A title as loaded as Usability is Dead needs some sort of explanation that a presentation can’t really convey.

KForum – a Danish site serving all those involved in communication, gave me an opportunity and asked for a write up. You can read it here (in English).Hopefully the article goes some way in describing how as a UX community we need to start collaborating more and moving away from formulaic thinking. Creativity is back in  a big way, fuelled by context and relevance…

On Wednesday (17 June), I attended the SIGCHI Interaction Design Day at Copenhagen’s ITU. It’s an impressive building and apt to host an event about technology and our interaction with it.

I also did a talk about Usability and user centred design and how user experience is always key in what we make.

You can see the presentation on SlideShare here and I will be writing an article about it published next week. I have placed the notes here

The human brain is complex but this book manages to break it down into parts that we can relate to and is a very accessible and quick book to read.

The author, Dr Susan Weinschenk, tells of us having three brains in one. Which certainly explains why it is so necessary to embark on research – with three brains how can we ever second guess our users? She lays out how this complex system works but also states that the unconscious mind makes many of the decisions in our lives. By influencing the unconscious mind though design techniques, we can effectively persuade users to interact with our sites and become more engaged.

The book is not really a practical, by the numbers guide, but more about the concepts of why users do the things they do. As such its worth buying and an enjoyable read that gives us insights that are backed up with actual contemporary research.

Verdict:  This book may well do for persuasive design techniques what Steve Krug’s Don’t make me Think did for usability. If you are involved in user experience I recommend reading this book.

Last month, at The Next Web 2009, Chris Sacca – investor in Twitter, was interviewed on stage and also chaired a panel about the Twitter ecosystem. The following post is a combination of his comments.

Chris Sacca – Picture courtesy of Anne Helmond 

Before being a major investor in Twitter, Sacca worked  for Google, where he ran the the alternative access division, whose ambitious aim was to get everybody connected to the internet. They mostly focused on user experience and solving user problems. 

Google – a company misunderstood
He describes his proudest moment of that time, was to help people understand Google. He describes Google as a place of radical socialism with employees who want to change the world and where money is not a driver.

He said that often Google does not want to be a dominant player, they would  rather be a catalyst to change an area, to allow users to choose a decent space for themselves.

It is a socialist viewpoint, (however capitalist it may seem) and if the consumer doesn’t have a choice we all suffer. He iterated that it is an open and honest view. It allows any user direct interaction without intermediaries.

Startups still excite
Sacca feels that Google’s monopoly of search doesn’t harm the consumer, or the quality of results. Users choose which is best.

In the same spirit, if you start a company and do not use your own product and are not passionate it will undoubtedly fail.

Food and rent is the biggest expense for  a new company. Product guys are the helpful ones. Companies are not built on business plans. They are built on prototypes. Hacked together.

Simple and accessible
Sacca strongly asserted that Twitter is a cultural and not a technological revolution. The product itself is not a complex solution. It has 140 characters as its USP. With both Blogger and Twitter it is  simplicity that is at its core. There is no training there. It is accessible immediately.

[Twitter] will be surpassed if it doesn’t evolve or listen to it’s users. Public conversations are very engaging, but it must enable interactions, must allow imagination.

Users distinguish success from failure, that is the real differentiator. He feel’s Twitter’s 600 million users are all in on something. It is hyper transparent, loose, flat – where all are equal.

He strongly believes that Twitter is becoming real time search. Where it is all about recency and relevancy, it is the engagement platform where conversations happen. That is why it is important, they are public conversations.

He then referred to the Obama campaign, in which he played a major part and the power of the Twitter platform to enable voters to speak directly with the president within four clicks. There were questions about everything, with no filtering and a chat about the country’s status in front of everybody.

The Twitter growth spurt
He predicts that Twitter, though big, will be bigger because it grows faster than a virus, it just keeps growing, maybe more than anything else. When it is simple we underestimate the elegance of it. It is an empowering and immediate communication channel.

Sacca and the panelists firmly believe that Twitter will make money – it is the finger on the pulse, the way of measuring and interacting with the largest opt-in communities in the world.

It is a platform where business can be built on top of it. He feels generally reporting of events is not good, and so Twitter is becoming the quality filter in this area.

Rules of Tweet
Sacca put up his own rules for the Twitter nation. He said that we need to be aware that we are stealing time from users every time we post.

Be aware of providing value, do not write rubbish, do not dilute your personal ‘brand’, treat each other with respect and don’t align yourself with personalities for the sake of celebrity.

He said it is the largest audience you will ever communicate with. It makes you a better and happier person. Its positivity is based on how strangers default to positive interaction with each other.

