This is a very important question you need to ask yourself before even thinking about the design of your website – should your visitors actually notice this website’s interface?

Most of the time, the answer is “no”. The purpose of most websites is to teach the visitor something or make him take an action like subscribing to a newsletter or buying a product.

If your website has a similar goal, and your visitor consciously notices your website’s interface, you’ve distracted him from that goal. You’ve effectively worked against your own goal. You’ve lost.

This means you actually don’t want a too sophisticated interface since that would be a distraction to your visitor. However, at the same time, you don’t want one that’s horrible either, since that would get noticed too.

So you end up in a balance-act: you don’t want something too fancy, but you don’t want something too horrible either.

There are of course a few exceptions to this rule. This can be the case in a few creative industries. A band may actually want to show their audience just how creative and different they are. Or a campaign site you want to make a big splash and go viral – people should know when they’re on such a site. However, for most business sites, the interface just isn’t the purpose.

(Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiros/ / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Lasse Lamminen – Developer

Originally from Finland, grew up in the Netherlands, lived in Germany, now relocated to Switzerland and also reachable via a Spanish phone number; Lasse Lamminen likes to move and his next move will be with Spoiled Milk.

This guy is an experienced developer with emphasis on Ruby on Rails, (X)HTML/CSS, JavaScript and PHP. In addition, he has a soft spot for the flourishing mobile app technologies – an area Spoiled Milk is following closely these days.

His passionate interest for the agile work philosophy will expectedly have a positive spill-over effect to our existing machinery.

Melanie Breitinger – Intern

Also welcome our very new (and first Zurich-based) intern Melanie Breitinger. She has always had a creative force yearning for expression and among her invasive passions have been photography and painting, of which she has chosen to pursue the first.

She currently attends a photography school, mainly focusing on advertising shoots. For three weeks a month, she will however be found in our local office at Hammerstrasse 11 – assisting on projects, having a go at screen design and sharing her visual ideas.

Melanie’s plan is to firmly grasp her new Spoiled Milk surroundings and learn how a clear-minded digital agency acts. As long as she can continue going to work with a smile, her main criteria is met.

Ay caramba! In Spoiled Milk we spend the majority of our time in the virtual sphere for team communication and project collaboration. Therefore we choose to focus a lot on the yearly meet-up’s, where the entire team gets together and takes an action-oriented look at current issues and future ambitions. Most importantly, we get to spend some time together in real life and be reminded of the great personalities inherent in our group.

This year we took off Thursday morning to cosy, warm (literally 23 degrees) and friendly Barcelona and settled into a couple of really nice apartments (tip: Inside-bcn) also intended to house our work sessions. Friday was intense: Full-day workshops dealing with strategic challenges, communication and production. We even fit in a fruitful brainstorm about blog post themes, so prepare for more activity right here!

On Saturday, besides continuing where we left off the previous day, each team member gave a 5-minute Ignite presentation on a topic of interest. Among the creative ones were ‘My Swedish heroes’, ‘Surfing’, ‘History of philosophy’, ‘Stream of thought’ and the ‘Pomodoro technique‘.

Following these sessions and a paella lunch, we went into creative mode. Two mixed teams and the challenge of capturing a Barcelona story in 90 minutes and then presenting the result to the rest of the team. The first group based their story on the letters of “Barcelona” – finding associations for each letter. The second group asked 20 locals what their latest problem had been. See the presentations here and here.

Finally, Sunday was for relaxing and reflecting, and left time for Gaudi inspiration, a last bite of amazing tapas and the final glances of sun before returning to the colder North.

Some more shots …

… and much more on Flickr.

Within only a few days, Russell Quinn’s new iPhone app developed for the San Franscisco indie publishing house McSweeney’s attracted mass attention via Twitter and managed to beat the iPhone app from bestselling American author Dan Brown on the U.S. iTunes App charts. So what’s so special about this app?

What can I use your iPhone application for?

McSweeney’s is a multi-media subscription app. Actually, it’s pretty much the first multi-media subscription app on the market! The purchase price includes a 6-month subscription and each week you’ll be pushed a new piece of content. This can be a film, a short story, an interview, a song, some artwork, or… well it’s pretty flexible. As well as this, you get daily updates from the McSweeney’s website, which will continue even if your subscription lapses.

How has the application been received following the launch?

We had a pretty wild launch night. There was lots of activity on Twitter and other social networks that propelled us to the number 1 spot in the books category (U.S. iTunes) beating Dan Brown’s new app. Since then sales had been stable and there’s been a lot of media interest in how McSweeney’s is pionerring such a new format. We had coverage on several major websites and I was interviewed by the Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

What will you focus on during next rounds of updating the application?

We have many exciting ideas for future versions. We really want to push the app in lots of new directions. Currently these are all secret, not for any other reason that we want them to be a surprise.

Have you considered making your application available on other platforms?

The McSweeney’s brand fits wonderfully on the iPhone I think and currently we’re too tired from the current launch to think about other platforms. However, we’re not ruling anything out.

What do you think the future of mobile applications holds?

Subscription-based publishing is fascinating, as is the rumoured Apple tablet.

Read more or head directly to McSweeney’s in the App Store.