Interesting study on ‘why people share online’ from the New York Times Customer Insights Group.
The study uncovers six sharing personas and their motivations:
>> Download the study: http://nytmarketing.whsites.net/mediakit/pos/
Interesting study on ‘why people share online’ from the New York Times Customer Insights Group.
The study uncovers six sharing personas and their motivations:
>> Download the study: http://nytmarketing.whsites.net/mediakit/pos/
The folks from Chadwick Martin Bailey, Inc. share with us the findings of their new research which shows consumers engaged through social media such as Facebook and Twitter are over 50% more likely to buy and recommend than before they were engaged...
In a recent study of social media usage it is clear that consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers.
Over on ReadWriteWeb Frederic Lardinois tell us how Twitter users don't like to return the favour...
According to a group of researchers at Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Twitter is not a very social network. After analysing over 41 million user profiles and 1.47 billion follower/following relationships, the researchers concluded that only 22% of all connections on Twitter are reciprocal.
What's even more interesting than the small number of user pairs is that 68% of all Twitter users aren't followed by a single person they are following. As the researchers rightly note, this makes Twitter more like a broadcast medium than a social network.
Congratulations to our very own Scott Bryant for being selected to speak at this year's UX Australia conference!
(contributed by Melissa)
Here are a few really interesting links which I found so far on the F8 conference.
(contributed by Manuel)
At Chirp, the official Twitter developer conference, Twitter shared some revealing stats about its site, users, and growth that had previously been kept under wraps.
- Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
- New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
- 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
- 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
- Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API
- Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
- Twitter's search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
- Of Twitter's active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet
- Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications
- Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees
You can also see some snapshots from the presentation.
No waffle, just links.
(contributed by Pat)
A great piece from Mark Hurst on the conundrum we all face: who should we be designing experiences for? He opens with the question:
Which would you rather do...
- create a experience that, even if you don't particularly care for it yourself, becomes wildly popular and puts your name on the map?
- ...or... create an experience you firmly believe in, no matter how popular (or not) it becomes?
And the difficulties in answering that question...
Because here's the thing: the larger culture can't decide which to value. Sometimes a "good experience" is the thing that makes a boatload of money, because it serves some consumer desire, no matter the intrinsic value or integrity - "the customer is always right." And if enough people buy it, it makes for good copy.
On the other hand, sometimes the "good experience" is the thing that is most authentic, and often popular to a small minority. The scrappy restaurant with cuisine for the foodie palate, the indie film refusing to dumb down its plot or characters, the neighborhood or book or community "keeping it real" - it's practically a cliche, given how obsessed the culture is sometimes with finding the real or authentic thing.
Mark goes on to discuss how this choice can affect how commercially successful the resulting experience might be, but just this conundrum is something that is a real issue within the UX field. We say we should always listen to the customer, but we know that often the best results are achieved through dogged determination and passion for something the designer/creator/owner believes in. Which way would you go?
(contributed by Pat)
I really liked this post by Seth Godin on the topic of realising there are different skills for different roles and that some people may have one skill-set or the other. And that's OK.
Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills.
Seth applies this model to other situations, such as students in a classroom, and of course marketing. And I think it's very relevant to UX: horses for courses, different strokes for different folks, know thy audience yadda yadda.
It really makes me think the way in which a lot of our society is structured, or governed, is often a "one size fits all" or "lowest common denominator" or "majority rules" arrangement. To think that someone's potential is being wasted simply because of the way in which the challenge, environment, opportunity or system is framed, is quite sad.
The example I keep thinking of is the (all too common) story of a dyslexic child, in a time gone by where people didn't understand such conditions, brought up to feel as though they are stupid, but they go on to achieve brilliant things in their life; if only their condition was recognised, understood and appropriately catered for (treated like "hunters" instead of "farmers"), would they have achieved even more brilliant things?
(contributed by Melissa)
In his article titled Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome, John Tierney asks what sort of articles do users share and what motivates them?
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
You can also check out this link within the post to a blog which asks readers to comment on why they comment: tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com
(contributed by Pat)
Grant McCracken delves into Ford's recent social media success in his Harvard Business Review article...
Ford gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission every month. And away they went. At the direction of Ford and their own imagination, "agents" used their Fiestas to deliver Meals On Wheels. They used them to take Harry And David treats to the National Guard. They went looking for adventure, some to wrestle alligators, others actually to elope. All of these stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the creators of the campaign, Bud Caddell, describes the central concept as...
The idea was: let's go find twenty-something YouTube storytellers who've learned how to earn a fan community of their own. [People] who can craft a true narrative inside video, and let's go talk to them. And let's put them inside situations that they don't get to normally experience/document. Let's add value back to their life. They're always looking, they're always hungry, they're always looking for more content to create. I think this gets things exactly right.
This sounds like an innovative, smart and daring (considering the affect the GFC has had on many large corporations particularly in the auto industry) campaign. I love how they had a good think about it, understood their audience and how they might influence that audience, then created a campaign that is far from the usual social media approach. Hat tip to Grant's blog where he announced the HBR article and also shares an interview he did with Bud Caddell.
(contributed by Chris)
Erin Malone has published a Boxes and Arrows article on building social experiences...
Nowadays everyone wants social in their sites and applications. It’s become a basic requirement in consumer web software and is slowly infiltrating the enterprise as well. So what’s a designer to do when confronted with the requirements to “add social”? Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way. It’s important to consider your audience, your product—what your users will be rallying around and why they would want to become engaged with it and each other, and that you can approach this in a systematic way, a little bit at a time.
It's a good, step-by-step introduction to getting a social experience up and running. There is a lot more than this to driving a successful social experience (including seeding it etc) but this covers some of the low level hygiene factors.