By setting internal values then publishing externally, the followers are making the Twitterers accountable people. It helps to keep them honest and helps them to achieve their highest ideals.

What’s the big deal?
Hearing Chris Sacca, it was evident that his enthusiasm and belief in Twitter was always going to be a bit of a Twitter love-fest.

However, there is no denying the importance of Twitter. For me, it initially had a huge so-what factor, so simple, so clunky, so basic, so who cares?

But if you look at the deeper underlying importance of a platform that allows people to converse across time zones and locations and to exchange relevant and interesting material in a simple, no-frills interface then it is important.

Tie in metadata, real time search, the ability to see what like-minds think about and see as useful, and it becomes something really important. It is timely, powerfully instant, but most importantly contextually relevant. There is a question about scalability but it represents the cultural change in usage that both Jarvis and Keen talked about.

It could be the product that signifies the tipping point from the organization to the user. The user is becoming more vocal, more organized and has real influence. The accepted rules of engagement on the web are changing because tools such as Twitter allow an immediacy and relevance that only human connections can supply.

We know the engagement metric is so important, but it is the conversation that actually tells you the feelings of a product, person or place. For this reason alone, Twitter is providing the means of conversation, which in turn gives us the meaning behind audience engagement. Now that is a big deal.

After Jeff Jarvis had his take on Google we had somebody from the inside – Bradley Horowitz.

Bradley Horowitz at The Next Web 09 courtesy of DailyM

Horowitz was the man who advised Yahoo to buy Flickr and after redefining his role there he made them acquire Delicious. Previously he had formed Virage (video categorization engine) and sold it to Autonomy after dropping out of his degree at MIT Medialab where he worked on image categorisation technologies.

It was no wonder with his background that metadata, context and categorisation formed an underlying theme to this talk. It was good to see these foundational elements of online user experience given the focus they deserve.

Moore’s law and the aim of Google
He stated that Google’s main perspective on technology was thinking big as a means of innovation. With this philosophy they have changed the world as we know it and their impact is massive. As silicon valley realised Moore’s law to be true, Google imagined a world where bandwidth, size and storage was not a problem. In doing so they created  applications such as GMail.

Google’s aim is to provide excellent search to enable users to store and find everything. It is to solve one of the world’s biggest problems -that of information overload, its loss and its retrieval.

Ubicomp is here
He told of everyday devices that have achieved ubiquity – that can now record your entire life digitally. Ubiquity is here.  The mobile phone is everywhere.

The problem as he saw it was that you can record everything but you don’t get another life to review it all. The challenge is harvesting metadata and defining context to give meaning to what we do.

So how do you use the information to a useful end? Horowitz (and Google) knows that the big problem is that we are dying from the start. Moments evaporate from the start. This fact drives Google to be fast. Latency is a key focus because time is of the essence. By being fast they give back the time to the world by speed of its services. 

Be aware of our human condition
He told of, meditation, sleep, walking the dog that gives him perspective. A very pertinent point was that technology needs to adapt and enhance the human life. He asked how do we solve attention management? The moments of life that need revisiting amongst the morass of spam and junk we all wade through.

A key observation was that metadata is as important as the data itself. Even from biosignals. He stated that Wetware (using people’s minds and bodies as systems) will be as important as software or hardware.

Audience at The Next Web 09 courtesy of DailyM

Image understanding is an amazingly complex process if you expect to use machines to do this. Using humans enables it to be easy to create understanding around cognition of imagery. People can do this easily to give meaning to images and Flickr shows that by a simple means to ensure that the people can tag easily.

Though I appreciate his statement I feel we have along way to go before the wisdom of crowds can be used effectively here.

He stressed that a few dedicated curators can create value for the majority. Indeed, the collective intelligence and interestingness creates a relevance metric that goes beyond just page rank algorythmns.  We see this in blogs, twitter streams and facebook communities but the curators still control the quality. That is  an important point I feel, and one that Google obviously realises.

Then he briefly showed a mental model that reflected the Google approach to data, starting at signal and working upwards.

• enlightenment
• wisdom
• knowledge
• information
• data
• signal

From a signal you may reach the pathway to enlightenment I guess, but it certainly has a clarity to it that is admirable.

The web is broken
What we did get from this talk was a refreshing personal perspective on the world of technology and how it affects us. He iterated that the conference had talked a lot about the current web, Twitter and real time search but he urged us to think about the real future.

In closing Horowitz stated how the browser is a bad model. It is not the optimal system to deliver the next web, the model is terribly broken, latency, code storage and caching are all frailties that have consumed countless lifetimes of development time.

