USiT blog

Congratulations to our very own Scott Bryant for being selected to speak at this year's UX Australia conference!

Facebook's F8 developer conference

(contributed by Melissa)

Here are a few really interesting links which I found so far on the F8 conference.

• A good summary: New Ways to Personalize Your Online Experience
• Showcase: Explore how sites integrate Facebook
• General conference info
• Watch keynotes live

Twitter's developer 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.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Pat suggests Projective Techniques: Eliciting Deeper Thoughts by David Jacques
• Lexi suggests Pirate Google by Michele Goetz
• Pat suggests Why YouTube doesn’t get more agency money – and what they should do about it by Mark Pollard

This is the last weekly links for the year, so the USiT team would like to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Hopefully your 2010 will be as successful and eventful as we expect ours to be!

Market for mobile internet will be huge

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb provides a great summary of a report released by Morgan Stanley that says the mobile internet market will be twice the size of desktop internet...

Perhaps the most remarkable statement in the report is that the Mobile Internet market will be "at least 2x size of Desktop Internet," which Morgan Stanley bases on analysis comparing Internet users with mobile subscribers.

The report starts out by saying that Apple's iPhone/iTouch/iTunes ecosystem "may prove to be the fastest ramping and most disruptive technology product / service launch the world has ever seen." It goes on to state that "a handful of incumbents (like Apple, Google, Amazon.com and Skype) appear especially well positioned for mobile changes."

This is a very interesting for the UX and media communities, since it means there will be many opportunities for mobile work in the future.
(forwarded by Sophie)

Digital magazine prototype

Bonnier have released a video showing off their concept for how digital magazines might look and work...

The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.

If this is what magazines will be like in the future, it's very exciting! The production and polish of the video itself is fascinating too; makes for a very convincing and understandable deliverable/marketing tool.
(forwarded by Angus)

You don't have the power

Seth Godin talks about getting past the old school thinking that you can control users/customers...

You don't have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they'd have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want, it's not going to do anything but make you hoarse.

Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.

This is why we must understand what our audience wants and work with that, instead of fabricating an "opportunity" in our own minds and trying—or should that be hoping?—to get people to come and use it.
(forwarded by Pat)

Twitter and the media (2009 wrap-up)

Ross Dawson picks his top blog posts for the year on the topic of Twitter and the media...

1. Twitter on ABC TV - the impact on politics, media and socializing
2. How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors
3. Event review: Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism
4. Twitter and the ever-faster moving news landscape
5. Who will provide the credibility ratings for the journalists of the planet?
6. Twitter's impact on the news and media cycle

Some really great commentary on 'new media' meets 'old media'.
(forwarded by Pat)

Technology First, Needs Last

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)

A Rebuttal to Technology First Needs Last

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)

Short-Term Memory and Web Usability

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)

My big list of 24 Web Site Usability Testing Tools

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)

Make the logo bigger! (the song)

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)

iPhone app for The Independent (UK)

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)

Surrender! Foucault and Twitter

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)

A summary of user research methods

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