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)

She’s already posted about “Sprint One” in which she outlines her very hectic sounding weekly schedule:
- Day One: Research
- Day Two: Planning, Designing & More Research
- Day Three: Design, and setting up next week’s research

Also interesting is the ongoing investigation into whether content editing should occur via a seperate “traditional ‘Admin System’ interface” or via “entirely ‘in place’ editing”.

The videos are pretty interesting and as always it’s always great to watch how different people evolve their thinking and practice design. Can’t wait for number 3.

I thought I’d post this today because the sketch designs they have come up with for the interactions reminded me about the UX bookclub that’s being held in our offices tonight.

While I tend to take a more symbolic view of the world (semiotics) particularly when doing design research, phenomenology does open up a different way of thinking about interaction design.

I found this article interesting as it spells out problems and solutions for combining UCD and agile project method – that I have had difficulty pinpointing during my project work. I wish my project team would read and understand this stuff.

This article made me realise that as an EA, I need to become skilled in, and get good at conducting fast and quick user tests. Testing could be part of my day-to-day activity, rather than needing it to be a separate task on the project timeline. Requesting project time for user testing will often be rejected, because people are worried it takes too much time.

Nielsen refers to a Tivo case study, where they ran weekly tests, but doesnt give too much detail on how. Nielsen recommends paper prototypes, but I dont think it takes much to whip up some wireframes – then at least they can be sent through to remote testers. The challenges are defining what to test and how to recruit particpants quickly and for free? Participants from our USiT team is a start….?

As for defining what to test, from my experience recently on 3 agile projects, the requirements were so undefined, and evolving, that I would have thought it would be difficult to nail down something to test. Then I read this advice:

“Keep a sense of humor and a good attitude. Have a flexible staff that’s willing to roll with the pace and unknown nature of the work. “You don’t know what you’re going to test next,” says Torres. “It was really taxing on researchers. At times, I didn’t know what we were testing until the night before, and I had to build a prototype and be ready to moderate the next day.”

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weekly-usability-tests.html

So perhaps its not them, its me!?

The new business site design was conceived through a comprehensive understanding of user needs for financial information. Contextual enquiry during the research phase lead by Dennis Nordstrom identified a clear user need for the delivery of a wide breadth and depth of world financial information in an Australian context.

Creating the site structure during the collaborative design session

In content terms the site needed to integrate the full business editorial resources of the national newspaper and in a News Corporation first be underpinned by contextual content/market data from other global properties such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Dow Jones and MarketWatch.

Therefore the mission from a user experience perspective was to successfully convey the huge volume of financial information available in a fashion that did not overwhelm or confuse.

Collaborative design sketch by Dennis Nordstrom & Alun Machin

The final product design concept was based around a simple contextual three column based solution for the vast majority of site sections. Editorial content is primary displayed in the left column, comparative market data/tools are placed in the centre column and supporting analysis, opinion and multimedia in the right hand column.

The final result

The site also introduces a whole new raft of features including:

• A snapshot of the key markets, currencies and commodities around the world at the top of every site page
• New areas focusing on World Business News, Financial Markets, Industry Sectors, Mining & Energy, Media, Opinion, Wealth and Executive Lifestyle
• Expanded editorial coverage and contextual market data for industry sectors such as Property and Aviation
• Interactive company charting showing key events and trading data such as dividend payments, trading volume underpinned with contextual news reports
• Comprehensive background information on all ASX-listed Australian companies plus data on stocks, stock market indices, currencies and commodities
• Suggested company name functionality when searching for stock quote information
• Display of previously searched company stock quotes
• ‘Story behind the story’ in-depth coverage on major issues such as the current global financial crisis

For further information on the new website a comprehensive guide is available to view in PDF format.

If you have any feedback (both positive and negative) or questions concerning the new site please leave a comment.

“Attention” can be thought of as a core product produced by media companies – under advertiser-supported models, media properties attract audiences whose attention is sold to advertisers seeking to reach groups of people. While this is not always the case, the increasing significance of product placement suggests even goods sold directly to audiences are subsidized by the sale of their attention.

This has been something that’s always intrigued me, and follows on a little from my last post. The importance of what we do as an Customer Experience team is to provide frameworks through which our content creators can capture more attention.

I’m wondering how long it will be before we start working more closely with advertisers to merge content with product placement, in more subtle ways than “skinning sites”.

But I personally don’t think we should stop there, how do we, how could we repurpose that content to be useful to other parts of the business? and should we?

How much damage / success could we reap if we generated integrated sales ideas based on our research alongside all of the more “useful” stuff we usually generate?

Is it time for us to stop thinking purely as UCD’s and more like business folk?

I like the idea of having some sort of templating to help define the sketching process. Thoughts?