Ergo

UCD 101

Paul.Dawson — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:33:04 GMT

Ok, I've been meaning to post this for a while, so sorry it's late... but I talk a lot about 'experience' and user-centred design, and occasionally, I stumble across someone who doesn't come from my universe and isn't as keenly aware of what some of this means. So here begins, hopefully, a small series of blogs on the basic principles of User-Centred Design (UCD) and user experience generally. The aim is to do each in 500 words or less. Something I'm not very good at, so bear with me. Herewith, UCD 101:

User-centred design (UCD) is an industry-standard term for an approach to the design of a solution that takes a detailed look at the needs of the end users of a solution, and then specifically sets about creating things that satisfies those needs.

Done well and in an organisation that truly 'gets it', this approach will drive not simply how something works, but the overall 'product' the company has to offer. UCD is a very effective innovation framework, as it looks at un-met needs in its customer base and potential customer base. This basic approach has been the key driver of invention since forever, so UCD is a perfect framework to drive everything from product innovation to interaction design.

In order to be effective, UCD can't purely be 'user' design. i.e. it cannot simply be 'what users want'. Take a look at Homer's ideal car below to see how bad this approach can be. UCD is about understanding users' wants and needs, coupling that with an understanding of what will drive the commercial business and what the technology is capable of. It's something often summed up as balancing desire, feasibility and viability. Unless you get all three right, the thing will fail.

Lose 'desire' and nobody will come to use it. Thereby collapsing any business case you had built on it.
Lose 'feasiblity' and you may not even be able to build it in the first place.
Lose 'viability' and it will be too expensive, or hard to maintain and the business needs won't be met.

The best products balance all three very effectively. So a UCD process is actually one that also is business-centred and technology-centred. That's a lot of centres... but the secret is mutual gain.

Usually, unless we create something that somebody wants to do ('Desire') it's going to fail. So usually, the reason we call this user-centred is that unless we have users, nothing else works; but as we said in reality the game is mutual gain. We can give users lots of things they want to do, but where is the business value? When we find overlap between user-benefit and business-benefit, those are the magic moments that will make a system or business successful.

Sometimes a business just has to do something. It might be a regulatory requirement for example. But even this requires attention to the 'desire' element. In this case, the base system comes first. "We need a system to get customers to sign our new terms and conditions". Viability is ticked as it's a 'must do', but now we have to address 'desire'. How do we make people do this? It's best if they want to do it as it will happen faster and they will be happier - but what motivates them?

Finally - UCD should have a success metric of user happiness. User happiness is a user benefit that overlaps with business benefits, but is often left unconsidered. In internal systems it leads to staff loyalty and lowered support costs, in customer-facing systems it generates increased trade and loyalty. But more than that, because loyalty can be generated simply by having the right product at the right price and not letting people down on delivery. That's all good, but you can go further. When you get customers emotionally invested in something, you move from simple loyalty, to advocacy, which is a far more valuable attribute for business. It's 'experience' that generates this emotional attachment...

Words: 576 - Doh!

Thanks to / people to read: Alan Cooper - The Inmates are Running the Asylum; Lou Carbone - Clued In.

USB vs FTP... For DeepZoom collections?

Paul.Dawson — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:05:46 GMT

If you're creating a DeepZoom collection in Silverlight 2, you will at some point have to get a massive amount of files into a web server's filesystem.

What DeepZoom Composer does is crunch source images into tiny tiles of images that are then intelligently served when a user is browsing a collection. What you're left with is a folder and series of sub-folders that is about 20% bigger, data-wise than the source images; but slightly more challenging is that it produces a large number of files. In the case below, 442 files.

Below, is just a quick observation/learning that is probably very, very obvious when you think about it, but worth noting so you don't have to discover it the hard way!

