YouTube Senior UX Designer Josh Sassoon and his colleague Tom Broxton, who leads the Monetization UX team at YouTube, gave a sneak peek at the multi-screen design principles that will guide YouTube’s future looks during a session at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday. The big theme was eerily familiar to anyone following our I/O coverage this week: YouTube wants to unify its experience across all screens, the duo explained, while paying attention to the specific use cases for each and every screen.

The duo showed off some design concepts during their presentation, with some featuring the same kind of tile-based design that has been dominating Google’s mobile design language lately brought to the desktop, and at least one playing with the same kind of multi-column design that Google just launched with Google+ for a possible redesign of YouTube’s homepage.

Many of these things were just presented as examples of the design process, which is very data-driven and based on both A/B testing and traditional user research. Fun fact: YouTube has been passing out paper assignment booklets to select users, asking them to track when in the day they’re accessing the site and with which devices.

However, Sassoon and Broxton also shared a few slides of what they called sneak peeks — not necessarily final versions of what YouTube will look like, but definitely explorations that hint at where things are going:

Worth noting in this shot is that YouTube is trying to unify the subscribe button across platforms — which makes a lot of sense, given how much of a focus the site has put on channels.

Also, take a look at how gorgeous this TV UI looks. And once again, there’s a theme of unification across its desktop, tablet, Android, iPhone and ultimately TV platforms.

As for the current redesign: YouTube first introduced the newly designed channel page, dubbed One Channel, in February, and the site said that it has seen a 20 percent growth in page views on participating channels. All in all, more than 100 million channels have already opted in to the new design, according to a post on the YouTube Creators blog.

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Well, a month ago the creator, Berg London, pivoted from its original incarnation as a design house to become a product-focused firm, looking to develop devices to run on its Berg Cloud platform and inviting other developers to do the same. And now the company has stepped up that latter ambition by teaming up with the Benetton Group’s Fabrica communication research center to launch Sandbox, a new R&D facility for developing connected products and services.

Not many R&D facilities run out of a 17th-century Italian villa, but Sandbox will. According to a statement, the facilities in Treviso will be used to prototype “connected objects, spaces and experiences” – just the sort of language you’d expect to hear from such design-centric companies.

Here’s how Fabrica CEO Dan Hill described the Sandbox mission:

“Sandbox is a unique opportunity for Fabrica’s researchers to imagine and prototype how these new connected objects and spaces will begin to radically change the way we live, work, play, organise and communicate. Going beyond the hype around ‘smart cities’ and Internet of Things, we are layering these technologies over our wonderful building to create a unique, open demonstrator – to help both us and our clients understand what it truly means to live and work with these exciting possibilities.”

I’m not sure centuries-old villas restored and expanded by star architects (Tadao Ando, since you ask) are the best representations of normal people’s living or working environments, but it sure does look like a nice place to do R&D:

Berg and Benetton are just the founding partners: more will be added in the summer, they say. Everything that comes out of this luxurious collaboration space will use Berg Cloud, however.

There are quite a few of these platforms gearing up at the moment, all of which aim to make it easier for people to create new types of connected, everyday devices. One of the biggest looks to be LogMeIn’s Xively platform, which counts the muscular ARM as a partner as of earlier this week, but there are other smaller efforts also underway, such as those from Carriots and Electric Imp. This is a very new field, though, so there’s every chance that different internet-of-things platforms will attract different types of developers.

I think it’s fair to say the more design-minded among those developers now know where to look as they prepare to invent the connected future. If you’re interested in design and the connected future, make sure to check out our RoadMap event in San Francisco in November. Tickets will go on sale this Summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to get access to those here.

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On Monday, the team at Pinterest finally moved into the company’s newly-renovated offices, and GigaOM got a tour of the new digs and sat down with CEO Ben Silbermann, who talked about where the company is headed now that it’s settled into the new location. Pinterest now has about 100 employees, and we’ve written before about how Pinterest has been able to maintain a culture of collaboration between designers and engineers in part due to its relatively small size.

