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Ambient Signifiers — “We can draw parallels between transport networks and their passengers, and websites and their users: both can be complex structures; both have navigable routes and destinations; and both can involve large groups of people using routes with the aid of wayfinding tools.”

UserVue Remote User Experience Research — “UserVue™ (formerly the Astoria Project) is a Web-based service that allows you to remotely connect to, interact with, observe and record users as they navigate an application or Web site.”

The Importance of User Experience – the Poster! — “The point of the poster is to provide a learning piece (currently used by over a dozen universities throughout the world) and inspiration to design and development teams. Having this type of collateral on your wall might cause someone to actually pay closer attention to your efforts ;-)”

Whole lotta IA survey results now available — “For the new edition of the polar bear book (almost done!), Peter Morville and I conducted five surveys of the information architecture community. All of the results are now available via the IA Institute web site…”

6 Ways to Fix a Confused Information Architecture — “When your website’s users consistently go to the wrong sections, you have many options for getting users back on track, from better labels to clearer structure.” (Interesting URL.)

Meredith Farkas’ Wiki Presentation at ALA — “wikis are not a one-size fits all solution” (Slapped together but still a useful reference.)

True Web Usability – Principles Over Laws — “If a Web site is usable from your perspective, it doesn’t mean that it’s usable by others. It is common for designers of Web sites or interfaces to think that if they themselves find it easy to understand then so will everyone else. Herein lays the danger. Assuming good usability leads to complacency in the design process.”

Logic Versus Usage: The Case for Activity-Centered Design — “Activity-centered design organizes according to usage: traditional human-centered design organizes according to topic, in isolation, outside the context of real, everyday use. Both are needed.”

Website Usability – You Can’t Get There From Here — “Usability can encompass many different facets. How easy is it to navigate through the website? Are search engine crawlers able to successfully find and index site pages? What paths do you want customers to take through the site? How up-to-date is content?”

Before search, Government agencies should look at usability – “So, before any organization, including a government agency, can help users via a web site, there must be a strong understanding of how users will interact with that site, and that seems to be the area in which many government agencies are lacking the most.”

Redesign of the Google Base homepage – “In our usability studies, we noticed that providers new to bulk uploading would often see the link “Post an item” and click it immediately. They often wouldn’t notice the smaller link that said “Post multiple items with a bulk upload file”. Our testers would end up in the one-at-a-time posting process, and they definitely did not like the idea of trying to add hundreds or thousands of items to Google Base by hand! With the new design, all of our testers were able to choose an upload technology that is right for their items.”

What term do you use for ‘user experience’? — “There’s a range of vocabulary that can be used to refer to user experience: ‘usability’, ‘interface’, ‘human centered design’, etc. What term we use seems to depend on what sells — within an organization, you use the terms that connect with the values and the understanding of the people you’re working with.”

Improving portal usability — “Remember that less is better and simple is good (think iPod or Legos). So focus less on technology and features, and more on simply “getting the work done.” In particular, portal developers should strive to remove features that may be nice to have, but end up cluttering the interface.”

Real Wireframes Get Real Results — “Usability tests are done to get early feedback on content and functionality decisions from people outside the project team. These participants, unfortunately, are not sure how to respond to a wireframe.”  (Hmm…)

On the Meta-Usability of User Interface Standards — “Concrete product design examples were more influential than the abstract requirements statements. Queried about the usability of the standard, more than half of the participants said that the rules in the standard were difficult to remember. An equal number suggested that providing good programming tools would enhance the value of the standard.”

Upping The Ante: Understanding business & design through casino poker – “When I started to make the connections between the two, it was incredible how much playing poker began to inform my thinking and understanding of both design and business. The people, behaviors, and situations happening at the poker table directly correlate to the processes in business and design, and through this series of articles, I hope to share some of those insights.” (Fun!) 

