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).

We’re a bit light on this week, we must be busy :)

These are your users, read and be horrified

(contributed by Melissa)

Over on UX Magazine, Jonathan Anderson tells the story of the “RWW Facebook login” debacle…

ReadWriteWeb recently published an article titled Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. Being an interesting, timely article, it rose to the top of Google searches for “Facebook login.” Then: chaos and confusion. Lots and lots of the people who use Google instead of their browser’s address bar to access sites began confusing the ReadWriteWeb link with a link to Facebook itself, and began posting angry comments wondering why Facebook had been redesigned and asking when they’d be allowed to log in again.

…and then makes the link to the vox-pops video showing “users” don’t really know what browsers or search engines are, nor the difference between them. It’s like Funniest Home Videos for UX professionals! (Part of me thinks UX vox-pops are genius, the rest of me recognises they are cruel and embarrassing. Watch the video and enjoy lulz.)

Capturing storytelling on video (like Clint Eastwood!)

(contributed by Pat)

Shawn Callahan from Anecdote shares some tips for capturing stories on video:

A few nights ago I watch Changeling starring Angelina Jolie. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood (has he ever directed a dud movie?) and I was fascinated by a short documentary we found in the DVD extras where Clint explained why he never calls out ‘Action’ when directing a scene. As an actor Clint found a director’s call to ‘Action’ off putting. He was immediately reminded that he was an actor, acting and his performance suffered. Instead Clint calmly and quietly says things like, “OK, in your own time …” or “when you are ready …”

Simple but useful tips from a guy who knows a lot about getting stories out of people. It’s an increasingly popular method of getting under the skin of an issue (the storytelling…or technically story listening) but getting candid video of the story is also being used more and more. It’s a great form or emotive/persuasive communication and I’d really like to start producing more little video snippets to share with our internal clients.

How to create an experience that sells - and do you want that?

(contributed by Pat)

A great piece from Mark Hurst on the conundrum we all face: who should we be designing experiences for? He opens with the question:

Which would you rather do…

• create a experience that, even if you don’t particularly care for it yourself, becomes wildly popular and puts your name on the map?
• …or… create an experience you firmly believe in, no matter how popular (or not) it becomes?

And the difficulties in answering that question…

Because here’s the thing: the larger culture can’t decide which to value. Sometimes a “good experience” is the thing that makes a boatload of money, because it serves some consumer desire, no matter the intrinsic value or integrity - “the customer is always right.” And if enough people buy it, it makes for good copy.

On the other hand, sometimes the “good experience” is the thing that is most authentic, and often popular to a small minority. The scrappy restaurant with cuisine for the foodie palate, the indie film refusing to dumb down its plot or characters, the neighborhood or book or community “keeping it real” - it’s practically a cliche, given how obsessed the culture is sometimes with finding the real or authentic thing.

Mark goes on to discuss how this choice can affect how commercially successful the resulting experience might be, but just this conundrum is something that is a real issue within the UX field. We say we should always listen to the customer, but we know that often the best results are achieved through dogged determination and passion for something the designer/creator/owner believes in. Which way would you go?

Hunters and Farmers

(contributed by Pat)

I really liked this post by Seth Godin on the topic of realising there are different skills for different roles and that some people may have one skill-set or the other. And that’s OK.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills.

Seth applies this model to other situations, such as students in a classroom, and of course marketing. And I think it’s very relevant to UX: horses for courses, different strokes for different folks, know thy audience yadda yadda.

It really makes me think the way in which a lot of our society is structured, or governed, is often a “one size fits all” or “lowest common denominator” or “majority rules” arrangement. To think that someone’s potential is being wasted simply because of the way in which the challenge, environment, opportunity or system is framed, is quite sad.

The example I keep thinking of is the (all too common) story of a dyslexic child, in a time gone by where people didn’t understand such conditions, brought up to feel as though they are stupid, but they go on to achieve brilliant things in their life; if only their condition was recognised, understood and appropriately catered for (treated like “hunters” instead of “farmers”), would they have achieved even more brilliant things?

