Piers Jones

A summary of User Experience in 2009

For those interested in Product Development and User Experience, this is a good summary of how User Experience design has evolved from the Information Architect, Jesse James Garret. 

Its quite a long video and quite heavy on theory but worth the effort if you have half an hour to set aside.

Jesse James Garrett | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Twitterjobsearch

A relatively new job aggregator twitterjobsearch is pulling together all the jobs posted to twitter across the web. In this interview with Robert Scoble, cofounder Willaim Fischer claims that in the past month twitterjobsearch have used natural language search to publish 280k unique job vacancies to their site, making it one of the top five job boards in the world by jobs volume already.

found on cheezehead

Talking to users of your product

It goes without saying that the more people that you talk to that actually use your product, the closer you are going to get to understanding what they need. Then you stand some kind of chance of delivering a product that actually meets those needs. However its very easy to forget to do that as often as you should and get wrapped up in the process of delivering products instead.

In my experience as a Product Manager to date I've found a variety of ways of taking feedback from users in order to improve the quality of what is delivered. There are times when pouring over web stats or undertaking formal usability testing is exactly what is called for. Sometimes though its just good to get out of the office and go and talk to people.

Today I tried out a new and very easy way of gathering product insight by using some software called Silverbackapp. I had know about this software for a while but never actually used it in the wild so to speak.

Its very very simple, you can talk to website users and as you have a conversation with them the software records the on-screen activity as well as filming a video of people's reaction to the product. This all plays back in a video at the end.

With the expert help of Martin Belam - we recorded quite a number of sessions today from website users. I hope the results will help us design some improvements to the product we were discussing based on those insights. I would recommend silverback app to anyone wanting to try more informal testing of their product - as well as recommending that getting out from behind your desk and talking to real customers is a really worthwhile thing to do for anyone in product development. You learn a great deal for free, just by asking.

Here's a video explaining silverbackapp in more detail:

Web Trend Map 4

Web Trend Map 4 Final Beta, originally uploaded by formforce.

A new version of the web trend map, just in and well worth a look.

Via information architects

Essential strategies for creating a successful web product from Dion Hinchcliffe

There is some excellent advice from Dion Hinchcliffe in this article outlining '50 essential strategies for creating a successful web 2.0 product'

Although web 2.0 is mentioned in the title I think these ideas could apply to most online products, especially "start by solving a simple problem".

I have a feeling that this is one of those reference articles that I may have to come back to from time to time. Its a great checklist.

The history of the internet video

Apologies if you have seen this already, but this 'history of the internet' video is well worth a look and very nicely animated.

I had never realised that the evolution of the internet owes so much to the cold war.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

via information aesthetics

a nice cup of tea

a nice cup of tea, originally uploaded by vanilla.sky.

Tired of the recession? Find yourself a nice cup of tea...

This feed taken from from the main Guardian website and then filtered using feedrinse  does not contain any of the following keywords:

Recession, Credit Crunch, Downturn, Unemployment

How to send an RSS feed to your email account

From the RSS Blog a new and very simple service which allows you to send a website's RSS news feed to your email account called http://www.feedmyinbox.com

Great idea

Tim O'Reilly's response to Andrew Keen and 'the cult of the amateur'

Great video from adders from the web 2.0 expo in Berlin of Tim O'Reilly's response to the question 'what do you make of Andrew Keen'

Tim O'Reilly on Andrew Keen from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.

RSS adoption rates still low according to Forrester report

There was some debate overnight in content of my googlereader inbox about the implications of a recent Forrester report saying that adoption of RSS stands at around 11% of internet users. Apparently the full report calls on marketers to make more efforts to explain the benefits of this technology to consumers if usage is to grow (I haven't read the full report, it's $279 and although I was interested I am going to make do with what I can get for free).

Steve Rubel feels that usage may have peaked there since "According to the research, of the 89% of those who don't use feeds only 17% say they're interested in using them" . Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins of Mashable counters that usage is in fact much higher than 11% since so many sites and features rely on RSS to provide content and users are already using these tools without realising it.

Whatever the true figure may be if you ask the average person in the street about RSS people rarely have a clue what you are talking about and why should they? I'm of the opinion that most of the 89% have no real interest in a piece of technology for the sake of it, they'll become interested if someone explains something interesting that they can do with it, easily.

The name, RSS explains the format if you are geeky enough to know what it stands for but it doesn't explain the benefits to anyone of actually using it. Feeds, feed readers, news feeds are all a much better explanation, we should choose a better name and then stick with it. News feeds are probably the best that I have seen so far.

Despite some tutorials that explain the principles of RSS just like the eco-kettle in the office where I work, if you need an instruction manual to understand it, its just too complicated. Even if you like the idea of an eco-kettle, when you want a cup of tea you just want to press a single button and for it to work. Yes I have learnt to use the kettle over time but it was a barrier to adoption.

We haven't quite got there yet with the usability of news feeds (or of eco kettles for that matter). Just because the technology has been invented it doesn't mean that we can stop there. RSS still has a long way to go in the way that it is explained to the non-technical user, concentrating on the benefits rather than the features and by supplying tools that are ridiculously easy to use. And of course finding a better name.

If that were done successfully I think the adoption rates of news feeds would be much higher than 11%.