Who Is Jonathan Ive? — “An in-depth look at the man behind Apple’s design magic”

Favorite Summer Hack — “Answer: a bottle opener in the bottom of the Reef Fanning beach sandal” (Related: Helicopters opening beer bottles.)

A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change — “A lot of the information that newspaper organizations collect is relentlessly structured. It just takes somebody to realize the structure (the easy part), and it just takes somebody to start storing it in a structured format (the hard part).”

User experience podcast – “Tired of reading about user experience? Then you might enjoy listing to Gerry Gaffney’s user experience podcast UXpod.”

I saw a show on the CBS Sunday Morning show today called Cutting Through Advertising Clutter. There were a number of very interesting comments made that’ll share with you in a moment.

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This will be a meandering brain dump of ideas
based on my notes while watching the show
this morning. Please excuse my lack of
proper editing and analysis.

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Nothing surprised me regarding the ways that advertisers are advertising, but I was a bit surprised by some of the attitudes and comments of advertisers. Their frame of mind and frame of reference is quite different than mine.

One advertiser stated that people don’t hate advertising, they hate bad advertising. I suppose this is true. For example, I think the Google ads on WebWord are useful and valid, otherwise I certainly would not run them. I feel that they are actually content that WebWord readers enjoy, but perhaps I’m wrong. Tell me if it bothers you.

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Is Google Advertising Evil?

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According to CBS, in the 1970’s the average person saw about 500 advertisements per day. And in the Golden Age of Television, the big three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) could reach 70 percent of the viewing audience. That means you. Now people are bombed with about 5,000 advertisements per day. That’s quite a leap.

What we’re seeing is ad creep, where advertisements bleed into more and more environments. More advertisements are being placed in places that were once taboo. For example, there are now urinal cakes that talk to men when urine hits them.

We’re already seeing this advertising assault is being ignored by people. We’re seeing banner blindness in the real world. To break through, advertisers feel that they need to be bigger, louder, and more invasive. It is an arms race. The more they bombard people, the more people ignore, so the more they bombard.

Advertisers wish to cut through the clutter but not alienate the audience they are trying to reach. Advertisers work inside an old school paradigm where they compete with other advertisers for our time. They think push. Push, push, push.

To this end, a couple of the analysts on the CBS show stated that to win, advertisers needed to be outrageous. They needed extreme creativity. This war is a war for attention, which translates to action in the form of spending. Advertisers wish to influence people so that they in turn spend their money.

But is this advertising paradigm the right paradigm? Do advertisers need to rethink their approach in light of the new media available? Do they need to look at the power shift from big companies to end users and consumers.

Of course.

Advertisers need to think about providing value beyond entertainment and push of information. They need to think about user control and the ways that users want to pull what they want to pull, when they want to pull it.

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Below you’ll see that I point to a couple
of my own web sites. I just wanted to
be very open about that. I’m not trying
to fool or trick anyone.  These sites are
just good examples for me to use.  :-)

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I’ll provide an example. I could spend money on advertising Pet Comfort Products, which is one of my side ventures, on Google or Overture. Instead, I spend nearly all my time and energy on writing articles and updating the site. Google picks up the content and exposes it to users when they search for free. And, this kind of “advertising” is free month after month. Instead of pushing advertising and my message, I create value, expose it, and let users find it.

I’ll dive on this a little deeper. I spend a lot of time looking at search terms the users use to find Pet Comfort Products. In light of this, I’ve written several articles that would have never crossed my mind. I’m looking at the demand from users and I try to offer up what they want versus trying to force anything on them. Here are some examples of articles that are driven by user demand:

• 10 Ways to Dress Up Your Dog With Pet Clothing
• 20 Reasons Why Dogs Eat Poop
• How to Give Your Pet a Pill: 15 Outstanding Tips
• Dog Tongue Sticking Out and Other Mysteries Explained

My point is that these articles didn’t just pop in my head. Also, I didn’t go out of my way to advertise them in any traditional way. I simply looked at my search logs and I took some questions from readers. The results come in the form of interesting and valuable articles that will pull in people for months, if not years. (Old WebWord articles still pull in many thousands reader per year.)