Pinterest’s new digs in San Francisco.

“We are heads down on execution,” Silbermann said.

Pinterest announced back in November that it would be rolling out some options specifically for businesses, and it announced a web analytics product in March. But for a company that just raised $200 million, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion, it seems likely that we’ve only just starting see what the company has planned.

Recent Comscore numbers put the company’s traffic at about 48 million global users, and while the company has made no moves into e-commerce yet, the vast number of people “pinning” photos of items certainly presents a lot of money-making avenues for the company down the line. Silbermann said the company will be announcing an update to Pinterest in a few weeks:

“We’ve already indicated Pinterest for business and and Pinterest insights are some of the foundational things for the company,” he said. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

When Silbermann spoke at our Roadmap conference in November 2012, he talked about the challenges in keeping a user’s attention as the web and smartphones increasingly pull them in different directions. One thing that could keep users on Pinterest more often is the tablet, which Silbermann called “the device of the future.” But even more than securing user eyeballs, he talked about his desire to translate actions on Pinterest into everyday life.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he said.

We’ll be talking more in depth about design at GigaOM’s RoadMap 2013 in November in San Francisco (to be the first to access tickets, which will go on sale this Summer, go here). Here are some more of Om’s photos of the company’s new offices:

Decor in the new Pinterest office in San Francisco.

The team at Pinterest talks things over in the new offices.

A view of the new Pinterest offices and eating options from above.

Work spaces at Pinterest.

The new Pinterest offices are fairly open and light by design.

Room to sit down and talk at Pinterest.

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Since the beginning, Apple has set the bar for good design, which is reflected in the majority of what you find in its iOS App Store. But as the iOS platform has aged, new design trends have emerged. The faux-leather texture on the Contacts app, or the wooden bookshelves on iBooks and Newsstand were welcoming and familiar six years ago. But like smartphones, they are no longer new. And as a design philosophy, the overly textured look that incorporates real-world objects is becoming less necessary in a world where mobile computers are more familiar than ever.

That’s why we’ve already seen some of the best and most adventurous third-party designers on Apple’s platform already embracing new design techniques on their own, incorporating flatter design elements as seen in places like Microsoft’s Metro design for Windows UI and elsewhere.

But if Apple embraces a new look that’s flatter and tones down the stylized textures, more will probably follow what we’ve seen in Letterpress, Clear, Embark and others: apps with a flatter look that still incorporate what we’ve come to understand as the standard iOS user experience.

Good design practice

Major design tweaks will ripple out into custom-designed apps, Phill Ryu, co-founder of mobile design shop Impending and a designer behind Clear, told me.

“Apps with custom UI benefit from, and in a way rely on, incorporating design features from the OS that its users would already be familiar with, as stepping stones to guide them through a new unexplored experience,” he said. “The stepping stones may need to be swapped out or tweaked if iOS 7 changes significantly.”

Michael Simmons of Flexibits, maker of Mac and iOS app Fantastical, pointed out that the most important aspect of app design isn’t following trends, it’s that they’re easily understandable to users.

“The point of native apps is the user is familiar with that — give them an app with that same user interface so they don’t have to learn something new,” he said.

“If Apple changes the user interface … we would have to adapt at some point to make our app more OS-like. We have a red header [in Fantastical, which stands out from Apple's usual neutral blue] but we still use standard [iOS] controls,” Simmons said. “It still fits into the ecosystem. And that’s the key: you do want to follow what Apple’s doing because you want your experience to be as close to the native experience as possible.”

Still, if there are changes to iOS 7, he isn’t anticipating them to be so startingly different that it will require app makers to retrain iPhone and iPad users.

“Apple doesn’t make drastic changes — they evolve,” Simmons points out. “It’s never been Apple’s thing to make a massive change.”

A good bet as to the kinds of changes we’ll see? Apple’s own Podcasts app offers a good example. The recent redesign didn’t alter the overall user experience, but they did nix the old-school reel-to-reel tapedeck. It still kept the basic functionality, but freshened up the look and feel with less gimmicky elements.