Collection size: 24MB, 442 images, contained in folder structure
Time taken to copy folder to USB Stick attached to my laptop – about 8 minutes
Time taken to delete folder from USB stick attached to my laptop – about 6 minutes

The length of time is presumably because of the overhead of the computer opening new transfers/connections for each file. The data size for this collection was reasonably insignificant, so it must be that. Here's another way to do it though that I would heartily recommend, and again is presumably very obvious when you think about it:

Amount of time to zip folder using 'send to compressed file' in Windows shell – about 45 seconds
Amount of time to copy zipped folder to USB stick – about 30 seconds
Time taken to delete single Zip file - about 5 seconds

The comparison of the two approaches? About 14 minutes versus less than 2 minutes!

So, do this every time:

Zip your collection before copying it.. simple as that.
If time is an issue, and you didn't follow my advice on zipping, use 'quick format' to delete the folder with loads of files in it - it takes about 30 seconds instead of 6 minutes! (and so obviously use a USB stick that is dedicated only to this task!)

UNLESS:

Actually, what we end up doing with these things most of the time is transferring them to a web server somewhere else. For this project, we are doing this via FTP obviously, and we are using Filezilla. We thought we were going to have to write some stuff to unzip the collection at the other end, but we also thought we'd see how Filezilla dealt with it. Here's how:

Collection size: 24MB, 442 images, contained in raw unadulterated folders (not zipped)
Total transfer time across 10mbit internet connection from Conchango's offices over the public internet to StreamUK: Under a minute!

So, two interesting things here:

Filezilla is pretty smart about not getting caught up in the overhead of opening and closing connections for different files, and we have a super-fast internet connection (thanks Stuart)
It's quite depressing that it takes less time to send that all via FTP over the internet to a remote data centre, than it does to transfer it to a USB stick attached to my machine!

Living the digital lifestyle and all the spam that entails...

Paul.Dawson — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:22:17 GMT

As more of us get 'hooked up' and start settling into our digital communications lifestyle, more people I know are going through a learning curve that for many of us we went through nearly 10 years ago. It's easy to forget this stuff, so when a friend asked me for advice on getting rid of spam, I thought I'd blog it too. Maybe you've got a relative or friend is asking the same question...

This is only one person's experience and opinion - there are others who have different approaches - and you should look at those too, but I offer it here in case it helps (it can't hurt, that's for sure).

This was the email I received:

"We have just been on holiday for the past week and I am now inundated with emails offering me viagra, etc etc (I had about 200 new emails of that variety). I have used the 'message rules' setup on the computer to block certain words (the really obvious ones) but they just seem to come up with more and more different ways of wording the emails. I find it a bit of a drag myself, but more importantly I can't even contemplate letting my daughter (who is about to go off to Senior school) have her own email account when we are getting emails like this.
"So can I ask - has changing your email address helped get rid of the spam? and how does it work. I would LOVE some advice on how to get rid of this problem!"

My reply:

The only way really to deal with it when it get to this level is to change your email provider and address. (Her email address was at her broadband providers domain e.g. @tiscali.co.uk, @sky.co.uk)
Certain email domains (i.e. the bit after "@") seem to be quite vulnerable to this. The basic reason is that certain email domains are simply more likely to have lots of real people at the end of them.
This is one of the reasons my wife's old email address was overloaded with spam (junk email), because hers was "@dawson.name" and anything that was a .name was obviously a real person, therefore the spammers think they’re on a good bet.
This applies to a lot of the internet service providers like Tiscali, Virgin Media, Sky etc.
What we have done is register a domain separately from our internet service provider. This provides us with a new email server, from which we download all our email, and the ability to create ‘throwaway’ email addresses that we can use on websites where we’re not sure how they’ll use it.
You can do this with someone like www.register.com (others are available).
Go and find an email domain that is reasonably memorable and meaningful to you.
You then pay to register the domain, and can also buy an email service from them. This is an annual fee (I use the $34.99 ‘pro’ one), and a fee every two years for the domain itself (I think around $60). Obviously this comes on top of your broadband fees, but... it’s only £20 a year. Cheaper than a mobile phone!
They also offer a service where they will register the domain anonymously for you – so they don’t publish an email address that can also be grabbed by the spammers. This costs a couple of dollars extra but I think is worth it, unless you use the hotmail address I suggest below....
After that you can then set up individual email addresses e.g. yourname@mytribe.org
And then it’s a case of keeping your email clean... this means, not putting your email address into websites, not using it on websites that you’re not familiar with or don’t trust, and so on.
It also pays to set up a few email addresses that you can throw away later if you need to. E.g. mynewsletters45@mytribe.org – that you can use when you need to put in an email address, but aren’t sure if it’s that kosher. Then, whenever you find you’re getting a load of email to that address, you can just delete it and all that spam will disappear.
All of these email addresses can be configured to go into your single in-box using a piece of software like Outlook Express. So there’s no hassle about having to go to different sites to check different email accounts.
From Outlook Express you can see to which email address something was sent – so you can start to work out if any of your email addresses has been compromised.
You can also set up different users who can then access their email separately and privately from a different PC or Mac, so you can also set up yourdaughtersname@mytribe.org as well. Or give her a choice of what her user name is. In fact, you should include her in choosing the domain as well – she might thing having her surname in it is not good for example...
She can easily set up her own email on something like hotmail or Google’s Gmail anyway... so my belief is it's best to give her one you have faith in and she believes to be private to her rather than her set one up that you won’t even know about. If you really needed to hack into it at some point, you could because you have all the access details. Whereas if you don’t even know about it...
I also find it pays to have a totally throwaway address that you don’t care if it gets spam. I use a hotmail address – just go to www.hotmail.co.uk and set up anything you like. E.g myname733@hotmail.co.uk
This means that if you need to give an email address to register for a site, and you really think there’s a chance they might be a bit iffy, you can use this one. You can check the account by just going to www.hotmail.co.uk if one of those sites needs you to click on a link in the email to verify it, but otherwise you can just leave it to fester knowing that nothing important will ever get sent to it.
Finally – when you do get spam email, don’t ever reply to it. That will reveal your actual email address – the one you only give out to friends and family and places you trust.
You can also get spam filter plugins for email packages like Outlook that are supposed to recognise spam – but as you point out, the spammers are so clever at constantly changing the way their emails work that I find they’re not very effective. The big online email providers like Windows Live and Google are quite good at this now, but then you have to use their web-based email systems.
I find there’s an advantage in having your email somewhere other than your broadband provider, because then if you decide to switch who your broadband is with, you can do so without changing anything else. Whereas at the moment, if you move away from Tiscali, you will have to change your email address.
I hope that helps...
By the way,.. none of this is guaranteed!

Deep, and even deeper

Paul.Dawson — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:08:00 GMT

When you get a new technology like Seadragon, you first work out how to get it out there in the hands of people who can use it in anger, and then you incubate it.

In the case of Seadragon, Blaise Aguera y Arcas first showcased it very publicly at TED last year. Since then, the team at Microsoft Live Labs who own the technology decided on an approach to making the technology accessible and available to developers, and now they've also extended it out to others too.

Silverlight 2.0 gave developers access to this technology in the form now known as DeepZoom, which is a sub-set of Seadragon functionality - but still plenty of functionality for the uses we're putting it to with our eCommerce clients and others.

PhotoZoom is an application written by Matt at Live Labs, and it's an incubation project, meaning that the application itself provides an easy accessible interface for the less technical likes of you and me so that we can easily see the potential of the technology, and tailor it to be appropriate to our clients. It's purely an incubation project today, so don't expect it to deal with albums over 100MB in size, or to have all the interface niceties and error trapping you'd expect from a mature production application (although it's actually very good anyway!). I was even seeing enhancements being built on to the app whilst I was using it - nice service from Matt at Live Labs!

So step 1 - get a bunch of images. The higher resolution the better.

Step 2 - go sign in using your LiveID (Live (Instant) Messenger ID) and create an alias. Mine is PaulAtConchango.

Step 3 - name your new album.

Step 4 - hit browse, select all your images and that's it!

Step 5 - wait... this stuff does take some putting together, so you need to have some patience but it seems to be getting faster and faster by the minute!

Here's my latest - taken from all the images on Flickr tagged 'whatsinmybag'.

