Congratulations to our very own Scott Bryant for being selected to speak at this year’s UX Australia conference!

Facebook’s F8 developer conference

(contributed by Melissa)

Here are a few really interesting links which I found so far on the F8 conference.

• A good summary: New Ways to Personalize Your Online Experience
• Showcase: Explore how sites integrate Facebook
• General conference info
• Watch keynotes live

Twitter’s developer conference

(contributed by Manuel)

At Chirp, the official Twitter developer conference, Twitter shared some revealing stats about its site, users, and growth that had previously been kept under wraps.

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet
• Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications
• Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees

You can also see some snapshots from the presentation.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Pat suggests Projective Techniques: Eliciting Deeper Thoughts by David Jacques
• Lexi suggests Pirate Google by Michele Goetz
• Pat suggests Why YouTube doesn’t get more agency money – and what they should do about it by Mark Pollard

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog…or do they?

(contributed by Angus)

Over on NYTimes, Richard PÉrez-peÑa reports news sites rethink anonymous online comments:

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

Forget anonymity! The problem is management

(contributed by Angus)

Scott Rosenberg responds to the above NYTimes article:

The great mistake so many newspapers and media outlets made was to turn on the comments software and then walk out of the room. They seemed to believe that the discussions would magically take care of themselves.

Comment spaces need supervision — call them hosts or moderators or tummlers or New Insect Overlords or whatever you want, but don’t neglect to hire them! These moderators need to be actual people with a presence in the conversation, not faceless wielders of the “delete” button. They welcome newcomers, enforce the local rules, and break up the occasional brawl — enlisting help from the more civic-minded regulars as needed.

I think he’s very right. It is exciting that design tweaks can improve communities/comments but you really need staff to participate and guide participation. And check out comment 13686, very interesting.

Making it harder for comments to be seen leads to more (and better) comments

(contributed by Angus)

Joshua Benton tells us how Gawker hide anonymous comments behind a ‘more link’ and emphasise known commenter’s comments:

In essence, Gawker’s “class system” means unknown commenters get stuck behind a “show all discussions” link few users will click. What most readers will see are only the musings of trusted commenters and the few comments from the riff-raff that either Gawker staff or trusted commenters have decided to promote — the “featured discussions.” [...] the shift led to an immediate decline in comment volume. [...] But comments quickly rebounded and have since skyrocketed at a much faster slope than before the switch.

Faux iPad?

(contributed by Manuel)

You’ve probably seen links to the post by Jaan Orvet and Andreas Carlsson on Quick and (not so) Dirty iPad User Testing…

I also made a few “3D” versions of the mock iPads, mounting a printout on stiff foam core. It’s not quite the same thickness as the real iPad but close enough. The testers will use these as an aid in thinking about the overall environment they are in, and actions they perform (like taking the tablet out of their bag), before interacting with the app or site.

…but have you tried it? Well, we’re going to! We’ll create some physical iPad mock-ups for use in concept testing and we’ll report back with our thoughts on how well it works. Stay tuned.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Melissa suggests 35 Great Social Media Infographics by Pam Dyer
• Lexi suggests Data Driven Personas and Analytics by Seb Chan (@Webstock 2010)
• Manuel suggests Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice? by Dori Tunstall
• Angus suggests Design with Intent toolkit 1.0 now online by Dan Lockton

Identifying assumptions and testing them

(contributed by Pat)

Jon Mooallem asks in the New York Times, Can Animals Be Gay?:

In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.

It’s a provocative headline, but looking beyond that, there’s a really good point being made about assumptions in research.

The discovery of the same sex couples comes after decades of scientists assuming the birds were forming male-female pairs. Even though they couldn’t explain why nests would sometimes contain two eggs when female Albatrosses can only lay one egg per year.

The problem was their assumption, that was never tested even in the face of hard data that would seem to contravene the assumption. It’s an important point to keep in mind when researching; identify assumptions and test them to see if they are leading to bias.

Mobile audience segments

(contributed by Pat)

Experian Simmons has released their 2010 American Mobile Consumer Report:

Through an extensive evaluation of the National Consumer Survey measures targeting the behaviors and attitudes that consumers have toward mobile phones, Experian Simmons uncovered five distinct segments of mobile consumers and three psychographic scales. Descriptions of the five segment now available are below.