Design philosophy is just one aspect of the changes afoot at Apple. The competitive field in mobile is vastly different than it was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone and iOS. As we’ve seen already, the company no longer can market the iPhone the same way it used to six years ago or even two years ago, so it’s adapting with new tactics to match a more realistic understanding of that market. The same is true for mobile OSes: a redesigned iOS 7 would be another example of how the company is looking toward the future by breaking with the past. The key will be to help third-party app makers and their users navigate these changes as painlessly as possible.

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Path has been noted for its design on mobile, and both Facebook’s Home on Android and Tumblr’s new Android design share navigation features with the social network. The new Tumblr navigation lets a user tap on the compose button to bring up a variety of options for blogging:

The company has over 200 million visitors per month and 18 billion pageviews, and CEO David Karp will be speaking with my colleague Mathew Ingram at PaidContent Live next week in New York about where the company is headed. Karp spoke at our Roadmap conference in November, where he talked about the challenges of good design on the company’s platforms, saying that it comes down to having a team that would personally want to use its own products.

“Good products are built by people who want to use it themselves,” Karp said at the time, pointing to Apple’s Steve Jobs and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom as examples. Karp also said that for many users, the app’s design serves as a form of self-expression, so it’s crucial for the company to get it right.

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According to recent studies, pediatricians aren’t the only ones who find that electronic health records include design flaws that make it difficult to find data and complete important tasks.

The SMART Platforms Project, led by doctors at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, is building a set of apps meant to optimize EHRs for doctors. Their most recent project combines medical expertise with design thinking to give clinicians an interactive growth chart that quickly highlights the most important information.

“Central to the practice of pediatrics – both in prevention and diagnosis – is this growth curve,” said Isaac Kohane, a pediatric endocrinologist and principal investigator of SMART (which stands for (Substitutable Medical Applications & Reusable Technology). “And, sadly, it’s the most neglected portion of the record in EHR because a) it’s different and doesn’t look like most of the data and b) pediatrics is a relatively small market compared to adult medicine.”

How can doctors’ intuition inform design?

SMART has already built a handful of apps, but to recreate the pediatric growth chart, the program turned to a design firm for the first time. Over several months, designers from design consultancy Fjord worked with a panel of medical experts, including a pediatric cardiologist, statisticians and pediatric endocrinologist.

At first, the designers’ role was absorbing as much as they could and, at times, that meant totally recalibrating their perspectives, said Charlie Gower, the lead designer on the project. “We’d find ourselves saying ‘that sounds ridiculous,’” he said. “Initially, it’s quite different, the things they want and the things they need.”

But, over time, his team came to understand the doctors’ point of view, he added.

“Doctors tend to do an awful lot from their gut – they’ve sucked in knowledge over a great deal of time and this knowledge informs what they do,” Gower said, “They have ways that they like to do things and ways of doing things that they rely on.”

The result of the partnership is an interactive tool that gives clinicians an easy way to view graphs showing a child’s entire growth picture, including length, weight, head circumference or body mass index, while letting them choose the graphs and comparisons that are most appropriate for that child. For example, while most clinicians might only look at a standard Centers for Disease Control chart, SMART’s tool lets them choose from other charts from the World Health Organization or those for children with Downs Syndrome.  It also lets them quickly plot development measurements against several charts at once.

All of that may sound fairly simple, but Dr. Kohane emphasized that children quickly establish a pattern of growth, and deviations from that pattern can provide early signals of obesity, thyroid disorders, Celiac disease and other conditions.  While standard EHR tools may make it harder for doctors to pick up on those aberrations, SMART’s app actually detects anomalies and notifies the doctor to take a deeper look.  It also spots data entry errors and provides parents with a less technical view of their child’s growth — another helpful feature given the confusion and concern growth charts can often create.

