The Mechanism's Founder and Design Executive Officer, Dave Fletcher is an awardee of the Silicon 100 for 2017. In the article, Dave talks about The Mechanism and how the company has survived and thrived over the past 16+ years in New York City.
We will remain human-focused and technology-mindful well into our foreseeable future. We can never forget that on the other side of our client’s device, there’s a human being – looking to be astonished and wishing to be connected to something bigger than themselves.
In today’s digital world, we know that much of the modern-day storefront is viewed from the screen of a mobile device or monitor. Commerce is no longer structured by physical distance and a global economy has made online competition fierce. This is exactly why the team at The Mechanism works so hard to make incredible web designs and intentional branding; we want you to stand out among the noise on the Internet. We pour our heart and soul into every client project that we have the privilege to work on, and that is why it is such a great honor that we received accolades as a Top New York City Agency of 2017 by Clutch.
Clutch, a well-respected technology referral firm based in Washington, D.C., scours the globe to find the best technology companies in the world. They conduct customer interviews to ensure that every company that they recommend is reliable, communicates well and delivers amazing results. Companies that are approved and recommended by Clutch are evaluated on their market presence weighing factors such as the services they offer, clients they serve, and examples of quality projects they’ve completed. With such rigorous standards, The Mechanism is proud to land a place on Clutch’s New York City leaders matrix.
“New York City is known for being a global hub for advertising, design, and innovation. For this reason, it can be incredibly difficult for agencies to stand out among their competitors,” said Jenna Seter, business analyst at Clutch. “All of the companies featured today have accomplished exactly that – proving themselves as leaders in their industries as a result of their commitment to clients, passion for their work, and ability to generate results.”
Since client reviews are such a large part of the process, we would love to share what was said about us. When we provided web development for a sales training provider, they commented that we “are very responsive and accessible. They are always there when we need some development help. They respond to my team quickly and are in constant contact with our development personnel. This is key in our business and essential for any vendor. Overall, the quality of their work is very good. Our team is satisfied.”
Pele, one of the greatest soccer players of all time stated, “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.” Liverpool hospitality packages is something you should check out if you love soccer. We are so excited to earn this incredible accomplishment and are proud of our hardworking, imaginative and knowledgeable team. We love what we do on the exciting forefront of technology, but our success is achieved only because our outstanding clients trust us with such important projects. The best reward that we get is when we exceed a customer’s expectations and bring their vision to life. When you love what we’ve created for you, that is true success.
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As we are stepping into digital age. Local Brand Advisor is helping thousands of new business to get off the ground. Dave Fletcher, Founder and Executive Director of The Mechanism was interviewed for the Cover Story in the latest issue of The Silicon Review.
Some highlights:
“Over the past 16-plus years, we’ve seen significant changes in the visual design/development sector and the clients we serve. Business (r)evolutions are occurring at a much faster rate than in the past, especially in technology. Deliberate and unintentional disruptions to the way businesses communicate with their chosen audience have ushered forth new ways of thinking about the direction and definition of branding in the digital age.”
“In many ways, these disruptions are a good thing,” says Dave.“For example, entrepreneurs, previously adverse to launching a new idea or service, are becoming increasingly unencumbered by many of the early financial risks included with a product launch. If an idea is remarkable and surrounded by a modicum of social media outreach and localized enthusiasm, the audience will not only help to fund a useful product or service, they will evangelize it to their personal social networks. This is the Kickstarter model – an upending of the business mindset – where anyone can present an idea to the marketplace, extricated by corporate interests or expectations. Brand “fans” are rebuilding the markets by themselves, not just the corporations anymore.”
Fletcher on using the email marketing services offered to promote The Mechanism and its experience:
"Our experience is a differentiator which strengthens our ability to predict changes in the diversified, evolving business ecosystem. We closely follow futurist interpretations because we are engaged with its endless possibilities to enhance and help the planet and society at large. Also, our ability to work directly with any type of corporate entity or personality comes with our collective experience and fearlessness to take on any project that presents itself. I prefer to build relationships for the long-haul. Executives always move on to new endeavors and projects and have built a comfortability level directly with either me or my colleagues. These very intimate relationships, forged through trust, have served us well."
Fletcher on the challenges in the industry
"One of our crucial jobs as digital creative consultants is to help company leadership and their marketing teams understand as much as they can about the human beings they are reaching out to with their brand identity. No matter the size of our client engagement, their audience is always the gauge and the most important thing to focus on. First, we need to know what the audience wants and expects, and not what the leadership expects. It is a tough pill to swallow at times, because when you are working with large companies, there tend to be large egos involved at the top. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. It is definitely a large part of how they achieved success in the first place. Once we understand their audience fully, we can then examine industry trends and data, understand the CEO’s vision and investigate all of the things that are a part the brand or company. By looking at the audience first, we tend to find very useful information."
Founder Dave Fletcher was recently featured in the technology section of CIO Review. His thought-piece, "Throughout this Big Idea" offers a perspective on the history of manipulation through advertising and the importance of taking the time to absorb multiple viewpoints in the age of "Alternative Facts". Written before the 2016 Presidential election, the article presents a stark and vital viewpoint about the dangers of media manipulation from a technology industry veteran.