He asked us to think about the ‘what if’ scenarios, take the long view and where the world is trending. Solving the problems that we expect to have tomorrow.

Create space in life
In many ways when somebody talks from Google you know they will not divulge what they do exactly, or certainly not their next step. They, like other successful companies, keep their products shrouded in mystery (ironic in this culture of open source and collaborative working don’t you think?).

With a slight nod to those who were wanting to know the next move he stated  it will be Google Voice. A way of leveraging voicemail into the digital life and Gmail.

Closing the circle completely, he asked ‘how much do you want to invite tech into your life?’. He reminded us to create space in our lives.

That coming from Google was a surprise – or was it really? Their aim after all, is to make our lives easier to manage in the information age. Surely that can only be a good thing.

Aside from speakers, The Next Web also showcased 19 startups  from an initial list of 200 (though only 18 showed up due to a patent issue). Sun Microsystems sponsored the competition with the eventual winner being presented with a cheque from Netlog.

Out of this list a few caught my eye as I felt they definitely offer something new, or needed, online. TechCrunch were on the judging panel and it was they reminded the startups that they wanted to see the business case on each presentation. It was not enough to purely have a good idea, it needed to be monetised and be an attractive investment opportunity, and they had to get the message across in 5 minutes.

Left to right – the judging panel; Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com), Robin Wauters (editor TechCrunch) and Stewart Townsend (manager of startups, Sun Microsystems) photo courtesy of Anne Helmond

I think the five companies listed below have something going for them, not only in what they do but what they represent.

Citisins
Taking the basic premise that guide books offer too much general info and that people do not want to feel like tourists. This product allows a user to create a bespoke guide book and share their own guide with others filled with the best, recommended content.

There is also a mobile version that sits alongside the website. The printed book is bought from the site and delivered to the door. Each destination covered has dedicated editors that verify the collated content about the place – unlike other services.

It is a really simple idea of getting the wisdom of crowds made into something highly bespoke and useful. Beta out this summer.

CoTweet
Billed as ‘How Business Does Twitter’ its a management tool for tweets that allows you to search and monitor Twitter for keywords, brand mentions and run campaigns within the Twitter sphere.

Value of this derives from the value that businesses find in monitoring the noise around brand terms. I have blogged previously about the importance of audience engagement and tools such as this will help the online marketer as they need ways of monitoring noise around their products.

Huddle

Huddle addresses the eternal question – why is it so hard to work together? It allows management of projects, and is billed as a useful SharePoint. It has simple workflows, wikis, discussion boards and online meetings. In many ways it builds on programs such as Basecamp and combines it with social networking tools, making it a unified collaborative solution.

Collaboration is still a key sticking point in many companies, from file sharing and storage to meetings and work allocation. With an online open system there is an immediate way for people to start collaborating with the minimum of fuss. This is an attractive proposition for many companies who can not afford or want to be tied to SLAs and expensive license fees.

Prezi
A new look at PowerPoint tools but is in fact a completely different animal because of its presentation style. 

This product has a large workspace that is not confined by a slide dimension or a linear slide show. It is the closest application I have seen that reflects mind mapping, not only in the output but the creative way of compiling a presentation. Has zoom, slide and panning reminiscent of Sea Dragon type of application and even works on a Wii.

This way of visualising information improves memory in the audience and lends itself to a more attractive, less text heavy experience. It would also be a brilliant tool in conveying concept models to clients because of the way it builds relationships through a narrative. Really impressive.

Quick.tv
Allows publishers to add interactivity to their videos easily. This includes forms, chapterisation of content, RSS on video and voting. Should have been done some time ago but its good to see its out there now.

Without huge costs to an enterprise, this seems to be a cost effective solution with an easy to use drag and drop interface. Video should no longer be a linear experience online, the old way of consuming media will give way to a more interactive model – its been a long time coming.

E
Finally the winner and the only reason I have included it here. In my opinion I feel that it very closely mirrors Zyb (acquired last year by Vodafone).

The difference here is that E has a USB hardware piece of kit that allows users to touch to exchange details. It has a neat use of RFID technology and is an obvious application of the Open ID philosophy.

They say that E is about bridging the gap between the physical and virtual world but I am not convinced. Slick presentation, nice site and product design and a partisan crowd all helped their case but I was left feeling I had seen it all before…

The Now Web
Seeing the startups was a great reality check against some of the ivory towers being talked about in other presentations. The hard reality is that these products and services need to make money. That means they must cater for the majority (or be so tantalising that they get snapped up by a company investor).