Building an app ecosystem for electronic health systems

Beyond the specific use of the tool, this partnership between doctors and designers highlights a growing trend. As doctors bring more of their devices to work and as more direct-to-patient health and wellness tools emerge, design is becoming an increasingly important consideration in building health services, said Gower.

And, added Dr. Kohane, the hope is that apps like this can motivate a larger community of developers. Recognizing that the world of electronic health records is dominated by giant vendors that can take time to innovate to meet clinicians’ needs, SMART was created with funding from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology of to support an ecosystem of apps that can be layered on top of existing EHRs.  Once a vendor or hospital IT department implements a software container, Dr. Kohane said, a hospital can install a SMART app for free.

When it first launched, the program focused more on the technical aspects of adding its apps to an EHR system, but now its emphasis is building apps that can show its potential. “[We want to] make apps that really inspire people to work forward much in the way that many of the early iPhone apps were inspiring to others,” Dr. Kohane said.

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But at Pinterest, the social media darling that has seen incredible user growth over the past few year and whose design has copied widely, the designers and engineers have one seemingly-improbable message: We can do both. At least for now, anyway: one of Pinterest’s greatest challenges in turning from web sensation into a viable business will be its ability to adhere to these principles as revenue and profit pressures sink in.

I talked with Pinterest software engineer Joshua Inkenbrandt and lead product designer Jason Wilson this week, and we discussed the recent Pinterest re-design: specifically, how both visual and engineering elements played into the overhaul, and how those tensions play out at Pinterest. The two were obviously passionate about the issue, re-iterating the unique qualities of Pinterest’s internal culture and the crossover between their roles. At one point, Inkenbrandt referred to a feature that Wilson had designed, and Wilson automatically jumped in to correct him:

“It’s the designs that I visualize. We’re all designers.”

But at an awful lot of companies, designers and engineers aren’t finishing each other’s sentences. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Twitter VP of engineering Michael Abbott explained the tensions best at our Structure:Data conference this week: “The tension on the design side is that it’s never good enough,” he said, “and on the engineering side he or she wants to ship… How do you get that balance? Because you still need to ship.”

Building a culture of mutual respect

It’s not that Pinterest is somehow immune from the tensions that other companies face. In fact, Wilson and Inkenbrandt noted that they think the media has probably underplayed just how much the site has changed over the years and the compromises that are inherent in every tweak:

“With every feature, there’s that tension between it being beautiful and then figuring out how hard it is to actually implement it. So everything you see on the new site has actually gone through that balance,” Inkenbrandt said. For instance, just looking at the main Pinterest grid — which doesn’t feel like it’s changed all that much since the site launched in limited beta in March 2010 — you would never know the number of iterations it has gone through.

Ben Silbermann, CEO, Pinterest RoadMap 2012 (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

“We’ve iterated on that 70+ times,” said Inkenbrandt, who just joined the company slightly more than a year ago. Of course, rapid iteration on the web wasn’t invented at Pinterest: Google’s web development strategy in its early years, overseen in large part by current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, blazed this trail for a generation of Silicon Valley engineers and designers.

In the relatively short time Inkenbrandt has been with Pinterest, the company has grown from about 17 employees to more than 100. Pinterest does not release official user stats, but recent ComScore numbers put users of the popular social content pinning site at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is about the same as the number who use Twitter. The company recently raised $200 million in a new round of financing, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion.

So the fact that the company has managed to weather this type of rapid growth without any notable or constant outages (just compare to the number of fail whales in Twitter’s early years), while also remaining one of the most-copied designs on the web at the moment, certainly speaks to Pinterest’s ability to balance both priorities.

It comes down to the company’s culture, the two said, in that the company values open communication among employees and prioritizes the goals of both designers and engineers. Of course, whether this can scale along with the company is always in question — it’s easier to support both when you’re just a 20 person operation. But the two said that heavy involvement from co-founder Evan Sharp plays a key role in fostering that balance.

“Evan himself designed and coded the original site,” Wilson said. “So we know that at the end of the day he understands what it takes to get it done.”

