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Posts Tagged ‘interaction’

Second-degree conference value* from UX Australia

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Although I didn’t make it to (what sounded like an amazing) UX Australia conference in Canberra the other week, I’ve been learning from the presentations that have been posted so far on Slideshare.

I haven’t looked through all of them but here are a few particular presentations and my notes about points I found useful:

  • Uxau09 More Content Quality B - David More
    Looks at how to develop collaborative/useful information architecture in complex organisation with plenty of stakeholders; and getting non-expert authors to generate content.
  • Emerging a User Experience Strategy - Penny Hagen
    An example about the process in creating a user experience for UNSW.
  • Experience Visions: A Case Study - Fred Randell
    About experience visions and dealing with Telstra, which provides good tips for dealing with large/complex organisations/developments.
  • More, Better, Faster! Agile Design for Fun & Profit - Matt Balara
    A useful overview of agile development. There’s a short case-study from slide 57 onwards about the redevelopment of the ecco shoes web site which visually shows the process.
  • Design For Multiple Touchpoints - Shane Morris
    Has some information about the process behind developing the Lonely Planet Surface, and includes information about how people interact with things they can touch (which can also relate to iphones, mobiles, screens, etc)
  • Ka-chunk! When customer experience design fails and how to avoid it - Joel Flom
    I like the general statements in this presentation, and the diagrams on Slides 21 and 22 showing balance between business, customer and implementation.

* “second-degree conference value” is a quote from UX Australia organiser, Steve Baty, when I referred to how much I was learning without being there.

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Posted in business, content, information architecture, user experience | 2 Comments »

Gravatars for amateurs

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
Gravatars

Examples of gravatars

This blog is powered by a recent version of Wordpress which now displays images alongside some people’s comments. I’ve seen these small custom graphics accompanying posts and comments on blogs for a while but now with my own blog making use of them it was time to investigate further. A right-click to check the properties on someone’s graphic pointed me to gravatar.com.

Gravatars are “globally recognized avatars”. When you post or comment at certain blogs with an email address you’ve registered with gravatar.com, your chosen avatar will automatically appear with your text.

With some help from the super-quick support team at wordpress.com (which is somehow connected with the gravatar user account process) I was able to setup my own account, assign a few of my most common email addresses, and now my comments around the blogosphere will display the avatar of my choice.

Use of gravatars helps to brand your online activities. Some people maintain consistent avatars across Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. Being able to use the same avatar in blog posts provides additional visual queues to people already aware of you, or you can draw interest from strangers and stand out from the crowd based on your choice of avatar.

Brands that monitor and comment on blogs would do well to set up a gravatar that includes a logo or product image. Used appropriately it can create brand awareness and provide a level of authenticity to comments.

For more information, take a look at:

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Posted in business, social media | No Comments »

Provide access to information

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

The Foster’s Cascade Green beer web site presents a standard “Are you over 18?” question before allowing you to proceed to the content. Oddly however there is a footnote stating that “In entering this site you agree to the terms & conditions” but it doesn’t provide a link to view the site’s terms & conditions.

Agree to Terms and Conditions

Agree to Terms and Conditions

If you decide to take the plunge and hope that you haven’t just agreed to handover your first born, the site itself has a “Terms & Conditions” link in the footer but clicking it takes you to the “Privacy Policy”.

Dudd link

Dudd link

I had a look around the site and could not find the “Terms & Conditions”. Here’s hoping Foster’s don’t turn up one day requesting my first born..

Lesson: don’t ask people to agree to something without giving them easy access to information related to that agreement.

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Posted in content | No Comments »

Flickrd Skittles

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Following on from yesterday’s observations on the skittles.com experiment, today their Flickr account has been presumably deleted.

Yesterday the Skittles site’s “Pics” link showed the Skittles overlay on a Flickr user account displaying a handful of pretty product shots (a screenshot can be found at this Flickr discussion).  Today that same link instead goes to a Flickr search results page for the word “skittles”, bringing up user generated pictures. Yesterday’s user account appears to have disappeared.

Either someone within the Skittles project has realised that their use of Flickr in this way is against the terms of use (commercial use must be approved by Flickr), or Flickr has pulled the plug.

It’s quite strange that with the presumed intention to promote user generated content by setting the Skittles home page to show the “skittles” twitter search results, they originally opted to show their own content from Flickr.

Regardless, here’s the lesson: if you’re going to use content from outside of your own creation, or interfere with another site, read the fine print and contact the owners before proceeding.

skittles search on Flickr

skittles search on Flickr

Here’s another piece of commentary on the site:

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Posted in social media | No Comments »

Bouncing off the Skittles buzz

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

I’ve seen a lot of emails, twitter messages, and blog posts today about the new skittles.com web site which is a portal to Skittles related content from twitter, flickr, youtube, facebook and wikipedia. Skittles has opened up their brand to be described by the people who want to talk about it. And with the new hype, that conversation is taking some odd turns.