You can’t help but feel that this fact kills a part of innovation and creativity by the time they get to launch. What we saw on stage were viable and interesting businesses, but you wonder if Twitter is really the biggest revelation we will get from the internet in 2009?

Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?)  and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) painted opposing views of the techno-cultural landscape.

Keen actually regarded Jarvis as a ‘cheerleader’ for Google although Jarvis himself said he used the company as an example for changes in the real world.

Jeff Jarvis (left) and Andrew Keen courtesy of Ann Helmond

Regardless of this, both agree that we are in a period of massive cultural change. Punctuated by the failing economy, the behaviour of banking institutions, the demise of the auto industry and business models that can no longer be sustained as the world moves beyond Web 2.0.

The perpetual beta
Jarvis comments that Google sees products in perpetual beta and continual evolution. That your worst customer should be your best friend, your best customer, your partner.

He sees that we are in more than a financial crisis, a depression or a recession, it is a compression – where perceived value is equal to real value.

Google has shown how being honest and transparent and collaborating with your community has created success. Above all they make sure they don’t get in the way of what people want to do. Google doesn’t know how its products will be used so they make sure they are not obstructive. Thus, Jarvis states it has become the measure of success in business.

From institution to individual – the person is the product 
Keen sees this time as a ‘profound shift in society’ that it is a critical moment in history. He feels there is a shift in power from the institution to the individual.

This is where Keen differs from Jarvis, though agreeing that the world of Google is the way things are changing, in his view the new age is where the person is the product. Of the individual and the empowered. He argues we are ambivalent to technology as a concept as we do not know where it goes.

That statement certainly framed the conference well. The conference’s focus seemed to fall into four areas;

1. representing the culture of our times
2. the current state of technology represented in new business (start ups)
3. current trends (Twitter)
4. future technologies (gestural interfaces and Ubicomp).

Twitter killed 2.0
Keen’s main concern is that all this change will not bring success but create a vacuum of quality. He argues that Twitter is the final nail in the 2.0 coffin. It maintains intimacy, relevancy and trust. It is the start of real-time social media.

Jarvis views the room as smart, that the conversation is the most important aspect, and those being engaged around it. The impact of this he says is huge on society and it is hard to determine how it will affect the future. He argues this transparency could result in governments being watched. He predicts newspapers will die, coming back as looser media channels.

Keen feels that this democratisation is a problem, a profound inequality where people become brands. Real time social media is the future and Twitter brings it closer than ever before. He feels that it is both inspiring and frightening. His concern is that change will not be successful. His fear being that the old media will not be replaced by anything credible.

 

‘The web 2.0 models are finished. You Tube does not work, they do not generate revenue. We need to maintain intimacy and relevancy but how? ‘

The challenge of elegant organisation
Keen’s last question is perhaps most pertinent as is Jarvis’ realisation that the conversation amongst smart groups is perhaps the most important part of innovation and one that is impossible to predict the results from.

Twitter certainly represents a change in the digital landscape, an immediacy that has power and lends itself to trend monitoring, real time search and the rapid spread of ideas amongst groups of like minds.

This fire hose of memes will become elegantly organised – and that really is the next web.  Jarvis believes it will be mobile, social, deeply linked and living in the cloud, and who could argue with that?

However stating Web 2.0 as being dead is the wrong statement because who said it was ever versioned? If you take a Google view the web is in perpetual beta, and the evolution will be error strewn and messy.

Remember that most success stories online are actually old ideas that have been redeveloped. Keep making mistakes and we may actually get to where we want to be, as long as we are learning from them.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates gave us Yahoo’s view that they do not believe in black boxes as a way to solve the complexities of search but that its more about what can be learnt from users.

Of course nothing new here   but he gave a holistic view about how Yahoo is addressing the different areas of the conundrum.

He talked about combining content with the user’s intent, the critical part of relevancy. Exploiting the wisdom of crowds and the new experiences based on the tools that have emerged in the last few years.

Their challenge is to be online and scalable (not unlike Twitter’s) and to tie all the loose strands of the web together by offering shortcuts to deep links and enhanced results.

People do not want to search, they just want to get things done

He stated the shift from a web of pages to a web of objects. Those objects being people, places dates and organisations, virtually anything with an identity. There was also an acknowledgement that there will be noise and mistakes but with enough data they will get enough accuracy

As he progressed to talk about taxonomies, folksonomies, machine learning techniques and classification and extraction, the themes of IA kept on appearing. Indeed, user experience was very much at the core of his talk although never explicitly outlined as such.