Why do users share?

(contributed by Melissa)

In his article titled Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome, John Tierney asks what sort of articles do users share and what motivates them?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

You can also check out this link within the post to a blog which asks readers to comment on why they comment: tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com

Sadly, we skipped a week last week (did you miss us?). But now we’re back.

Domino’s Pizza: Be Inspired By Your Harshest Critics

(contributed by Angus)

Whitney Hess has a great post about a Domino’s video campaign promoting a new pizza they apparently created in response to user feedback. Includes video excerpts from the campaign. While it’s easy to be cynical I agree with her the customer reactions in the video seem authentic and demonstrate the benefits activities like design research and user testing can give an organisation if they take on board and act upon what is discovered.

While the cynic in me sees their Pizza Turnaround “documentary” for what it is — a marketing campaign — there are still many customer experience lessons to learn from their story.

Designing for experiences across channels

(contributed by Angus)

Brandon Schauer has created a single page diagram on designing multi-channel user experiences. Lot’s of new to me terminology which I think will prove useful.

Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t.

This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel.

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

(contributed by Angus)

Anthony Colfelt on how User Centered Design and Agile processes can be reconciled. Good overview of the positives and negatives of the two processes and some advice on how to get the best qualities from both processes by adopting “Agile UCD”

Remember, Agile does not mandate how to define concepts or overall design direction, but it is a great way to execute on solid design research and well laid plans. UCD needs to be flexible enough to respond to the reality on the ground when the implementation team encounters issues that mandate a different design solution. Document only what is needed to get the message across and co-locate if at all possible, because cross-disciplinary collaboration and face to face communication are vital. Working a sprint ahead of the development team is helpful in allowing the design team enough time to test and iterate. If these rules of engagement are followed, the two approaches can work very well together.

Forgotten passwords an overlooked problem for subscription based revenue models?

(contributed by Angus)

In a long, colourful rant titled “Subscriptions are the New BLACK” about business models for startups, Dave McClure touches upon a user experience issue that apparently caused PayPal a lot of problems:

PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service. And i’m guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.

He suggests that this misleadingly small problem will cause subscription/digital product based businesses problems & that the only way around it is to create services that people need/want to use frequently

… as we transition to a Startup Ecosystem driven by direct payment & subscription business models, I want to make it clear how IMPORTANT it is to make sure users don’t forget their passwords. If they forget their password, and/or can’t recover it, then guess what MoFo — YOU DON’T GET PAID.

Which means you don’t get Laid, you don’t get Acquired, and you sure as friggin’ hell don’t get to Go IPO.

So listen up & i’ll share a little secret with you — there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords. Basically, it’s this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.

But perhaps authentication services like Facebook Connect will help alleviate the problem this time round.

Research is communication

(contributed by Scott)

Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain suggest in their first article from an ongoing column Insights from Research that…

Consumers have two ways in which they can communicate with companies: through their purchasing behaviour and through user research.

I quite like the way they position user research as a way to define potential relationships…

If a decision to purchase is the final word in a conversation between a company and consumers, user research makes the first impression. Just as communication is an interaction between people, user research is an interaction between a company and its market. It lets a company get to know the people who are its potential customers before making a decision about establishing a relationship with them.

Making design principles stick

(contributed by Scott)

Kate Rutter from Adaptive Path provides a really useful overview of how to keep design principles working as the product evolves.

She suggests effective design principles:

• Inspire ideas
• Translate to real-life situations
• Help the team decide between options
• Challenge the team to ask useful questions
• Are specifc to this product
• Make for special and unique experiences

She also elaborates on the five ways to make design principles stick:

• Make them visible
• Keep them fresh
• Tell stories with them
• Make them social
• Go public

How Ford got social media right – the Fiesta Movement

(contributed by Pat)

Grant McCracken delves into Ford’s recent social media success in his Harvard Business Review article…

Ford gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission every month. And away they went. At the direction of Ford and their own imagination, “agents” used their Fiestas to deliver Meals On Wheels. They used them to take Harry And David treats to the National Guard. They went looking for adventure, some to wrestle alligators, others actually to elope. All of these stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

One of the creators of the campaign, Bud Caddell, describes the central concept as…

The idea was: let’s go find twenty-something YouTube storytellers who’ve learned how to earn a fan community of their own. [People] who can craft a true narrative inside video, and let’s go talk to them. And let’s put them inside situations that they don’t get to normally experience/document. Let’s add value back to their life. They’re always looking, they’re always hungry, they’re always looking for more content to create. I think this gets things exactly right.

