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Posts Tagged ‘data’

Google sheds light on what we want to know

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

On a mission to find out how to do something, I got so distracted by Google Suggest that I’ve completely forgotten what I was trying to learn to do in the first place.

“Google Suggest offers searches by other users that are similar to the one you’re typing”1 based on some super algorithm that takes in to account, among other things, popularity of the search term and your region (eg. google.com.au will differ from google.co.uk).

So Australians appear to be a complex bunch - when they’re not busy figuring out how to woo, fondle and bonk, they’re trying to look their best to get a job training a dragon2.

Google Australia - "how to" search

Google Australia - "how to" search

 

So what about Google.com? The US is similar to Australia but, rather than just have sex, they want to get pregnant while playing games and downloading videos.

Google.com - "how to" search

Google.com - "how to" search

 

And Google.co.uk? They seem to be a cartoon-drawing spotty mix of the Australians and the Americans.

Google.co.uk - "how to" search

Google.co.uk - "how to" search

 

Finland on the other hand are so dragon-fixated that they’ll break the law by rolling a joint while waiting for their torrents to download.

Google.fi - "how to" search

Google.fi - "how to" search

 

And if we try an equivalent of “how to” in Finnish, among similar ideas of losing weight, kissing, getting pregnant, and training dragons (lohikäärme = dragon if you were interested), they also want to know how to hit a woman, how to make a fever go higher and how to make a bomb.

Google.fi - "kuinka" search

Google.fi - "kuinka" search

 

I wonder if Google is encouraging people to search for odd terms by displaying Google Suggest for basic terms like “how to”. I was about to search for something but the list that appeared distracted me (”Would kids see this? Why is there an apostrophe after sex? If unemployment isn’t so bad why is everyone doing job applications?”). If you allow the distraction, click on one of the suggestions, are you increasing the popularity of that search term thereby keeping it in the suggested terms for a longer period of time? Will the quirky searches rise through the ranks to take up the top spots?

 

1. Google Suggest
2. Okay, I know it’s actually a movie but I prefer my take on it.

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Learning a bit about the EPUB format

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Shopping cart suggestion to buy an EPUB book

Screenshot of the shopping cart letting me know I could buy an EPUB version

I was buying some books on Rosenfeld Media, when the shopping cart suggested I buy Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting and that it was available in the EPUB format for iPhone and Sony Reader.

Although I was intending to buy the physical book, for curiosity I decided to also give the EPUB version a go. A few weeks ago I briefly glanced over an article What Web Designers need to know about EPUB (via Russ Weakley’s Some links for light reading) but hadn’t delved further so I thought it would be a good chance to learn more.

I completed my order, downloaded the EPUB file, and then realised I didn’t know how to view it! (Note: I didn’t mind figuring it out for myself and although Rosenfeld Media don’t currently have instructions for using EPUB files they have let me know that they will be improving the experience of buying EPUB books as they ramp up their EPUB publishing.) A little research and I found a number of applications including Stanza which is available as an iPhone app and a desktop program. Their instructions helped me to transfer the EPUB file from my PC to my iPhone via wifi - in the end a simple process.

Poking around Stanza on my iPhone I found that I could download other books, many offered free by publishers or through lapsed copyright, and some paid books. I realised I had previously used a similar app to download a few books but perhaps I’d stumbled on a poorly built app as I wasn’t too awestruck by the idea of reading on my phone at the time. Stanza’s interface and interactions, while a little clunky, are alright and “Card Sorting” is formatted well for reading on screen while I wait for the physical book to arrive.

I realise that the EPUB format has been around for a number of years but it feels like it’s been one of those ideas floating around waiting for technology to catch up. Sure, the iPhone might not be the ideal reading interface but the Kindle, iPad, and whatever else comes next means that people who might be unable to access good (or any) book shops/are environmentally conscious/want to save some money/want to try before they buy/etc have a much easier method to do so. Australian books are pricey which I presume is due to the distance books have to travel from overseas, or because the shipping orders are small due to our small population, so providing access to quality information in affordable and environmentally friendly ways is a step in a good direction.

I know that I won’t be giving up on my much-loved bookshelves any time soon, but in the same way that digital music downloads of single tracks encourages me to try more artists without spending a lot of money on CDs, I expect I’ll now “try” more books before I buy physical copies.

Now if only the various publishers, hardware developers, software developers, etc could agree on a single format for e-books and sort out the whole DRM mess!

A few links I’ve stumbled on while looking for more EPUB information:

On reflection as I hit “Publish” this begins to feel like an ignorant post, but I actually don’t know anyone who owns a Kindle or an e-reader, and I’ve been very much in love with the physical flipping of book pages since I was a child. From my choice to download an EPUB book and having a good experience with it, I’m now much more willing to give e-books a go.

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Recent reads - using data

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The Birth (And Death) of Market Research: Why Design Research Will Prevail (Sam Ladner)

This article suggests that summary statistics relied on by market research companies are no longer relevant and qualitative research of the long tail is where the money’s at:

  • “Design research uncovers how long-tail niches develop and what differentiates them.”
  • “…design research is about knowing what to build as well as evaluating the prototype.”

When Data Gets Up Close and Personal (Stephen Anderson)

A good contemplative piece about tracking performance and creating feedback cycles. As an example, Stephen has considered how you could make a “game” out of email by considering motivating factors and presentation of progress.

  • “What we’re really talking about is setting up systems whereby individuals can (1) see in a tangible way (2) reflect on, and (3) learn from their past behaviors.”
  • “Get creative with how you represent the data– our brains will thank you for that with extra attention.”

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures (OkTrends - Christian)

Well… the post is about dating site profile pictures, but I think that it’s a good showcase for data analysis. They’ve done extensive research and they’re using it to give advice to their users = users get more successful results from the site = spreading the word to friends = more money for the business.

The 2 in 100 who might matter most - your core web audience (Seb Chan)

Seb Chan from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum provides an example of how he looks deeper in to the museum’s site traffic data to realise that 2% of people are visiting the site 10 or more times in a quarter.

  • “Whilst we all like the big figures of casual visitors we get to our websites many institutions, having flirted with social media, we are beginning to realise that casual visitors, much like casual visitors through the door of a museum, aren’t so useful for building sustained co-creative relationships with.”
  • “This 2.10% is one that needs a lot more analysis as does the ‘5 or more’ category. How do they arrive at our site? What are they looking for? What do they spend most time looking at?”

Analysis Ninjas: Move Beyond The Top Ten. Find Love (/Insights) (Avinash Kaushik)

  • “You know what is the one thing stopping you from finding truly actionable insights from your web data? Web analytics gems lie deep in the data and we spend our lives looking at the top ten rows of data.”

This article encourages investigation of the long tails in site traffic data to pin-point opportunities and shows how to make sense of what at first might seem like data overload. Avinash provides examples of how to apply advanced table filtering in Google Analytics, generate tag clouds (I’ve given this a try with a client’s search keyword data and it sprouted some very useful visuals), and how to set up keyword trees with Juice Analytics.

Back to Basics: Tip for exporting rows (Google Analytics blog)

This is a brief tutorial to show that while Google Analytics allows you to export up to 500 rows of data normally,   to export more (eg. all your search keyword terms) you can add &limit=xxxx (where xxxx is a number more than the total number of results) to the URL and then download the CSV to retrieve all the data.

Charting the Beatles (Michael Deal)

Beautiful infographics [swoon] !

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Posted in business, content, information architecture, user experience | No Comments »