There’s no point quoting the obvious stabs that some people are inflicting with the realisation that they can have their 15 minutes 2 seconds of fame on the Skittles “home page”, but other companies are taking the initiative to hijack the hype to spread word about themselves such as this tweet:

twitter message

Skittles twitter hijack

And I’m all for limiting/stopping the marketing of junk food to kids but would you really expect to find a Date of Birth question visiting a confectionary web site and have to shield your kids from seeing the site for fear of what they might read (currently a couple of obsceneties per search page)?

Skittles and kids

Skittles and kids

I’m certain that after the initial rush the excitement will die down and the crude tweets will decrease. Maybe the Skittles Wikipedia page (which looks rather carefully crafted) will skip mass defacing … maybe.

Brave move, and I look forward to seeing how things progress. At the least they’ve suddenly got people talking about their little sweets, social media and user generated content.

A couple of more extensive pieces of commentary on the Skittles approach:

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Posted in social media | 3 Comments »

NSW KM Forum - Online Communities

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

These are my notes from the NSW KM Forum’s “Online Communities - Making It Happen” event that was held tonight at the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney.

These are not verbatim quotes from the presenters. They are my jotted notes and may contain misrepresentation of ideas, or may mislead due to the lack of context.

Presentation 1: Angela Beesley
Vice-President of Community Relations for Wikia Inc and chair of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Twitter: @wikiangela

  • Wikipedia is a global community.
  • The 1% rule applies to Wikipedia. Approximately 1% of visitors are contributors.
  • More edits = better quality. Wikipedia would like to encourage more edits.
  • Wiki syntax has been a barrier to participation.
  • Community dispute resolution is important.  Develop a resolution process. Wikipedia learned this painfully and is still working on the process.
  • Encourage new community members.  Make them feel welcome.
  • The first steps of new community members should be easy.

From the Q&A after her presentation:

  • Wikipedia has terms of use that state that companies should not edit their own content due to a conflict of interest (I wasn’t aware of this and have mixed feelings about it - obviously you don’t want every company/product page to be a marketing spiel but some facts about companies may be best explained from within).
  • HP setup a wikia wiki around a product successfully.
  • World of Warcraft is one of the largest wikia wikis with around 70,000 articles.


Presentation 2: Christy McCarthy
Community Relations Manager for WorldNomads.
Twitter: @crustyadventure

  • WorldNomads began as just a travel insurance company.
  • In 2005, WorldNomads established the not-for-profit Footprints Network - while purchasing travel insurance people could choose to contribute ($2 I think). They’ve raised $600,000 for charity since then.
  • Customers were thankful for the ease of the contribution process, being able to make a difference.
  • In 2006 they setup a blogging platform for people to document their travels.
  • The travel blogs bring in visitors via search engines and attract people who might not even know the brand.
  • In 2006, they created podcasts for learning the basics of a range of languages based on the top destinations of their community and their community’s top requested languages. These were provided for free and attracted a lot of downloads.
  • The audio files used in the podcasts have now been re-purposed for iPhones and are available for free from the iPhone App store. 5 of the top travel apps are WorldNomads language apps which provide exposure of the WorldNomads name. (I wanted to double-check this from home - the reference is that WorldNomad has 5 places in the top 20 free travel apps in the App Store)
  • Travel Scholarships demonstrate the passion for the travel industry and provides great content.
  • In 2008 they knew their community was also active on Flickr and Youtube. Learning to communicate with these channels has been a new thing.
  • Be open to new discoveries.
  • Twitter brought the biggest surprise they never imagined providing not only B2C but B2B interactions.
  • It takes time to create community.


Presentation 3: Mark Pollard
Strategy Director, McCann Sydney and CEO of Stealth Magazine.
Twitter: @markpollard

  • Topic was “7 Things You Can Learn From Hip Hop” (I’ve seen this presentation in a condensed format previously at Ignite Sydney).
  • In 2008 Stealth Magazine had 200k visitors.
  • Mark has been experimenting with the blog, checking reaction.
  • Pay your dues. Understand your scene.
  • Understand dynamics of influence.  Look for the constructive.
  • Keep it real always. He found that if he posted under his own name rather than a handle/username/nickname he felt more accountable for his comments on the message board.
  • Anonymity isn’t cool. Seeding isn’t cool. Whisper campaigns aren’t cool. Getting paid to talk is wrong.  Instead invest in long term relationships.
  • Healthy beef and disagreement can help communities.
  • It’s okay to step back from the community.
  • Don’t worry about negative comments. Groups are mostly optimistic (I found the Bazaarblog graph that Mark displayed).
  • Let people self moderate.
  • Don’t forget to step away from the computer. Offline makes online more fulfilling.

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