This sounds like an innovative, smart and daring (considering the affect the GFC has had on many large corporations particularly in the auto industry) campaign. I love how they had a good think about it, understood their audience and how they might influence that audience, then created a campaign that is far from the usual social media approach. Hat tip to Grant’s blog where he announced the HBR article and also shares an interview he did with Bud Caddell.

5 Steps to Building Social Experiences

(contributed by Chris)

Erin Malone has published a Boxes and Arrows article on building social experiences…

Nowadays everyone wants social in their sites and applications. It’s become a basic requirement in consumer web software and is slowly infiltrating the enterprise as well. So what’s a designer to do when confronted with the requirements to “add social”? Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way. It’s important to consider your audience, your product—what your users will be rallying around and why they would want to become engaged with it and each other, and that you can approach this in a systematic way, a little bit at a time.

It’s a good, step-by-step introduction to getting a social experience up and running. There is a lot more than this to driving a successful social experience (including seeding it etc) but this covers some of the low level hygiene factors.

The Apparatgeist calls

(contributed by Angus)

The Economist examines global cultural differences in the use and understanding of mobile phones and asks whether these differences will disappear as the innate qualities of the technology (the “apparageist” or “spirit of the machine”) becomes apparent. Reminds me of a Marshall Mcluhan line “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

How you use your mobile phone has long reflected where you live. But the spirit of the machines may be wiping away cultural differences

Technologies tend to be global, both by nature and by name. Say “television”, “computer” or “internet” anywhere and chances are you will be understood. But hand-held phones? For this ubiquitous technology, mankind suffers from a Tower of Babel syndrome. Under millions of Christmas trees North and South Americans have been unwrapping cell phones or celulares. Yet to Britons and Spaniards they are mobiles or móviles. Germans and Finns refer to them as Handys and kännykät, respectively, because they fit in your hand. The Chinese, too, make calls on a sho ji, or “hand machine”. And in Japan the term of art is keitai, which roughly means “something you can carry with you”.

Crash course on the history of Interaction Design

(contributed by Angus)

Karen McGrane posts four sets of slides from her course on Interaction Design History…

Practitioners in other design disciplines—architecture, graphic design, fashion—would be expected to have some grounding in historical movements and trends. But most people have no formal education in interaction design, and so they’ve never learned the roots of the discipline.

The third set (Week 3) in particular is full of great quotes and images I hadn’t seen before. As she says in the preface of the post it’s important for people doing interaction design today to have some understanding of the history of the field.

Iteration in the animation process at Pixar

(contributed by Angus)

A great quote about the importance of frequent reviews of creative work as it progresses from Pixar president Ed Catmull, speaking at Stanford’s business school:

In the process of mak­ing the film, we reviewed the mate­r­ial every day. Now, this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. […]

Sup­pose you come in, and you’ve got to put together ani­ma­tion or draw­ings and show it to a famous, world-class ani­ma­tor. Well, you don’t want to show some­thing which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right.

The trick is actu­ally to stop that behav­ior. We show it every day—when it’s incom­plete. If every­body does it, every day, then you get over the embar­rass­ment. And when you get over the embar­rass­ment, you’re more creative.

It’s not obvi­ous to peo­ple, but start­ing down that path helped every­thing that we did. Show it in its incom­plete form. There’s another advan­tage to that. When you’re done… you’re done.

According to Ed while showing incomplete work is scary and potentially embarrassing it has two very important benefits, it results in better “more creative” work and it means that when the animator/designer thinks they’re finished they really are finished as stakeholders have participated in the process.