I’ve been building another similar “experimental” site with some colleagues called Stretch Mark Remedy. We do not plan on doing any advertising on this laser focused web site whatsoever. Instead, we’ve told people about the site, we’ve offered up free advice in discussion forums, and we’re writing valuable articles. We’ve also focused on a very narrow topic so that we can dive deeply for our readers. Let me restate: We’re not doing any traditional advertising for Stretch Mark Remedy. We’re not spending any money to push a message to people. It’s all word of mouth and organic.

Now, I admit that I’m discussing both Pet Comfort Products and Stretch Mark Remedy here, which seems like advertising. But, it’s really more a matter of marketing. I’m doing my best in this post to some valuable advice. My web sites are valuable examples. They demonstrate how it is done.

Some folks will see that I’m not doing advertising at all. Instead, I’m doing marketing. That’s the key. (Yes, there is a difference between advertising and marketing.) You pay for advertising and you push a message.  With marketing, you use a variety of tools to bring people and resources together for a common goal, and to make exchanges.

The message is that you want to generate value and help people. On the web, I very strongly feel that creating excellent content is the key. That will generate traffic. The search engines will love you and people will love you. Everyone wins without spending money pushing a message or attempting to cut through any clutter. Competition with advertisers is a moot point. I say, let them fight it out because people are going to continue to get better and better at being blind to the assault.

Let’s wrap it up. At the end of the CBS show, there was an interesting factoid:

Proctor and Gamble spends 4.61 billion per year on advertising.

What would happen if P&G spent just 10% of that generating excellent content and helping people? I would bet that it would be more valuable than advertising, but maybe I’m just one silly guy with several high traffic, high value web sites.

DDF.UPA China warmly invites you to User Friendly 2006 for 3 days, bringing together usability practitioners, designers and technologists from across China and internationally.

Date: 3-5 Nov 2006
Venue: Dragon Hotel, Hangzhou.
Language: English with Chinese translation

Related:

User Friendly 2004 – Beijing
User Friendly 2005 – Shanghai

I’m not going to Go Pink for October but maybe you should. Why am I not going pink? Well, I have enough trouble just keeping WebWord running on a good day. If I try to make changes, it would certainly be total chaos.

I’ve been tossing an idea around in my head for several weeks now. It goes like this.

Supposedly, virtually all technological innovation is driven by porn. Well, not exactly. All exploitation of technology is usually done first by pornographers. They make money if they can more efficiently sell sex. The conclusion is simple for businesses. If you want to know the future of technology adoption and exploitation, watch pornography. Um, I mean watch the pornographers using technology.

Here are some references if you care to research the points above:

• Pornography and Technology
• Pornography Drives Technology
• Cellphone technology rings in pornography in USA
• Is Pornography Driving Technology?
• Forbidden Science

So, does it make sense to look at how pornographers are using technology to understand reputation management?

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If you’re stuck on the concept of reputation management and why it’s important, check out a previous WebWord post: Poor Man’s Reputation Management  Back to the show…!

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I think that there is a better place to look than pornography for answers about the future of reputation management. In particular, I think that day traders have a better sense of reputation management than anyone. As an added bonus, their focus is on making money. So, if you’re a business and you care about your reputation as well as your bottom line, it might be time to look at how day traders stay on top of companies.

Let’s dig…

Here’s a great list of things that day traders look at:

• Quote
• Tape
• Level II
• Charts
• Spoos
• Listen Only Squawk
• Bonds
• Currencies
• Sectors
• News
• Message Boards
• Chat Rooms
• Newspaper
• TV
• Fundamentals

Obviously, not all of these things are worthy of your attention. They are too broad and they just don’t relate to your company’s reputation. Instead, look at the intent of these things. Day traders look at what is going on with the finances of companies, but also the entire market, message boards, chat rooms, news lists, and more.