Enjoy! For best results, use your mouse's scroll-wheel...

Now I have the list!

Paul.Dawson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:43:48 GMT

Stuart Preston runs all of our infrastructure at Conchango, keeping our business running and our people talking to each other and clients - oh and he develops Vista side-bar gadgets, VSTS plug-ins and a whole bunch of other stuff!!

After my blog post about the back of the ***-packet. He was kind (daft??) enough to send me the complete list of words that are automatically censored by the Community Server software that runs our blog site.

So here they are! Publish and be dammed!

***, ***, ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , ***, *** , *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , *** , *** , *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, *** , *** , ***, ***, *** , *** , ***, *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***.

SO - what do you think? Are they all that bad??

Oh - I see what I've done there... never mind!

Anyway - you'll have to believe me that it's a collection of the words you'd expect. Also a lot that I have NO idea what they mean, and a whole bunch of extremely derogative homophobic and racist terms. However, apparently I can't have a blog about any form of homosexuality, as even the word for a female homosexual is banned.

Oh, and a really good one... in the UK, French Connection UK branded themselves rather cheekily as *** - that's F.C.U.K. - however that particular term is also banned. So no French Connection blogs on our site then! :)

Obviously we need this stuff, as it prevents malicious anonymous comments offending the world before they can be taken down. It's just interesting to see how the Community Server open source community developed this list that's all... and how it needs to be adapted to suit a particular cultural usage... or does it? Should we be politically and culturally sensitive to every culture everywhere? Is that our responsibility seeing as we have a global platform with universal reach? That's an open question...

*** is an English word for cigarette - but my blog doesn't seem to know this!

Paul.Dawson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I was writing a blog post recently, and was describing some approximate and rough calculations. The way we might describe this in the UK is to call them "back of a *** packet" calculations. The word: '***' meaning cigarette.

It's also a word used to describe a form of servitude common in English Public Schools a few years back (and some today actually).

However, my blog, run on Community Server, decided to change '***' to '***'!

Ah, so I see what's happening now... the word I can't seem to use in this post is F - A - G. Which my blog turns into ***. I checked the original post, and the word is intact, so it must be doing the automated censorship and translation at Runtime!

I am guessing that this built-in censorship is due to the fact that this word in the United States is used as a derogatory term for someone who is gay... not here though! However this is an international blog, so do I have duty to be wary of things like this? Or am I allowed to be as British as I like? What exactly is the blogging etiquette on this? Or should I just allow the server I'm on to censor as it sees fit?

Yours effin and blindin, Bollocks Wanker Dawson. :)

Deep, deep, deeper deep down

Paul.Dawson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:37:00 GMT

My good pal Steve Clayton posted tonight about my session at MIX and referenced an audience member, who was indeed from Otto, the company who own the Oli brand. Yes, he said that the LookBook functionality we invented and then built for them has double the conversion rate from a standard non-LookBook user on the website.

And I agree with Steve's hastily put together napkin mathematics, that anything that shows product in deep, deep detail, and allows people to share it, play with it and generally do what they want to do with it, will increase conversion.

If Amazon can claim that adding their basic form of recommendations will increase sales using their ecommerce platform by 20%, then I'm all in favour of napkin (***-packet) maths that say that Deep Zoom could do the same!

Deep Zoom (the artist formerly known as Seadragon) is indeed a more capable beast than any of the current ecommerce image management applications out there.... I think it's only a matter of time (or contract periods) until we put one in for one of our ecommerce customers.

Institutionalising the Conchango Experience

Paul.Dawson — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:42:20 GMT

Following up from Andrew Shillaber's recent post: Organisational Experience - it's fair to say that I've been thinking more and more recently about what the 'experience' of Conchango is.

We definitely 'get' experience when it is about how consumers and brands interact together. We also can think experience when focusing on how other companies interact with their employees through intranets.

And.. there are some people at Conchango who think about the Conchango to Employee experience - a few of which Andrew outlines in his post. From 'little things' like fruit being readily available in all our offices, to bigger things like weekly physio visits, freely available to all employees.