(contributed by Angus)
The Economist examines global cultural differences in the use and understanding of mobile phones and asks whether these differences will disappear as the innate qualities of the technology (the “apparageist” or “spirit of the machine”) becomes apparent. Reminds me of a Marshall Mcluhan line “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
How you use your mobile phone has long reflected where you live. But the spirit of the machines may be wiping away cultural differences
Technologies tend to be global, both by nature and by name. Say “television”, “computer” or “internet” anywhere and chances are you will be understood. But hand-held phones? For this ubiquitous technology, mankind suffers from a Tower of Babel syndrome. Under millions of Christmas trees North and South Americans have been unwrapping cell phones or celulares. Yet to Britons and Spaniards they are mobiles or móviles. Germans and Finns refer to them as Handys and kännykät, respectively, because they fit in your hand. The Chinese, too, make calls on a sho ji, or “hand machine”. And in Japan the term of art is keitai, which roughly means “something you can carry with you”.
(contributed by Angus)
Karen McGrane posts four sets of slides from her course on Interaction Design History...
Practitioners in other design disciplines—architecture, graphic design, fashion—would be expected to have some grounding in historical movements and trends. But most people have no formal education in interaction design, and so they’ve never learned the roots of the discipline.
The third set (Week 3) in particular is full of great quotes and images I hadn’t seen before. As she says in the preface of the post it’s important for people doing interaction design today to have some understanding of the history of the field.
(contributed by Angus)
A great quote about the importance of frequent reviews of creative work as it progresses from Pixar president Ed Catmull, speaking at Stanford’s business school:
In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now, this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. […]
Suppose you come in, and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a famous, world-class animator. Well, you don’t want to show something which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right.
The trick is actually to stop that behavior. We show it every day—when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.
It’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped everything that we did. Show it in its incomplete form. There’s another advantage to that. When you’re done… you’re done.
According to Ed while showing incomplete work is scary and potentially embarrassing it has two very important benefits, it results in better “more creative” work and it means that when the animator/designer thinks they’re finished they really are finished as stakeholders have participated in the process.
(contributed by Angus)
Two lengthy posts for and against the use of Lorum Ipsum in wireframes and mockups. Personally I side with Karen McGrane as she argues that Lorum Ipsum is not the problem but a symptom of the problem:
The real problem is an overall process that treats design and content as separate tracks without appropriate communication, collaboration, and checkpoints along the way.
(contributed by Angus)
Ivana Jurčić shares A Collection of Printable Sketch Templates and Sketch Books for Wireframing and Todd Warfel has made available his templates used for his "rapid sketching and peer review/critique" process.(contributed by Angus)
Thousands and thousands of beautiful dials and banks of red lights on Flickr – Interaction designer porn?
Don Norman stirs things up with...
I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.
(forwarded by Angus)
Todd Warfel replies to Don Norman's post...
Technology didn’t drive these innovations, it was merely the road. The driver was an opportunity for invention and design research was right behind the wheel.
When both sides of a debate are highly respected experts, it makes for an interesting read!
(forwarded by Angus)
Jacob Nielsen reports ...
The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations
(forwarded by Angus)
Craig Tomlin shares his list...
In the past few years, there has been massive growth in new and exciting cheap or free web site usability testing tools, so here’s my list of 24 tools you may need to use from time to time.
(forwarded by Angus)
In the finest tradition of Spinal Tap comes this mock-metal song Make the logo bigger, sure to raise smile on the face of anyone who's had to deal with clients who want their logo...just that little bit bigger. (Warning: make sure you turn down your volume before playing the song)
(forwarded by Angus)
Over on Econsultancy, Graham Charlton reviews the latest newspaper website mobile app...
The Independent iPhone app is a departure from some other newspaper apps, as it is designed to allows readers to download all the articles while they have a decent 3G or wi-fi connection, and saves them for reading while offline.
An interesting approach.
(forwarded by Sophie)
Ian Delaney laments the direction in which social media may be taking us...
Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry.
Do we blindly accept "social media networks as empowering, democratic and all about spreading fresh ideas"? Delaney says "The reverse may be the case: any given information about ourselves donates some portion of control to another party". It's the "dark side of social networking" he says. An interesting philosophical read to break up the mountain of practical posts, articles and reports we read day in and day out.(forwarded by Chris)
Lastly, on his personal blog, our own Patrick Kennedy summarises a whole bunch of useful user research methods...
In this article I give a quick overview of the methods I commonly use, broken down in to main categories:
- Direct user contact—where the researcher does very much interact with users, or members of the audience as I prefer to call them
- Indirect user contact—where the researcher does not actually interact with members of the audience
1. Participate and play The only way to understand social media is to participate. Don’t just open Facebook and Twitter accounts. You need to play extensively with a wide variety of tools and discover how they are being used. If you think you don’t have time, think how much time you’ll have if you cannot work effectively in a world increasingly driven by social media.The other five steps are:
The results of a three-year Digital Youth project have been released by the University of California. It seems like an impressive ethnographical study.
Here is an extract from the summary report (PDF 83kB):
Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher and her research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use to date.
They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research finds today's youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.
Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important. The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. These activities have captured teens' attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence.
I don't think the findings are hugely surprising, but they are very interesting and do support other research that has surfaced in recent years with regard to how "gen Y" use online media to extend friendships and interests and engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.
There is some great content on the project website, but there could be better use of multimedia in terms of communicating the findings (there is some video on the McArthur Foundation website though).
[Thanks to Christo who first posted this to the Antrodesign mailing list]
USiT is the user experience team within News Digital Media, based in Sydney, Australia. The team works on the design of a wide range of web, mobile and internal applications.