Many of the things I mentioned above are a bit old skool. There is a new wave of day traders doing something a bit more sophisticated. They are looking at blogs, and they’re sifting through podcasts and blog comments. Furthermore, they’re spending time managing their day trading information with tools like del.icio.us and Furl. Of course, while they are there in these social zones, they’re digging into what others are keeping track of and posting.

To paint this another way, some of the more sophisticated day traders are moving beyond old media and traditional financial indicators. They even moving away from more established online information streams. They’re getting hip on Web 2.0 and the social networking found at places like eBay, Digg and MySpace. They’re reading TechCrunch and they’re spending time at YouTube and Yahoo Answers.

Not for fun, but for profit.

Taking this a bit further, if we look at how day traders use technology, we can start thinking about how to manage reputations. We can think about these tools being used to manage personal reputations as well as business reputations.

I’ve already heard about HR staff poking around Facebook and MySpace, making sure they are not going to hire an idiot. This is old news to many folks. Reputation management in this case isn’t just for the person who wants to get hired, but for the company doing the hiring.

Another point lost is that the actual HR recruiter is being forced to look at other how other people manage their reputations so that they don’t get burned. Imagine how some HR recruiter bosses might scold HR recruiters about hiring some idiot, when that idiot “obviously” posted insane and inflamatory material.

Let me turn this another way. We’re moving into a new way of life, where reputations are impacting reputations. This is a second derivative impact on us. That is, I have to worry about how your reputation impacts my reptuation. Online. All the time.

See now why reputation management is so critical? See also why reputation management will be big business, right on the back of security and privacy management of course.

If you don’t learn how to manage your reputation and if you don’t learn how to monitor the reputations of others, you could be in big trouble. Personally and professionally. Learn from the day traders. Learn how they stay on top of what is important.

“A new browser study revealed a shift in how we interact with the Web. University of Hamburg researchers found the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen. The authors recommend that web developers create concise, flexible, and fast loading web pages to keep pace with the speed of web navigation.”

The web is getting richer and more robust. More activity can and will take place inside the browser window versus with the browser itself. For example, users are much less likely to use the browser Back button to navigate.

This article also challenges the idea that you have a full screen as a design canvas. Although you might design for 640×480 or 1024×768, many users simply don’t use their browsers in full screen mode. Users also have toolbars in the way, consuming space all of the time. Thus, you always lose real estate. Designing for a certain resolution is a bad idea unless you decrease that amount by about 15%. Users will use the screen space exactly as they see fit. Fight that and you’ll always lose.

Also, it seems that slow connections are still a problem. More jazzy cool stuff is being pumped through slow pipes. Obviously this must be a frustration for many users.

Highly recommended: Web Navigation Study: A Clickstream Analysis

“If we feel for the people we design for—we will do what is in their best interest.  And that is being a compassionate designer.”

Get out of the office, Talk to people, Be curious, Do what they do…

“As the amount of content and diversity of applications available over the Web grows exponentially, unyielding progress for most is a new roadblock for others. A growing number of Canadians with vision impairments, counting over one million, are being left behind, as the next-generation Web takes flight.”

Is accessibility for vision-impaired web users getting worse?

“Paper will always be a better “solution” for some people. It’s flexible, familiar, and portable. So treat the paper as another part of the user experience, design for it, and make it as usable as your electronic equivalent. You’ll never win everyone over.”

Find out why your online form isn’t getting used…

“The results show that participants found more usability problems and made more suggestions to an interviewer who was a member of the same (Indian) culture than to the foreign (Anglo-American) interviewer. The results of the study empirically establish that culture significantly affects the efficacy of structured interviews during international user testing. The implications of this work for usability engineering are discussed.”

Lesson: Birds of a feather flock together?

Journal of Usability Studies, Issue 4, Volume 1, August 2006, pp. 156-170