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.

eco-friendly packaging

Sennheiser CX 300 - eco-friendly packaging, originally uploaded by spjwebster.

It's not often that I notice the packaging for any product. Apart from the fact that there is far too much of it, it just gets thrown away and is a complete waste.

One exception to the rule is the Sennheiser in-ear headphones which I recently got for my iPhone. They were posted (via Amazon) in a really cool cardboard box made entirely from recycled paper.

I hope other manufacturers follow suit and do away with all that unecessary plastic stuff.

Simple ideas work best - number 1

3 simple ideas that I have seen lately that have really impressed me;

• Having white roofs and lighter colour pavements could help reduce global warming
• A great simple tool for working out whether a website is down for everyone or just me? (via Lloyd Davis on Twitter)

• Probably the most successful idea from tv series dragon's den is a plastic cable tie, that just got a £36m order

Yep, the simple ones are the best.....

A map of the social entrepreneur landscape from 2gether08

I didn't make it to the 2gether08 'unconference' this week but I've been following some of the content coming out of what looked like a very interesting event.

I really enjoyed this short video trying to map the social entrepreneur landscape by Cliff Prior and Nick Temple from Unltd. I particularly liked the analogy of web 2.0 to the arrival of the railways, that doesn't feel too far off. Lets hope that people don't get stuck in the swamp of misrepresentation...

The social entrepreneur landscape from David Wilcox on Vimeo.

U.A.Tea

my own tea pot and cup, originally uploaded by perago89.

We introduced a new user testing session on our jobs service this sprint called U.A.Tea, it's just like U.A.T (User Acceptance Testing) but with tea and cake.

The tea and cake bit definitely worked to get more people along. We received some really helpful input prior to release of the product and it helps the team catch changes early in the process, or at least before we release the product to live.

Dell ideastorm and open innovation

One of my first jobs after leaving University was working for First Direct Bank looking after a project that they called Quest. It was a staff suggestion scheme where everyone in the company was incentivised to submit suggestions of how to improve their products. My job was to work with each internal team, encourage them to submit ideas and then feed through the results into the projects department. During my time looking after the project there were some good wins, particularly around improving the usability of back office systems. Overall though it was really hard to make work. Why? Well it was tricky to identify the ideas that would deliver the biggest benefit, most suggestions tended to be either very difficult to implement or of a small scale and of dubious payback. There were also so many ideas to work through and that was just from the staff, not all the customers as well.

Now I see that the suggestion scheme has come of age with the application of social / web 2.0 principles. I was taking a look at Dell ideastorm today which is based on the salesforce platform. Over 20,000 customers (or potential customers) have voted to standardise power cables for laptops. Which has got to be a very powerful insight for Dell's new product development. Even better though is that the wisdom of crowds has sifted through over 8,900 ideas to choose the products and features that people really want.

Jeremiah Olswang from Forrester has got a write up of the launch of ideastorm here.

This type of approach has to be a big part of the future of new product development, engaging with your community of customers and giving them an opportunity to collaborate and participate in new product features. Easy to knock, hard to pull off. Well done Dell.

UPDATE: Although as others have pointed out that you have to act on the results of all that information if you are going to be taken seriously. I certainly hope that's the case here.