Watch the video

Lorum Ipsum is Killing your designs / In defence of Lorum Ipsum

(contributed by Angus)

Two lengthy posts for and against the use of Lorum Ipsum in wireframes and mockups. Personally I side with Karen McGrane as she argues that Lorum Ipsum is not the problem but a symptom of the problem:

The real problem is an overall process that treats design and content as separate tracks without appropriate communication, collaboration, and checkpoints along the way.

Sketch templates

(contributed by Angus)

Ivana Jurčić shares A Collection of Printable Sketch Templates and Sketch Books for Wireframing and Todd Warfel has made available his templates used for his “rapid sketching and peer review/critique” process.

Control Panels!

(contributed by Angus)

Thousands and thousands of beautiful dials and banks of red lights on Flickr – Interaction designer porn?

Welcome to 2010! This is our first first weekly blog post for the new year, hopefully to be followed by many more, as well as individual posts by USiT team members. Stay tuned, and please send any feedback to blog[at]usit.com.au

Beyond just demographics

(contributed by Pat)

John Williams gives a good example of why we need to look beyond demographics…

This [...] highlights what researchers refer to as psychographics - emotions, beliefs, attitudes that explore why people do what they do. It adds an important dimension, giving you much deeper insight into consumer motivation - it helps you understand what makes shoppers open their wallets…

A nice overview that you should show clients who fail to look deeper than age, sex and income to see the real people they are describing with market segmentation. Hat tip to the Next Gen Market Research group on LinkedIn for this and lots of other useful research tidbits.

Physiological responses in user research

(contributed by Pat)

A new report from One to One Interactive on user generated content (video and flash animation) gives a good glimpse of the more sophisticated research methods being employed across market research and user research today.

Some of the findings in the report are quite interesting (such as “57% of Internet video viewers intentionally watch Internet videos to change their current emotional state” and “Supporting viewers in the creation of the right expectations for your digital media may be more important than simply getting them to watch your material”) but it is the approach used to study engagement with UGC media that is most intriguing…

While watching their media, participants were connected to OTOinsight’s Quantemo™ neuromarketing research system. Quantemo™ simultaneously records multiple biophysical signals (breath rate, galvanic skin response, heart rate, body temperature) in addition to eye and click tracking information. After recording the biophysical measures, Quantemo™ combines the measures into a single representative measure of physiological engagement. The Quantemo™ Physiological Index or QPI serves as a single point of reference of the overall level of physical engagement (or disengagement) exhibited by a research participant. Positive QPI scores represent stronger physiological engagement while negative QPI scores represent weaker physiological engagement.

A thinly disguised piece of PR for their product it might be, but very interesting nonetheless.

Norman replies to Nussbaum

(contributed by Pat)

There have been many reactions, rebukes and arguments generated by Don Norman’s blog post Technology First, Needs Last (which we mentioned a few weeks ago) but one quite prominent response came from Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week…

Norman tells designers to get over themselves. It is science and technology that drive truly disruptive innovation, not Design’s focus on the needs and wants of people. Ethnographic research, Norman says, can generate small, incremental innovations but the blockbuster game-changing stuff, comes from the lab, not the village or the mall.

Don Norman himself appears in the comments, in an attempt to clarify his position (which I happen to agree with)…

Sorry folks, but I think you miss the point. I too bristled at Norman’s conclusion — and I happen to be Norman. I have long argued that we should seek out the fundamental needs and afterwards build the relevant technologies and products. But as a scientist, I rely upon data, and the data have convinced me that this is simply not the way things happen. I resisted this conclusion for a long time, but the more i examined the evidence, the more I decided that I had no alternative but to embrace this controversial position.

One of the issues at the heart of this debate is ambiguous terminology. For example “design research”, “ethnography”, “design” and “innovation” are some of the most widely misused and abused terms, so much so that many of the (quite often heated) discussions concerning Norman’s post are based on a straightforward misunderstanding. There are many cases of people being “outraged” and disagreeing with Norman, but if you read further it seems they actually agree with him but are reacting to what they think he was saying based on their interpretation of the terminology used.