What about the experience of being a customer of Conchango though? As individuals we think about it everyday, and it's why those customers stay with us for years and years. But we haven't yet institutionalised this, other than making them a set of principles and guidelines on how we all operate as individuals. So, it's largely down to how the individual consultant interprets this. Individuals aim to please and impress our clients and to add value to their businesses and projects, and how well they do at that depends largely on the individual - and the tone, and tone of voice, of this communication is set by that individual.

However, we don't think often enough about how Conchango as a brand speaks to our customers during projects; and how we can institutionalise that experience so it comes through in every interaction our customers have with us, regardless of the individual.

Many of you have seen me talk about Virgin Atlantic's approach to experience. This takes two forms. The first is allowing the individual's personality to have free reign - one way this comes through in how the individual crew members on board flights choose to talk to their passengers. If you've experienced an amusing introductory PA announcement on board, then you've experienced that phenomenon. However, they also do this institutionally. This is largely what I talk about in presentations and is manifested in the 'little touches' you see peppering the experience, that makes you think "they really think about me".

It's time to think more about how Conchango institutionalises the magic of good experience... we do it often enough for other great companies and brands!

I will make it my personal mission!

Inaugural UK Silverlight User Group

Paul.Dawson — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:52:53 GMT

A few of you have been asking when we're going to organise the inaugural Silverlight User Group we said we would organise in the UK.

Conchango has been working with Silverlight 2.0 since its release into the early adopter programme a few months ago, and have been gagged ever since (in a good way!), until finally it was released in public at MIX08 last week.

So - now it's out there and we're not in danger of breaching our NDA, we've decided to sort out a date - and at the moment, we've got good space in the week of the 31st March to 4th April - so thought we'd throw it out to you to see what you prefer!

Venue would be our offices at 36 Southwark Bridge Road, SE1 9EU.

Email me, Rich Griffin or Michelle Flynn with preferred dates. We're thinking early evening. We'll provide the beer and pizza!

Another T5 Blog...

Paul.Dawson — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:23:35 GMT

Inspired by James Saull and Andrew Shillaber... it's my turn!

There are some beautiful and original works of art in London Heathrow's new Terminal 5. Most of them already owned or recently commissioned by British Airways.

All of them - tucked away in the premium lounges for only the small percentage of privileged customers who get to travel at the front of the aircraft.

That's a shame... especially as some of them are digital and interactive, like this:

These kinds of works are delightful, inspirational, original and inspiring, and they should be available for us all. It's not like we can just book in to go visit T5 like we would an art gallery - so when we do go there once or twice a year, it would be nice to be able to see it!

There is one original piece of art commissioned specially for T5 that is in the public area, but that was done by BAA - the British Airports Authority.

Here's what Ginny McGrath at The Times said:

Art is not a new venture for BA. The carrier has a collection of over 1,500 works by artists including Peter Doig, who is currently exhibiting at the Tate Britain, and Anish Kapoor, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.
Sadly only BA staff and a minority of its passengers enjoy these works because they are hung at the BA headquarters at Waterside, near Heathrow, and in airport lounges around the world, accessible only to premium passengers and frequent flyers.
Full article and video tour here

T5 does look cool - the passenger experience reinvented I guess, but equally the revamped Terminal 3 East development and the next stage of redeveloping Terminal 1 will be pretty awesome too! I went into T3 and Virgin Atlantic's Upper Class Wing the other week, and that was UNBELIEVEABLE...

Gorillas in our midst

Paul.Dawson — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:06:00 GMT

Steve Clayton sent this around a little earlier in his 'Friday Thing' - always a joy!

If you haven't seen this viral video and TV advert put out by Transport for London, then click through now and do the test.

Steve guaranteed that you would;

A) Laugh a lot

B) Send it to your friends

I agree.. so do the test now!

It's all about whether or not you can keep up mentally with the action on screen - it takes a lot of attention. So if you haven't seen it - do that now - do NOT read on until you've done the test.

No - don't read on yet - unless you've really, really, really done the test. Seriously, there's a spoiler coming - so don't read on! Click on the link above now, then come back after you've done the test.

when you've done it... scroll down....