Modern technology and network-based communication contains and amplifies the desire originally facilitated by the print, radio and television mediums. As the internet continues to evolve, we must recognize that the quality of information is crucial. Groups of humans have always preferred to gather where people share the same beliefs, and without careful deliberation, we may continue to separate humanity into tribes of singular opinions. It's one of our great flaws, and keeps a vast majority distant from truly understanding those who oppose them. Viewpoint is religion and technology is the church. Right and wrong are blurred thanks to the internet's delivery mechanism, which facilitates quantity over quality. One could even argue that a younger generation has become accustomed to perceived communication patterns predominantly through text entry rather than actual speech - internalizing our thoughts and espousing complexity through emoji. It's faster, but certainly is a means to impede advancing our brains to their fullest potential. Wide-eyed, yet lacking wisdom, we coast dangerously close to only consuming what we understand implicitly. This is how technology captures us and how we lose our humanity; our ability to reason and the desire to better ourselves through healthy disagreement, knowledge and discourse.
Humanizing the Machine
If we learn one thing by examining the past of any medium’s evolution or any technology revolution, it's that as time goes on, we expect things to get easier. Interface design has always been about humanizing the machine - cleanly separating us from the bits and bytes; from the tedium of engaging with an electronic contraption by creating a natural interaction without falling face-first into the uncanny valley. The interfaces of the next generation of devices will follow the engagement rules perfected by the veterans of the digital era, but complexity will be undercut by the passive introduction of vocal dialogue with our device. As Artificial Intelligence improves, we will learn from and mimic the personalities of our devices. And likely, vice-versa.
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Our first interviewee is Dave Fletcher, founder and DEO (design executive officer) of The Mechanism, a digital agency based in New York City. For more than two decades, this noted design expert has explored a wide range of media, including interactive design, print, video and photography for clients around the globe.
What's a mobile trend that's working well?
You've probably heard a great deal about the "Internet of Things." Apple has announced HomeKit, which will turn your iPhone into a remote control for your interconnected home. To expand on this, eventually, we will live with systems that plug into an artificial or ambient intelligence to manage your life, curate your interests, drive a vehicle and keep track of your day-to-day travels. It will never force you to remove yourself from an existing experience to use a website to research what the network will already know you're looking for.
What's a mobile trend you wish would just go away?
Selfies.
How do you determine whether a client needs an app, mobile-specific site or responsive site to reach their customers via mobile devices?
Dave Fletcher
Typically, the answer emerges from an honest and collaborative conversation with our client partner about their audience, their ambitions and their budget. The audience is key here, and in most cases, the client has an idea from either Google Analytics or other research as to what type of device or devices their end users have.
Mobile plans, available carriers and speed of connectivity based on geolocation of the target audience are important yet often overlooked factors when it comes to a mobile initiative. They should be researched as well so we have an understanding of these factors during the planning phase.
If the client requires deep integration with a smartphone operating system that simply cannot be replicated within the smartphone browser's capabilities or there are very serious security concerns, a discussion about appropriate mobile operating systems and native app development can take place.
To address the "mobile-specific site" or "responsive site" question: A digital experience should always be designed and built to render and function appropriately on all devices. Having dedicated server hosting will also help improve your website loading speed.
Search is the compass of the internet. It guides us to the content that we are really looking for and helps avoid the stuff we don’t really care about. Or at least that’s how it is supposed to work. It turns out that beyond just the complexity of installing and configuring a search server, it can also be difficult to account for the various use cases of your search tool. Lets take a quick look at how The Mechanism engineers were able to tackle this challenge when building a restaurant search application for SafeFARE.
The good folks at foodallergy.org enlisted our services to build a restaurant search sushi near me that will allow users to find allergy-aware restaurants based on any combination of 9 criteria. Using the Ruby on Rails framework and Sunspot Solr (a Ruby DSL for the Lucene Apache Solr search server) we built this search app, and learned a few things on the way.
If a user searches for restaurants in a ZIP code should we only return restaurants within that ZIP code, or should we include restaurants from other nearby ZIP codes in our search results? And if we include other ZIP codes, how many other ZIP codes? How should we order the results? These and other similar questions helped up to come up with the structure of our search controller.
Figure 1.1
if params[:search].present?
@search = Restaurant.solr_search do
fulltext params[:restaurant_name] # runs a full text search of
It took us about a week but we were finally able to come up with enough if statements to cover every one of the 362,880 possible combinations of search queries. Figure 1.1 is a small sampling of how we implement search when a user types in a restaurant name, cuisine preference, and restaurant location. First we search the solr index for whatever the user enters in the restaurant_name field, then cut that list down to only the approved restaurants, then we check to see if the user also entered a cuisine preference, if so we facet our list down to restaurants that match that cuisine, if the user did not enter a cuisine, we skip that step, then we check if the user entered a location that they would like to search like a city, or state, and we facet our list down to only restaurant’s in that area. Using this strategy we can create sort of a Venn diagram that allows us to drill down only to the information that we want, and point that result to the restaurant variable. To increase the functionality of the site, The Mechanism engineers implemented an IP lookup to automatically detect the IP address and location of the user, and order search results by how close the restaurant is to the user.
A second major challenge that many developers face when using a search server is deployment. In order to use solr in a production environment, you will need a Java app servlet like Tomcat or Jetty, and you will need an instance of Apache Solr. Developers may consider installing standalone versions of Tomcat and Solr Sunspot depending on their hardware capabilities, but sunspot comes bundled with a Jetty server which can be used in production by running the command RAILS_ENV=production rake sunspot:solr:start
And voila! we have implemented an advanced search tool that will help users find allergy-aware restaurants all across the nation and may even save somebody’s life one day.