Wilson, who’s designed for companies like Apple, Lytro, and Adobe, said he thinks the company’s efforts to make sure new hires understand the importance of collaborative culture has helped keep the company on that track:

“I’m basically a vagabond in the industry. I’ve worked at a hell of a lot of places. And every place has its way of doing things. When I worked at Apple, it was very design-centric, and things came from the direction of the executive and it’s thrown over the wall at the engineers. And I’ve worked at places like Adobe, where they develop the features and then say, make it look good. And I don’t believe personally — and this is just a personal opinion — that either of those really are ideal. It’s not bullshit to say that here, it’s a total team effort. I can point to a design element, like actual pixel-level design elements, that Josh gave me creative direction on.”

Design and engineering building the new look

Pinterest rolled out its new design to the general public earlier this week, and to the un-trained (or un-Pinterested) eye, the new look wouldn’t seem too different. But two key changes to the look — larger pins, or photos, that come with the content suggestions along the side, and a new way to remain in-stream while scrolling — actually started at engineering problems that were solved by the design team.

The engineering team had long wanted to fix some of the structural issues that had come with the site’s rapid growth, Inkenbrandt said, and one of them was how to suggest more content for users in a way that was both natural and useful. But in the end, it was Wilson’s design team that found an answer to the recommendation engine quest, by surfacing similar pins from boards users had created:

“One of our challenges was how to recommend content,” Inkenbrandt said. “So we’re coming up with like, secret sauce algorithms, where we’re trying to figure out based on content what people might like. And then it turns out that based off the design, just having the actual board where the pin was from, well, that content is obviously highly relevant, usually in the same theme, and can help people find great stuff.”

By showing related content next to individual pins, and then allowing users to navigate to that content without leaving their spot in the stream, also solved another engineering issue with navigation. Wilson said Sharp gave him and the designer some high-level goals for the re-design, and one was to make the overall feel much more lightweight.

“Before, you would look at one close-up and then go back to the grid and then back to the close-up. So we wanted to figure out a way so you wouldn’t have to do that jump. It seems like a simple thing, but if you’re on there for an hour let’s say, and you do that repeatedly, you might do that a few hundred times.” he said. “To me anyway the holy grail to navigation is to get to the user to navigate via content.”

But while Pinterest has been able to balance the priorities of design and functionality fairly remarkably so far, the rubber might be about to hit the road. The company has been nudging its way toward a business model recently, adding features like analytics for businesses and encouraging marketers to the site, which makes sense if the company is going to live up to that $2.5 billion valuation.

But just ask Twitter and Facebook: it’s a lot easier balancing design and engineering when salespeople aren’t breathing down your neck every day.

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Pinterest announced the redesign back in January, but only tested it out with a small number of users. The company is now rolling it out more broadly. In the new design the photos pinned to the site appear larger, and the activity feed is smaller, which makes sense given its focus on displaying attractive images. It seems like the biggest complaint from users so far is the removal of the thread of re-pins under each photo (similar to reblogs on Tumblr) that showed who shared each photo and in what order. However, you can still see who has re-pinned or liked individual photos when clicking on them.

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, CEO Ben Silbermann said they’re constantly pushing the Pinterest team to come up with new ways to engage people’s attention on the site:

“Every one of your experiences has to feel good,” he said at the time. “Every month, it has to be more than a passing novelty. If they don’t feel like it gives anything to them, they’ll crowd it out.”

The company recently released a web analytics tool for brands who have a Pinterest account, which arrived after a new $200 million funding round.

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UX designers’ primary job is to improve usability and extend productivity. But they also have a responsibility to address the unintended consequences of new technologies, some of them with a clear ethical dimension. Following is a look at some of the principle ethical quandaries that UX designers will run up against and must deal with responsibly.

Human costs and de-valuing work

So much of the UX discipline’s early efforts were driven by the desire to improve human performance and productivity while reducing errors. Few questioned the value of these gains, achieved by optimizing system design, augmenting human ability, and automation, especially as it eliminated dangerous, repetitive, or tedious work – think of assembly line factory jobs that in past decades injured and maimed scores of people.