Are you sure you've done the test?

a little bit more

and more

The test is still available if you haven't done it yet?

no you're not off the last bit yet... come on, you can do it

Ok, we're there I think!

It is good isn’t it?

About a third of people see the interruption the first time out, so it's not a guaranteed wow factor, but most people simply don't notice what should be obvious and is in plain sight.

I was a bit peeved actually, because for ages I’ve had it on my list to recreate what is quite a famous cognitive experiment with our own Conchango basketball team in order to use it at conferences and the like, as its impact is incredibly surprising and quite delightful.

It's an experiment known colloquially as ‘gorillas in our midst’ - you'll see why from some of the original experiments I've listed below. Some of the first experiments in this go back 30 years.

The phenomenon is called ‘inattentional blindness’ and is the reason why people don’t see things like instructional copy on kiosks or websites! (they’re too busy trying to use the thing!)

Your brain is so busy trying to keep up with the action, and keeping track of the task in hand - i.e. counting passes, that it simply fails to register what should be a very significant event going on right in front of your eyes - in the original, a man in a gorilla suit walking right through the middle.

It's in part a protection mechanism that allows you to really concentrate. Your brain shutting out extraneous information in order to reserve its processing power for the task in hand. Fighter pilots experience a form of this when they go into extreme action - and are trained to do so - in order that they have enough brain processing power to operate at such high speed and with continued high reaction times.

In a simpler form, it's what means you miss what seem to be very obvious things on kiosks or webpages. If the eye is drawn to a particular area where you think something might be that you're looking for, you will completely blank out what is otherwise incredibly obvious. We did an airport check in kiosk application where we put instructional copy in 54 pt black text on a white background right at the top of the screen. Many people didn't even know it was there despite the fact that it occupied about a third of the screen.

Here’s the stuff on it..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness

And here's where I first took the inspiration to re-create it. I wanted to use my boss in a pink ballet tu-tu (it wouldn't be the first time he's dressed like that - seriously!)

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html (scroll all the way down to the bottom!)

And: Gorrillas in our midst - the best one I think...

Enjoy!

Update: The storm over this ad isn't done yet - but this blog post gives an update - albeit one that seems a little biased towards someone inside the advertising industry!

Post Virginity

Paul.Dawson — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:46:57 GMT

Well, I had a great time at MIX08. The session I thought went really well, and the feedback from people who were there was really good.

The session is now up at:

http://visitmix.com/blogs/2008Sessions/C03/ and this is also the place to give your feedback. This is always welcome, and in fact, it's pretty much required! We always encourage brands to listen, intently, to what their customers have to say about them; whether or not that feedback is directed directly at them, or at a wider community.

Listening these days is a required skill. The brands who we feel we can't get through to are the ones we tend to slag off. Whether it's as simple as not being able to get through to the call centre, to having an insight into their business, that you simply can't see the logic of that brand not adopting, the frustrations and turn-off factor that result are incredibly damaging.

The ones that listen though, give us an incredible amount of satisfaction and delight, and make us feel vested in them. Being 'vested' in a brand goes much further than simply liking them - it means becoming an advocate for them, and having incredible empathy and sympathy for seeing them doing well.

At Conchango, we undertake trends research a few times a year, and the last one of these with our partner The Future Laboratory revealed some attitudes from consumers that back this right up. The values and attitudes that they are looking for in the brands they love, include things like 'empathy' and 'openness'. This means not covering up when things go wrong, and eliciting feedback, and doing something about that feedback to make the offering much more empathetic to consumer goals and attitudes.

This is something that is only really borne out in the long term though - so new companies like Virgin America need to keep it up. It's also something that brands who have been around a while can turn around to their advantage, even if they don't have a history and heritage of being this way. Big names like Gap, Amazon, BMW, L'Oreal, Pepsi and others who may be sitting on their laurels should be thinking this one through...

I look forward to 2008 being the year of the listening brand!