Its very interesting how in a different arena, UX is considered as a given, and an obvious consideration in the design of effective systems. No fanfare, no podiums, just laid out how it is. Its a sobering reminder of how tribal communities can become and how necessary it is to attend events that give a sense of perspective.

Building out an open ecosystem

He continued talking about an open ecosystem encouraging contribution from the audience. Citing Search Monkey as a good case of a collaborative environment.

He highlighted SearchPad (trend detection around search queries), Correlator (associations around topics) and TagExplorer (browse flickr through user’s tags), prototypes that exhibit Yahoo’s thinking.

A worry for the startups showcased at this event is that many of their ideas are being worked on by the big companies who can throw huge resources behind these projects and now work in smart, agile ways. That’s a big challenge for anybody involved with the semantic web if they are not either Google or Yahoo.

In summary it did show Yahoo’s focus on people. If the future technology highlighted here doesn’t fulfill peoples needs and desires then it is a fruitless pursuit. It was good to see Yahoo’s dedication to the user.

Something of a departure for me is to attend Next Web 2009, in Amsterdam. Its different as it is not explicitly about the world of user experience, but more about technology and its application on the internet.

Hello Group have sent me here to gauge just what is coming up in the world of the web in these really testing times. It will be good to see the new startups touting their wares and to hear from notable technorati and their different points of view.

The second of a seven part post about optimising a site to create a more engaged audience. Here we look at user behaviour and how methods used help ensure you address user needs.

Previously: Success metrics

Photo by Nicholas Nova

I have written before about personas to design experiences around user wants and needs. The problem with personas is that to be truly valuable they require a fair amount  of data. For evidence based design decisions they have a real use and they fall into two types…

Simple Personas

These include decision making styles, content preferences and some segmentation.

Robust Personas

Includes Myers-Briggs-type indicator (seen below), psychographic profiles, market research, competitive analysis and detailed segmentation. Making the simple personas robust involves overlaying extra research in the form of market information, and business intelligence. Acknowledging the types of use behaviour here really helps when analysing the types of user behaviour online. 

Applying the concept on a homepage

What would our four types of user behaviour want from Amazon?

• Spontaneous seek top sellers & new releases, making the purchasse on a whim. Images lead choice here.

• Humanistics care more about reviews or specific items for personal relations (birthdays, gifts to loved ones)

• Methodicals find by genre & categorization, they will be likely to find their product through a specific personal criteria. Navigating and browsing through the list of items.

• Competitives search by what they want or the best deal. Price is a key influence as well as perceived quality.

Relevance creates conversion

Not planning different content for different user types will inevitably leave some people out in the cold. This naturally results in abandonment and high bounce rates.

Of course it is difficult to cater for all types, all of the time, but be aware of trends. Be that in news needs, fashion, public opinion or group feeling. The nature of human behaviour is diverse, if you serve one experience you can not expect to be successful in converting all users. Be aware of the context of their use and their profile.

Photo by psd

Revisit the profiles

It’s important to get a good understanding of the advantages that can be gained by identifying personas, then also going back and analysing the segments of these personas and find new ways to appeal to them.

The best way, as described in the previous post, is to keep the ear to the ground, listening to ‘noise’ around blogs, forums, social networks and bookmarking sites. Using search engines as your listening device is a key trick here, as is the ability to sniff out the genuine revelation about your product.

Frequency

Look at how frequently your visitors visit. Try to persuade them to visit more frequently.  Frequent visitors are more engaged with the site – they are more likely to help you generate content

Look at how long it has been since visitors last visited – there will become a point where they become passive and won’t be persuaded to come back easily.

Brand search term strength

Users who are engaged with your brand will search for it to find you.
Measure how many visits you get from your brand terms that can include marketing slogans, misspellings, even advertisements.

Gauge their emotional responses. Conduct surveys to find out what people think of the site, be that online exit surveys, email surveys, or user interviews. Try and ask real people who know and have an opinion about you site, product or brand.

Ask people who don’t have anything to do with the brand normally – they may be users in the future, and will certainly give you so unbiased feedback.

Photo by boltron

Getting behaviours defined

People’s behaviour is impossible to predict, we are only really  able to take educated guesses. Even best practice will not always give you the best result and so it is again a case of making iterative changes to your site to accommodate (and get in tune with) your users. Open up as many modes of communication that you can deal with and adjust what you deliver accordingly.

When you have cracked it, make a note of it somewhere and then be prepared to rip up the script as your audience moves on once again. As long as you can keep up and strive to stay ahead, then your audience should be retained. But be aware the job is never finished. Keep iterating, keep testing and keep the site alive.