But some forms of automation come at the cost of diminishing the work’s intellectual and emotional value. Consider the levels of automation found in fast-food restaurants or warehouse fulfillment centers, where work is de-humanized, worker growth is diminished, and the value of rewarding work is stripped away. Undoubtedly these issues were at play with the spate of protests and suicides by distraught Foxconn workers in recent years.

The question for the UX professional who designs these work experiences then is: at what point must efficiency and optimization yield to human concerns?

‘De-skilling’

Over the past two decades, there have been tremendous advances in the development of powerful support systems that augment human intelligence in demanding environments. For example, some aircraft systems, such as the  Boeing Dreamliner and the  F-35 Lighting II, have become so complicated that they challenge the human capacity to fly them without assistance from an “intelligent” assistant.  The positive benefits of this technology can reduce error and improve safety.

At the same time, UX researchers must examine the possibiliy that automation can create a situation where skilled operators can be replaced be less-skilled operators. (On a mainstream level, that would include losing the ability to navigate without the aid of GPS, or more simply the ability to do math without using a calculator.)

In some cases, the gains from technology will outweigh the loss of skills. In others, the level of support and automation might warrant reconsideration. Whatever the outcome, it is critical that UX designers initiate this conversation, so that users of technology can make informed choices about their extent and consequences.

Influencing user behavior

We’ve gotten pretty good at being able to subconsciously influence and alter behavior (by nudging, for one), which creates a vexing ethical conundrum for UX designers. The UX professional must understand that for every product created with the “best intention,” there will be another that deliberately nudges the user to ends not in the user’s best interest.  Thus on the one hand, they recognize that human behavior often results in sub-optimum choices and actions. On the other hand, they recognize that they have the potential, through design, to affect that behavior in other ways – positive and negative.

So how do UX professionals define their ethical responsibilities as they subconsciously influence users’ decisions or actions? The case of producing negative outcomes is clear; less clear is who determines what is “positive.” The line between the two is often not well defined. Take for instance the medicare prescription drug plan finder tool on the medicare.gove site which navigates this dilemma well. It guides and supports the user in an unbiased fashion to the plan that best aligns with their health needs – a great improvement over early support efforts on the site.

The erosion of privacy

With the best intentions, technologies have been developed to remotely monitor the activities of the elderly – what and how much they eat, where they’re located, even when they take their prescriptions. Similarly, products like vuezone or  Car Connection allow parents to monitor every movement of their children – what they’re doing at home, how fast they are driving, where they are at 2 a.m.

The benefits of such technologies are real, for one allowing the elderly to live independently or for parents to be confident in the safety of their children . Yet such constant monitoring of the individual can also have the opposite effect, instead leaving one feeling the loss of highly valued privacy and dignity because of non-stop monitoring. With each new capability comes added consequences.

The dangers of distraction

The convergence of technologies can tax our attention spans in a way that threatens the limits of human capabilities. One case is the increased integration of communication, navigation, and entertainment technologies in automotive design. We now have GPS screens, entertainment monitors, handsfree cellphone use, and advanced stereo systems with various control mechanisms.

While these technologies deliver unquestionable value and pleasure to the driver and passengers, they indisputably divide the operator’s attention, distracting him or her from the stated purpose of driving, leading to life- threatening situations (and that’s not even including texting while driving). The problem has become so severe that the Highway Safety Administration has created a website to address this issue.

So what responsibility do UX professionals have in these situations? The likelihood of distraction and its consequences should become an area of intense focus in the UX discipline’s research agenda.

At the end of the day, UX professionals must increasingly consider where their responsibilities lie – with the organization that reaps financial gains from the technology sold, or with the user who may possibly suffer negative or life- threatening consequences from these products.

Bill M. Gribbons is professor of information design and corporate communication and director of the graduate human factors program at Bentley University. 

Photo courtesy Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com.