Value and nostalgia are top consumer trends for 2010

(contributed by Pat)

The folks over at trendwatching.com have given us their predictions for 2010, with consumer-centricity playing a big part:

It is always important to know where consumers are headed, as that is what business is all about - serving changing consumer needs. It is extra-important in 2010 because consumers are insecure and thus any brand that can help them solve their worries, any brand that shows they understand their situation, will be remembered when times are good again.

This is the last weekly links for the year, so the USiT team would like to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Hopefully your 2010 will be as successful and eventful as we expect ours to be!

Market for mobile internet will be huge

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb provides a great summary of a report released by Morgan Stanley that says the mobile internet market will be twice the size of desktop internet…

Perhaps the most remarkable statement in the report is that the Mobile Internet market will be “at least 2x size of Desktop Internet,” which Morgan Stanley bases on analysis comparing Internet users with mobile subscribers.

The report starts out by saying that Apple’s iPhone/iTouch/iTunes ecosystem “may prove to be the fastest ramping and most disruptive technology product / service launch the world has ever seen.” It goes on to state that “a handful of incumbents (like Apple, Google, Amazon.com and Skype) appear especially well positioned for mobile changes.”

This is a very interesting for the UX and media communities, since it means there will be many opportunities for mobile work in the future.
(forwarded by Sophie)

Digital magazine prototype

Bonnier have released a video showing off their concept for how digital magazines might look and work…

The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.

If this is what magazines will be like in the future, it’s very exciting! The production and polish of the video itself is fascinating too; makes for a very convincing and understandable deliverable/marketing tool.
(forwarded by Angus)

You don’t have the power

Seth Godin talks about getting past the old school thinking that you can control users/customers…

You don’t have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they’d have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want, it’s not going to do anything but make you hoarse.

Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.

This is why we must understand what our audience wants and work with that, instead of fabricating an “opportunity” in our own minds and trying—or should that be hoping?—to get people to come and use it.
(forwarded by Pat)

Twitter and the media (2009 wrap-up)

Ross Dawson picks his top blog posts for the year on the topic of Twitter and the media…

1. Twitter on ABC TV - the impact on politics, media and socializing
2. How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors
3. Event review: Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism
4. Twitter and the ever-faster moving news landscape
5. Who will provide the credibility ratings for the journalists of the planet?
6. Twitter’s impact on the news and media cycle

Some really great commentary on ‘new media’ meets ‘old media’.
(forwarded by Pat)

Webnographers

There’s some great stuff to be found over on webnographers.org for anyone interested in virtual ethnography. Here’s their blurb…

Cyberanthropology is but a fetal field, far from defined. This website was developed in the interest of providing a central hub for those interested in ethnography of the internet. Created by and for webnographers, its success in contingent on your participation.

Ethnography is not constrained solely to anthropologists, and indeed the barriers that divide the various social sciences are at once arbitrary and collapsible. Any individual interested in the complex social, cultural, and psychological facets of humans relating with and through the internet is encouraged to join in this nascent community. Webnographers unite!

This is a very interesting area of research, and an area in which our team is expanding with each and every project.
(forwarded by Pat)

The 10 dos and don’ts of website development (that every CEO should know)

Over on the FatDUX blog, Eric Reiss shares his top 10 list for management:

[...] the web has become more important than ever as a means of communicating with customers/clients/membership. But I have yet to meet a CEO who likes website development. It makes business leaders uncomfortable. The web experts speak in a cryptic language – CMS, KM, XML, CSS. The site seems to take forever to build, costs more than expected, and invariably provides less value than the organization had hoped.

No one likes signing a big check without some idea as to what they’re getting. So if you’re a business leader, here are a few basic, non-technical tips that will significantly increase your chances for online success. And they let you do what you do best – lead.

