What Social Media Users Want

(contributed by Scott)

We’ve been talking a lot about social media lately (I mean who doesn’t?) and this caught our attention, Jennifer Van Grove‘s article on social media statistics for the news space:

What’s most interesting is that nearly half the traffic (47%) that Twitter generates falls into the news category. In fact, Twitter users’ interest in the news genre surpasses that of Facebook users by nearly 20%, which would appear to make it the number-one social network for newsies.

Another interesting tidbit is that MySpace users have no interest in news whatsoever. Instead that corner of the web splits its interests between video games (28%) and celebrity and entertainment content (23%). This aligns with what we’ve seen in terms of MySpace’s business strategy around securing exclusive entertainment content over the past few months and where it’s likely headed for the future.

The Future of Publishing

(contributed by Scott)

Created by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books and produced by Khaki Films, this video speaks for itself “literally” but I must say although twisting halfway through into a marketing thought-piece did make me think about audiences and “presumption”.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• A friend of USiT suggests Most Online News Readers Use 5 Sites or Fewer, Study Says by New York Times
• Manuel suggests Readability (bookmarklet) by Arc90
• Scott suggests Digital storytelling effects lab
• Pat recommends Manpacks (via Rex@Savage Minds)

Tobii’s library of eyetracking papers

(contributed by Pat)

Now 275 Academic papers about eyetracking in the Tobii Library on Diigo! Easy to search, including abstracts!! (via @jamesbreeze on twitter)

Move mouse, make art

(contributed by Manuel)

IOGraph allows you to keep a visual track of your own mouse movements, making something of a modern art piece.

The idea is that you just run it and do your usual day stuff at the computer, then open the software after a while and grab a nice picture of what you’ve done!

Retro internet

(contributed by Angus)

Looking back on how we were: re-reading articles and advertisements from mid 90’s Wired magazines – often funny in retrospect!

And looking back on looking forward: Clifford Stoll in 1995 on what the internet won’t be: looks now like he was very wrong, but maybe time will tell?

Creating a UX design library

(contributed by Pat)

Usability News reports that Quince Pro enables privately-held UX design libraries:

Infragistics has launched Quince Pro, a private, secure and organized way to collaborate, communicate and cultivate private UX design libraries to ensure consistent user experiences across teams, departments and companies.

Don’t ask customers why they left you!

(contributed by Pat)

Anthill Magazine instructs us to not ask customers why they’ve left:

The traditional approach to customer defection research is to ask former customers: “Why did you leave?” But acting on the results of this type of research won’t actually reduce defections, and can divert your attention from the real issues.

…because doing so typically generates…

…a list of “things to fix”, but these are just the triggers to change. While fixing the ‘triggers’ is fine, it only reduces points of annoyance and it won’t actually help you to add real value to your offer. And until you add real value to your offer, your customers will still be drawn, or will drift, away to your competitors.

The article also suggests a more beneficial tactic for dealing with the situation.

Where Do Heuristics Come From?

(contributed by Angus)

We use heuristics as shortcuts and guides when evaluating designs but where do they come from? Dana Chisnell says either folk wisdom, specialist experience or research. She says…

Research-based heuristics simply have more heft: credibility, specificity, and applicability. Still, there’s no substitute for primary research. Firsthand observation of your users in their context reveals subtleties of behavior that even research-based heuristics can’t match. And if your research of your users in their context contradicts the known research, what do you do? (You don’t get two guesses to answer this question.) If you go with what your users do, then even the most deeply researched heuristics are at best a poor substitute for doing the right thing.

6 ways iPhone and Android Users Differ

(contributed by Melissa)

Philip Elmer-DeWitt compares users of the two leading smart phones in terms of gender, age, engagement, purchase habits and handset satisfaction.

The battle of the smart phones is a topic to watch in 2010 as more Androids come to market. It will be interesting to see how some of these metrics change or evolve.

The Quick List

What’s this, something new?! Yes, we’ll now be featuring a collection of quick links amassed by the team. No waffle, just links.

• Scott suggests Five User Experience Trends I’ll be Watching in 2010 by Gene Smith
• Scott suggests Streams of Content, Limited Attention by Danah Boyd
• Angus suggests Ultimate guide to table UI patterns by Janko Jovanovic
• Angus suggests Ultimate guide to table UI patterns by Janko Jovanovic
• Melissa suggests Dan Hill, New Soft City [video] by Bill DeRouchey
• Melissa suggests Facebook will allow users to share location by Nick Bilton
• Melissa suggests And the winner of the best film about design is… by Alissa Walker

You will have noticed we missed another weekly blog post last week. Take it as a sign that we are really busy :)

UXurls

(contributed by Melissa)

You’ve seen popurls.com but now there’s UXurls.com. It’s an aggregation of everything UX from the last 24 hours, created by Harry Brignull, who says:

It’s a really simple popurls clone, intended for people who are too busy to set themselves up with their own RSS reader, or just fancy a quick glance at the sites I’m reading.

This blog is not one of the 130 sites Harry has included, so you’ll still need to come back and visit us :)

Rapid desirability testing

(contributed by Chris)

On UXmatters, Michael Hawley shares a case study where his team used the Product Reaction Cards developed by Microsoft Research to assess the “desirability” of design alternatives, from the user’s point of view:

To test which approach would best align with our intended goals, we conducted a desirability test using product reaction cards. Starting with the full Microsoft list of cards, we revised the list to include only the adjectives we felt were important for this brand, after assessing our early user research. We narrowed the final list to 60 adjectives, but kept the 60/40 split between positive and negative terms Benedek and Miner had suggested.

We’ve used this technique, or a very similar approach, on many occasions. The Product Reaction Cards are quite versatile and can be used in many other situations also. For example, for producing a view of the desired future state of a system, which can be very interesting in comparison/contrast with that group of people’s view of the current system.

In another recent project, users were asked to liken the website concepts to an image of a person. The images personified a variety of emotional responses, for instance a cool, young woman or an older, corporate gentleman. Overall, users felt one of the designs was quite young and feminine, which is what the project aimed to achieve.

Experience maps

(contributed by Angus)

We really like Gene Smith‘s experience maps, produced for a recent project:

[...] the research was much richer than anything we could capture in an alignment model. Hardcore gamers invest a lot of time–on forums, in stores, with friends–before buying a game. We wanted to show how these different experiences shaped their behaviour.

The solution we came up with was an experience map–a diagram that combines a persona with an abstracted story about the gamer’s journey from researching games to purchasing, playing to sharing experiences about that game. The story includes the details on the different channels where gamers get their information along with supporting quotes form our research.

They are great diagrams, I imagine most UX practitioners would be very envious of such high quality deliverables!

Researchers plan to automate web image description

(contributed by Pat)

In what might help to improve website accessibility, the E-Access Bulletin reports that a new UK academic research network aims to enable computers to describe visual content on web pages:

The network is aiming to develop a web browser plug-in which would be able to analyse an image and describe it to a visually impaired user. It is one of a number of projects exploring computer vision and computer language programming to be undertaken by the new V&L Net – the Vision and Language Network of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).