But back to the point... go give some feedback!

http://visitmix.com/blogs/2008Sessions/C03/

Facebook's targeted advertising

Paul.Dawson — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:22:44 GMT

Much is talked about Facebook's ability to do very targeted advertising, based on pretty much anything in your profile, from location, to religion. Scary... but legal in the US anyway (no Data Protection Act or European Privacy in Electronic Communications bill there!).

So - I got tempted by one, and what did I get?

"We're sorry! This offer is not available in your area."

So I guess we have to go back to the fact that it has the 'ability' to do targeted ads... only people don't seem to be doing it. I wonder if the advertiser got charged for me clicking on it?

Live Services - Social Search - Collaborative research

Paul.Dawson — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:31:54 GMT

Something really cool today from the Windows Live Services team. Using the Live Messenger services, and the Live Search services to create 'social search' - or in my book, a nice way of being able to share online research with someone - or a group.

The announcement from Angus Logan:

http://blogs.msdn.com/angus_logan/archive/2008/02/29/quick-apps-6-0-are-here-social-search-with-tafiti-and-messenger-new-quick-app-lots-of-enhancements.aspx

It creates the concept of a research 'shelf' on which you can stack web page results from Live Search. Then you invite someone to share the shelf, and can post comments, delete things, add things, and generally organise your thoughts between you.

It builds on the original Tafiti application, which was a Silverlight front end on Live Search.

How to get around it:

First, sign in with your Live ID (link is top left). Create a 'new shelf' and add some search results to it. Double click on the shelf, and you will have a list of your Messenger contacts. You can drag someone to share the shelf with. Start posting links and comments, and you 'buddy' will see them in their version of Tafiti.

Why do this?

Well, it's what we've been talking about for many of our clients. You can see this being used for a group, or a couple, planning a holiday or a trip, sharing their early research, and testing ideas on where to go with each other. You can equally see this as the bare bones of a 'social shopping' application, where you can post ideas in the form of images, URL's and so on.

I'm sure it will be posted to the Quick Apps site for you to download and work with. Quick Apps are available here: http://dev.live.com/quickapps/ - obviously watch out for the other apps, some of which we designed. But particularly the Contoso Bicycle Club too with some outstanding innovation from us! :) (go to the River Thames bike ride, and click 'bike cam').

There's also now a new QuickApp that takes that idea of travel planning in the research shelves, and actually does it! Look for Contoso Hotel...

Well done Live Services team! Gives us some more stuff to talk about at MIX08 I guess! See you on Tuesday!

Technorati Tags: customer experience,Live Services,Messenger,Search,Travel,Retail,Conchango

Brucey proves CPA exists!

Paul.Dawson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:37:50 GMT

We've been saying for a while now that we've been observing behaviours in users of digital media where they are not consuming digital media alone, but retaining a continuous partial attention (or here) of multiple media at the same time.

In the very young, this can extend to 4 or 5 things at a time - mobile phone, instant messenger, web and TV or X-Box for example.

In us oldies, we believe it to be web and TV mainly, or web and radio, web, instant messenger and TV at a stretch.

Well, now I have firm populist proof. At 11.25pm tonight, on the Friday Night with Jonathan Ross show on BBC1, Jonathan was interviewing Bruce Forsyth - an entertainment legend in the UK!

Jonathan suggested that people go and sign up to the Facebook group "Give Bruce Forsyth a knighthood" - I found the group within about a minute and a half and there were 2,117 members. As I now check it 10 minutes later, the number is: 2,658. The rate of increase was VERY rapid in the first two or three minutes and tailed off after about 5. Within a minute, nearly 200 had joined up.

To me... absolute proof that we are consuming more media overall, not less TV... (actually we knew that already, but this is just a slightly more fun illustration!).

The TV companies can rest easy - social networks aren't taking away their viewers. They're just partially occupying them whilst they watch TV!

The lesson? TV companies: when you tie your content to these social networks and find ways to interact between the two media, people respond... quickly. They obviously like it. So do it more!

Technorati Tags: customer experience,media,jonathan Ross,Bruce Forsyth,entertainment,user experience,social media,facebook,TV,broadcast