There are some good points in there, and the central point of reminding business leaders to not get caught up in the detail, but rather to be leaders is excellent. These tips were obviously learned and refined over many, many client engagements!
(forwarded by Pat)

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film

Over on Gizmodo, John Herrman discusses Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them…

Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is a different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that a machine is powerful; that a villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers borders on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus

He forgets to mention the “Unix system” from Jurassic Park, possibly the most ridiculous of all of these movie UIs :)
(forwarded by Angus)

Dimensions of design/Against ahistoricity

Adam Greenfield talks about looking beyond the obvious sources of insight and inspiration, including those who have come before us…

Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate transitional spaces between public and fully private that might still usefully inform the design of digital applications and services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is risible (and here I’m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX “community” and the technology industry that supports it).

Even if you don’t like Adam’s writing style, this is a thought provoking piece. Especially interesting was the introductory quote from the book Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers which outlines how design can actually make people do things – as suggested by Jon Kolko and argued against in the recent Sydney UX book club.
(forwarded by Angus)

Walt Disney’s Creative Organization Chart

Delphine Hirasuna writes about the typically unique way in which Disney went about things, in this case the humble org chart…

The Disney org chart, on the other hand, is based on process, from the story idea through direction to the final release of the film. All of the staff positions are in the service of supporting this work flow. Perhaps the question now is what should the org chart of the future look like, given the global workforce, telecommuting personnel, virtual employees, outsourced jobs and contract workers who sometimes outnumber salaried staff? In an idea-based, rather than a manufacturing-based, economy, how should a business organize itself?

(forwarded by Angus)

Content Strategist as Digital Curator

On A List Apart, Erin Scime examines the role of curator in digital media…

When a site launches, your audience arrives to learn more about what you know most about. It’s critical to create a content experience with purpose, that is consistent and contextual. This helps to assert your brand’s authority, establishes relationships with your audience, and secures a return visit based on your content’s value. The content strategist-as-curator is the one who makes this happen. How?

(forwarded by Angus)

Landline phone numbers in electronic forms

Jess Enders shares the results of her research on how to best format phone numbers…

The research findings: one long string is the clear winner. Like the mobile phone numbers, one long string of digits—including area code—was the most common method of data entry: out of 640 landline phone numbers provided by interested research participants, 39% were entered as one long string of 10 digits (i.e. no spaces and no chunking).

(forwarded by Angus)

4 Out of 5 Viewers Leave If a Stream Buffers Once

Janko Roettgers reveals some interesting video-related user behaviour…

More than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by Tubemogul. The Emeryville-based video distribution and analytics startup took a close look at 192 million video streams over the course of 14 days to figure out how much rebuffers matter. The result: 6.81 percent of all streams rebuffer at some point, and around 2.5 percent rebuffer twice.

(forwarded by Angus)

How UCD and Agile can live together

David Farkas sets out a framework in which UCD and Agile can work together:

Diagrams are pretty, Gantt charts set expectations, but reality is far from perfect. At the end of the day, a project manager must own the project and there must be some sense of reporting. Depending on the project manager’s background and personal goals there will tend to be a focus towards the needs of UCD or Agile… Finally, friction exists from misaligned expectations from UCD practitioners forcing their methods too late in the game or agile practitioners trying to wean out hard requirements before purpose is fully understood.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Huffington Post wants to add paid tweets to its articles. Will advertisers bite?

(or, an alternate headline offered by one commenter, “HuffPo Sells Remaining Fraction of Soul for Ongoing Revenue Stream”?)

In Advertising Age, Nat Ives reports…

The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events.

Marketers haven’t bought in yet, but they seem likely to be intrigued. The biggest question is whether marketers and the Huffington Post can execute the program without marring visitors’ experience reading and interacting with the site.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Should journos have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change job?

And, on the subject of journalists tweeting, Mumbrella asks whether journalists should have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change jobs:

There’s an argument both ways. You could view it in the same way as when a reporter changes newspaper, they’ll take their contacts book with them. I’ve now got business cards and contacts books stretching back 20 years. I’m not sure what use the private phone number for Farnborough ambulance station in the UK would be for me now, but I’ve still got it somewhere.

(forwarded by Sophie)