• Mobirati: (19% of mobile phone owners) They represent the mobile generation having grown up with cell phones and can not imagine life without them. Cell phone devices are a central part of their everyday lives.
• Social Connectors: (22% of mobile phone owners) For them communication is central in their lives and cell phones allow them to keep up to date with friends and social events. The mobile device is the bridge to their social world.
• Pragmatic Adopters: (22% of mobile phone owners) Cell phones came to being during their adult years. They are now learning that there are other things they can do with mobile phones beyond just saying “Hello.” Cell phones are more a part of their everyday life than ever before, but still more functional than entertaining to them.
• Mobile Professionals: (17% of mobile phone owners) Mobile phones help them keep up with their professional life in addition to their personal life. More likely to own a smart phone. Their phone has become their all-in-one device for all communication and information needs. Features are important and used.
• Basic Planners: (20% of mobile phone owners) They are not into cell phones or the world of technology. Use cell phones just for the basics. The cell phone is just another communication device for these consumers.

(Pie chart sourced from MediaPost article discussing the segmentation)

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Sophie suggests A Popular Misconception by Khoi Vinh

Test post

Patrick Kennedy Design Research Lead

News Digital Media A News Limited Company Level 25 | 175 Liverpool Street Sydney NSW 2001 Australia

Phone | 612 8114 7758 Mobile | 0410 506 904 Email | patrick.kennedy@newsdigitalmedia.com.au

*********************************************************************************************** This message and its attachments may contain legally privileged or confidential information. It is intended solely for the named addressee. If you are not the addressee indicated in this message or responsible for delivery of the message to the addressee, you may not copy or deliver this message or its attachments to anyone. Rather, you should permanently delete this message and its attachments and kindly notify the sender by reply e-mail. Any content of this message and its attachments which does not relate to the official business of the sending company must be taken not to have been sent or endorsed by that company or any of its related entities. No warranty is made that the e-mail or attachments are free from computer virus or other defect. ***********************************************************************************************

Test post

Patrick Kennedy Design Research Lead

News Digital Media A News Limited Company Level 25 | 175 Liverpool Street Sydney NSW 2001 Australia

Phone | 612 8114 7758 Mobile | 0410 506 904 Email | patrick.kennedy@newsdigitalmedia.com.au

*********************************************************************************************** This message and its attachments may contain legally privileged or confidential information. It is intended solely for the named addressee. If you are not the addressee indicated in this message or responsible for delivery of the message to the addressee, you may not copy or deliver this message or its attachments to anyone. Rather, you should permanently delete this message and its attachments and kindly notify the sender by reply e-mail. Any content of this message and its attachments which does not relate to the official business of the sending company must be taken not to have been sent or endorsed by that company or any of its related entities. No warranty is made that the e-mail or attachments are free from computer virus or other defect. ***********************************************************************************************

People want Contact more than Content

(contributed by Pat)

Over on FASTForward blog, Rob Paterson writes that online dating is bigger than porn – people want contact more than content:

Now it is clear that people are finding that online is THE PLACE to find a mate. Average time on [Facebook is] 22 minutes! Average age is 48. Customer spend on average $239 a year. The industry is worth over a $1.0 billion a year.

But the best part is the infographic, the top of which is shown below:

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

(contributed by Pat)

The guys over on OkTrends have reported their findings after having “cataloged over 7,000 [member profile] photographs on OkCupid.com”. They looked at which photo factors related to success (I’ll leave it up to you to imagine how success might be defined for an online dating website). The four myths are:

1. It’s better to smile
2. You shouldn’t take your picture with your phone or webcam
3. Guys should keep their shirts on
4. Make sure your face is showing

It’s a fun post, but behind it is some very interesting and well thought-out research. Some of the findings (as well as the method used) could also be applied to social networking and other online memberships where users keep a profile.

It also reminds me of a few discussions we’ve had within the team regarding analysis of visual communication (signs, business cards etc) to examine the information that is important to both the writer and the reader.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Sophie suggests What is information architecture? by Mickey McManus
• Manuel suggests Journalists Starting To Be Replaced By Robots by Martin Bryant