Sustainability
If developers don't understand their audience, their users, they have little business being in this business. More critical to that, is understanding that culture.
Every organization, institution, corporation defines and promotes their identity through this sense of culture; an aggregation of values, vision, history, context, tastes and attitudes in which incubates the organization's purpose.
Culture is an aggregate of stories, narratives that weave into some semblance of presence, what some marketers call brand, what I call identity. Users of sustainable applications recognize this, they want this, and subsequently will write narratives that define and redefine the application itself.
That makes developers and designers story tellers. For the developers and marketers in my company, myself included in dreaming this, we may consider ourselves designers, but if we stick to that paradigm I'm afraid we'll create an application that will be bought and used for its gimmick. What we aspire to do instead of design is narrate, creating sustainability, a longevity of usefulness and impact.
Imagine a user interface based on this idea of storytelling.
Sustainability is closely tied to branding. Branding, as we're familiar with, it has lost it's impact by virtue of its saturation. Lost is the affect of color and shape on our audience. Instead, the need is to establish identity and the identity as a corporation and a concept has to be authentic.
Identity is not a brand, not an iTunes icon, not the Apple logo. Identity is a gut feeling about their affirmation from the product. When more than one person has that feeling, we have a brand, and the product, the app, the device has an identity. For my development that authenticates our influence as something other than a mobile or a web application; JiminiCrikit is a human application.
Usability
From Amber Austen, co-developer of JiminiCrikit
"JiminiCrikit is Live; it's organic, adapts, listens, learns from use."
"It's appeal is universal, not contained in any demographic, and the blog is so essential to grow forums out of this. Using the technology to extract information from a user, the blog forum can generate user groups organically. People can be gathered into communities by many contexts - cultural, geographical, temporal, physiological, and others.
"The blog content can serve to deliver stories, curate information helpful to JC users, talk about key elements and user ideas, spotlight it's postitive affect on a particular user through a bio, create topics that lead into forums, and many other ideas... forums can then branch off into their own blogs, and other blog administrators can manage deeper topics, or specific applications of JC.
"JiminiCrikit is designed to deliver content throughout the day, without it being prompted. Questions we consider are how much is too much? How can the user determine frequency? or will JC even be able to detect if its getting on your nerves?! Perhaps the user could have a few key terms/tags that JC would recognize so it could adapt in any capacity.
"I believe finding the balance for the user, letting the user decide the amount they need, is key to it not being too intrusive."
