a key part of Vocademy’s visual identity as well as the over-sized fonts and vibrant orange.

But actions really do speak louder than words so see the site (or to book some singing classes maybe!) at Vocademy.co.uk