Video diaries help improve customer service

(contributed by Pat)

On Quirks.com, Joseph Rydholm describes how Insights from video diaries help Midas in its drive for better customer service…

Securing buy-in from influential franchisees was just one of the benefits that Midas researcher Garry Rosenfeldt reaped when he turned to qualitative research to develop a new service model.

It’s a great tale of how using video ethnography can avoid some of the issues with running traditional qualitative research activities such as focus groups. Unfortunately, you need to register (for free) on Quirks to read the article. It is worth it, but just in case you want more of an incentive…

Kitchen ethnography

(contributed by Pat)

Also on Quirks.com, Maren Elwood talks about Ethnography tracks the migration of technology into the American kitchen …

For many Americans, a kitchen is no longer just a place for making meals. The author’s ongoing study has seen it morph into a HIVE, a highly interactive virtual environment that incorporates food preparation along with checking e-mail, surfing the Web and a host of other tech-related activities.

I can’t imagine anything better than jumping in an RV and hitting the road to do research with real people!

Evolution of the BBC Homepage

(contributed by Sophie)

It’s a bit old now, but Jo Wickremasinghe‘s post on the evolution of the BBC homepage is quite interesting:

Last week we launched a new version of the BBC homepage at http://beta.bbc.co.uk. At first you might think the beta homepage seems pretty familiar, with its modular customisable layout. But take a closer look and you’ll notice we’ve made a number of significant improvements.

The main changes are:

• The introduction of a new navigation bar across the top of the page which will eventually be rolled out across the whole site
• New promotional area they have dubbed the ‘media zone’ which showcases a wide range of content in a small screen area
• Focus on ‘finer grained’ personalisation of content – their research suggests users place more value in being able to tune the content of widgets over the ability to remove/add/rearrange the widgets on the page
• Focus on the ‘Now’ with the introduction of several features to give a better sense of what’s happening across the BBC right now: Spotlight module, ‘Just in’ on the iPlayer widget, Topic Tracker providing the ability to keep up to date with over 11000 topics of interest across the BBC

After two months in beta, the new design has been launched, Jo reports.

Robert Andrews gives an external perspective in his post about the choice of horizontal navigation.

The Google Redesign: A Closer Look

(contributed by Sophie)

Whilst on the subject of home page redesigns, Tyler Tate has written a good summary of Google’s search results redesign:

What’s Changed

• The Google logo is about 30% larger.
• There is now a permanent sidebar left of the results that allows filtering by news, blogs, images, etc., as well as time range filters and options for changing how search results are displayed.
• The searchbox is now the full width of the results column, slightly taller, and has a slight drop shadow rather than the previous inner shadow.
• No more top vertical bar. The result count now sits just below the searchbox and is much smaller than before. The filter for searching locally moved from under the searchbox to the sidebar.
• Search results are now 55 pixels higher on the page and have have a higher density overall (there’s slightly less vertical space between results, and indented results have only one third of their previous margin).
• Cached, Similar, Show more, and Related links all changed from a muted purple to a brighter light blue and now only have an underline on hover.
• Pagination is about 30% larger, and there is still a searchbox below the pagination, though the blue background has been removed.
• Related searches are now displayed much more compactly.

And he goes on to explore some of the elements such as the sidebar, related search suggestions and wonder wheel in a bit more detail.

The history of Facebook’s default privacy settings

(contributed by Manuel)

This great infographic shows how Facebook have changed their privacy settings over time. The current state is shown below.

Journalists and metadata

(contributed by Angus)

How do we make sure journalists understand the value of entering and maintaining metadata (so they want to do it)? Perhaps the answer lies in this series of posts by Wired editor Ben Hammersley:
E-Books – The Bigger Problem, Part One of Three
E-Books – The Bigger Problem, Part Two of Three
E-Books – The Bigger Problem, Part Two Point Five of Three
E-Books – The Bigger Problem, Part Two Point Five Point One of Three

He gives the following explanations of the value of metadata. They might sound good to a UX person, but how important would they be to a journalist on deadline?

The necessity above all else of keeping your metadata might seem like a geeky affectation – something that is really only of interest to librarians (itself not a bad reason) or trainspotterish data-completists – but it is in fact the simplest and cheapest route for a publisher to future-proof their business…So why do everything you can to keep metadata intact? Because it’s from this information that new products can be automatically created, at a scale and rapidity that would be impossible otherwise. With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup.

He’s working on a CMS that will somehow ensure/mandate the capture of metadata as the story is created, and also permit easy cross-platform publishing.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Pat suggests I Remember You by Mark Schenk (if only for the quote from Terrence Gargiulo: “A story is the shortest distance between two people”!)
• Melissa suggests Updates to Google search [video] by the guys from Google
• Angus suggests How Google Got Its New Look – The process that led to the redesign of Google’s all-important search results page by Helen Walters
• Angus suggests Information architecture for news websites by Stijn Debrouwere
• Scott suggests 3 tips for getting your stories shared on Facebook by Michele McLellan

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)

Here is an extract from the summary report (PDF 83kB):

Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher and her research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use to date.

They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research finds today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important. The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence.

I don’t think the findings are hugely surprising, but they are very interesting and do support other research that has surfaced in recent years with regard to how “gen Y” use online media to extend friendships and interests and engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

There is some great content on the project website, but there could be better use of multimedia in terms of communicating the findings (there is some video on the McArthur Foundation website though).

[Thanks to Christo who first posted this to the Antrodesign mailing list]

The article is immediately relevant to me because I’ve been working on trying to describe a model of how research we are conducting is stored, updated and gets fed allochthonously through analytics and smaller bits of research from around the business.