Designing the viral app w/Christina Wodtke
Posted on February 13, 2009
Filed Under Design, Social Media Marketing, User Experience Design, twitter | Leave a Comment
Christina Wodtke made an excellent presentation at Interaction 09 - Vancouver. Christine is a product manager for Linked In. Our favorite professional networking website. If you would like to hear Christina speak, she is making another appearance in Calgary shortly.
Christina talked about how your product or website in her case ( and ours ) should be to make it effortless to the user. In her words, frictionless. She gave basically some examples in companies have made ONE small change to their service/product that made their product “frictionless”. What that really means is to actually removing any doubts the user has about making a decision on your website.
One example was Youtube. What Youtube did that nobody else was doing was allowed users to embed the videos in their own website of course this was against most of the rules at the time, as you didn’t want people to actually move away from your website. What YouTube did to fix that was display other videos from their website after the inital video. In excellent idea obviously as they are still very successful.
Throughout her talk she told us about some patterns she had been noticing in the websphere.
1. The Asymetric Follow
Following someone like on Twitter is like a cascual handshake. It says, Hey I think you’re cool and I would like to know more about it. Whereas facebook you need to ask someone’s permission to be there friend and they have to approve that they know you. Generally people will follow you if you follow them. It’s a great way to expand your network and your reach ( whether you are a individual or a company).
2. News feeds
Both Facebook and linked in as well as other social media sites are using news feeds to keep users informed and to keep drawing them back to the site. Many sites are designing their services around the newsfeed. As it’s one of their most useful tools to their users. It’s aggregated content.
3. Impactful
Instead of saying impactful she could have used the work relevant. But, I think relevant is overused.. Either way. You want to make sure you users get the most imapctful ( relevant) content easily. Using lists such as mopst emailed, most blogged and most shared - makes that happen. NyTimes does that well.
4. Outreach
Give the users the tools to allow them to share and communicate your message to others in their network.Examples include: sharelets, blog this button, share buttons and the recommend button. NYtimes.com has a nice share feature. Christina did give us a warning about this - she warned to choosse a few relevant sites to share to if not we would overwhelm the users.
5. Targeted
You need to choose who in your user group is the making the most of your service and helping you the most. You as a company need to find out who those users are and make their life easier so they can help you even more. Sounds kinda selfish but it’s life. An example she gave us was Yahoo Groups. They chose the group manager. That’s the person who best keeps the conversation going, has influence and flushes out anyone not wanted. Yahoo decided these users were most important to them. They then spend the time enhancing the user experience for them. To read more about the types of users and how to identify who helps you company the most, visit the Groundswell.
My experience at IXDA Vancouver - Day One & Two
Posted on February 9, 2009
Filed Under Professional Development, Random Thoughts, Usability, User Experience Design | Leave a Comment
This weekend I attended the IXDA conference here in Vancouver. You can read all about IXDA on their website. Or you can read the rest of my post to hear the shortened version. This post includes Day 1 & 2. Day 3 to come soon!
The first day, Friday was basically a half day and included sessions with John Thackara, Jared Spool ( panel session ) and Fiona Raby.
John’s session was all about the problems in the world and how as designers this was an opportunity for us. It was more of a big picture presentation than anything but a great way to open a conference. I thoroughly enjoyed the session as it was eye opening and made you think.
Jared Spool’s session was really a panel of experts in the field. The panel focused mainly on what they are looking for in Interaction designers when they hire them. It was proven informative for prospective interaction designers and entertaining for the rest of us.
Fiona’s talk focused on robots and her work with her students. I didn’t find it very interesting as it was more along the lines of product design and we all know that’s not my background.
The second day started off with Robert Fabricant, an executive creative director at frog design. He started of his talk by addressing the issue of defining : what is interaction design? This topic was brought up on Friday to no avail. No one can really decide what interaction design is or how to explain it Robert, however took a different approach and he pointed out what it’s not.
He stated:
- technology is not our platform - behaviors are what we work with
- interaction design is not a technology ( it encompasses interactions off the computer)
The next session I attended was Dan Willis on Spime Management. Dan Willis is a designer, information architect, usability expert, digital strategist, author and illustrator. Somewhat of a brand whore, he created washingtonpost.com’s first user experience group, was PBS’ first Director of User Experience and spent a decade at various print and online ventures for Tribune Co. As a part of his current gig as a consultant for Sapient, Willis led the development of a hand-held wayfinding prototype for the American Museum of Natural History. Willis has presented at several IA Institute summits and is the creator of UX Crank (http://www.uxcrank.com), a resource for user experience professionals.
He talked about what a spime is, how we can use it today and gave a few examples. One was in Colorado ( maybe not Colorado but some place close) how a ski resort was using spimes. What they were doing was scanning each persons’ ski pass as they got of the ski lift. Once they scanned the pass - they could make sure it was current and were given details on the person. ( Photo, etc..) so they could confirm it was their ski pass.
Shortly after that was the keynote with Dan Saffer. Dan Saffer was an experience design director for Adaptive Path until 2008. Dan has designed and built websites, applications, and devices since 1995. An international speaker and author, his acclaimed book Designing for Interaction has been called “a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs” (Jared Spool, CEO of UIE) and has been translated into several languages. View Dan’s Presentation
Good Usability - Top ten rules from a user’s perspective
Posted on January 26, 2009
Filed Under Usability | Leave a Comment
I have been searching the net for some time looking for some examples of good usability posts and what that means to share with some co-workers. That way it wouldn’t sound like I was making this all up. I was unable to find any suitable to send them and thought - maybe other people are having the same problem?
So I’ve included a list of top ten things I ensure before anything else. In my next post I’ll dig more deeply into each element and how it should work. If your site didn’t meet all my top ten list items, then hold on for next week when I talk about some more of site examples.
Here are my top ten rules of good usability from a user’s perspective
- Site must quickly load - If I can’t see it I won’t like it
- Up-to-date content and news -Your content is stale so must your business.
- Easy to navigate - If I can’t find it I can’t like it
- Keep design simple and consistent across website - I need to know where I am so I’ll remember to buy from you.
- Clearly show contact information - If I don’t know who to contact you - how do I give you my money???
- Provide the same experience across all browsers -If your site breask in my browser - I’ll go to the next website - SIMPLE
- Minimal animation. And always allow users to stop/start it. - How I am suppose to concentrate on your product with all the moving advertisements?
- Use descriptive text for links -Click here tells me nothing I am not convinced…
- Open all PDFS or links to another site in a new window- OH weare goin somewhere else. I’ll close that to get ack to your site.
Please feel free to post comments, questions or links to good/bad examples of usability.
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