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In the new version, Path messages take advantage of the fact that as our phones have become capable of much more than transmitting voice and text, traditional SMS has become fairly outmoded. People are looking for ways to communicate with richer features than just the letters of the alphabet. So the company focused on creating a private social network is introducing a much more full-featured messaging option along with the third version, and pretty much everything you’d want is there.

For a company that’s known for its design, some of the features will look different from what users are used to. But in meetings in San Francisco last week ahead of Wednesday’s launch, Path designers said they view the addition of large emojis they’re calling “stickers” as a new kind of digital art — a kind that hopefully, users will pay for.

There’s text, of course, but it’s the other features that kick it over the top: the large emojis called stickers, the ability to quickly insert a pin on a map to show where you are or want to go, voice recording features, the ability to import or snap photos, music, movies, and a few others. They’re the type of features you might ordinarily screenshot or explain with words, but they’re now available at the tap of a button.

“I think it’s a typical Path swiss army knife,” said Nate Johnson, Path’s VP of marketing. “You can do a lot of different things with it. And it helps that we have the list of your closest friends sitting right there.”

Path to success?

The question for Path is whether a robust messaging feature will add to the network’s appeal and either draw in new users or bring back those who have lapsed.

The company recently hit 6 million registered users, and Johnson said that for most people, once they get past the initial hurdle of understanding how to use the app, adoption is quick. Path raised a $30 million Series B led by Redpoint Ventures in April of 2012 and $8.5 million back in April of 2011.

Path’s decision to focus on stickers is interesting. Not only does it infuse the app with a new set of aesthetics and graphic artists who might not necessarily work for the company, it gives a hint at where the company’s monetization strategy is headed.

Users will receive two “packs” of stickers for free. Each pack includes somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 images, depending on the pack, and the free sets take the classic Path smiley face (named Jack, apparently) and gives him a whole set of new updates. There’s party Jack, with a beer mug; developer Jack, with a 5 o’clock shadow and Red Bull; sleepy Jack with a robe and coffee mug, and more than 30 other images.

Path is betting that emoji-like images are the kinds of things that consumers will want to pay for under a freemium model. The stickers are basically emojis on steroids, maybe. At first glance they don’t really fit with Path’s carefully orchestrated red and yellow aesthetic. The stickers come in a variety of styles, and most are goofy in nature and garish in color.

“The philosophy here is to build things that people want to pay for,” Johnson said. “It’s not to put in advertising. The spirit of this is that we think there’s a better way to make money. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Design uber alles

Path is known for its design — the company has worked hard to create a strong feeling in the app through attention to detail and careful consideration of all elements. From the shading on the buttons to the way certain features fade out when you look at a photo, it’s the way that small things come together that makes Path an attractive app. But with the addition of large emojis, or stickers, the company is detouring a little from its established look, and banking on consumer delight to promote a new kind of design.

“I feel like in this day and age, anyone can be self-taught and design something that looks good. But there’s so much thinking behind our product,” said Jenny Ji, design director at Path.

Key designers at Path said that they’re persuaded the new stickers will not only provide some revenue for the company, but will provide greater joy to the consumers and change how we consider digital art.

The company worked with external artists to create each of the sticker sets or “packs,” and when users tap on a sticker pack to purchase, they’ll see the designers name and bio, making it seem like you’re purchasing a gallery of hand-crafted pieces of art, rather than smiling dog images.

“Each of these packs, there’s a theme around it,” said Dustin Mierau, co-founder and head of design. “So we’re really asking is, ‘What do you want the pack to allow you to communicate? Like this one is about friendship and love, so my wife and I send these back and forth quite a bit.”

“We don’t want people to have to type,” Mierau said. ”Typing is probably the worst part of messaging today. Usually it’s typing to coordinate or do things, so we want to bring in the tools that make it easier. With one tap, I’m saying something more meaningful. It’s a whole phrase. That’s how we see stickers, it’s entire phrases wrapped up in one tap. It’s like the map of saying where I am. It’s this whole giant interaction wrapped up in one Path moment.”

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