Perry

Hewitt

Month: July 2013

  • The science of website design

    The science of website design

    Few would dispute that website design is a creative exercise. A recent study by Katharina Reinecke and colleagues [PDF] would imply that there’s some interesting, quantifiable science baked in as well. Both common sense and studies confirm that users judge a site’s appeal within seconds. Reinecke et al. offer some compelling findings on how visual complexity and colorfulness play into that initial judgement.

    The researchers found visual complexity to be a significant factor in initial appeal. Low-to-medium complexity in the visual design translated into more positive initial impression. Apparently, preference for low visual complexity is notable for viewers over the age of 45. (Anecdotally, I’ve observed this as a similar cutoff age for tolerance of an endless scroll.)

    color wheelThe study also analyzed reactions to colorfulness, measured in part by distribution of colors in an image and composition of adjacent colors (the complementary colors effect). Overall, colorfulness was found to be a less important driver of visual appeal at first impression.

    The researchers also captured and analyzed demographic data. Findings included that while age correlated with preference for low-medium visual complexity, education level interacted more significantly with colorfulness. Gender did not play a major role in either visual complexity or colorfulness, and the study indicated that further research is required to better understand the role of native language and aesthetic rating.

    The process of creating website design remains highly creative and subjective. Great design, to a degree, follows Justice Stewart’s dictum: “I know it when I see it.” But the more we can understand and quantify the specific elements that form an initial and lasting impression, the better user experience we can create.

    Photo credit: Victor Hertz

  • Friday 5 — 07.26.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Facebook’s Q2 numbers are in and the company appears to have mastered mobile ads — which now make up 41% of ad revenue.
    2. Google delivered Chromecast, a device that lets you watch the web on your TV for $35, and competes with the likes of Apple TV and Roku. Its approach is fundamentally different, though, using your smartphone as the interface for the TV experience.
    3. YouTube releases customizable subscribe buttons to allow users to follow channels from anywhere. It’s another way to promote the high-value content channels, channels you might develop a fondness for and watch on your TV screen via, say, Chromecast.
    4. Flipboard affirmed its position as both distributor and competitor to its content providers by launching a web-based version of the service. Publishers have used Flipboard to reach audiences on iPad, but may have questions about a web-based version that runs ads like their own sites.
    5. Visiting your parents this summer? Just how many times do you think you’ll see them before they die? This app offers up a best guess based on WHO health statistics — and provides great material for guilt-purveying mothers everywhere.
  • How to staff an effective social team

    How to staff an effective social team

    Good post from Jerry Kane on the difference between strategic and procedural social media practitioners. The former group understands your business and its vision, and the latter are the digital natives, expert in the tactical usage and what’s next on the horizon. The strategic team members have experiential business knowledge; the procedural pros have the digital muscle memory that informs both gestures and interface expectations. Clearly, age serves as a useful proxy for this divide.

    Social media can enhance the status quo, or disrupt and advance business goals. If your organization’s social media is only a vehicle for news releases, a procedural approach can inform choices of the best technical tools, hashtag usage, and posting times. But if you want to use social media to change what you are doing alongside how you are doing it, cultivate strategic capabilities for your social team as well.

    gratuitous dog photoA concrete example: if you are a high-end pet care company, you can amplify your communications with a procedural approach to going social. Develop an Instagram program that posts your pet grooming success stories, and ride or create a hashtag for people to share similar photos. Create and actively curate a Facebook page with a system of recognition and prizes, and empower local moderators for that page.

    But if your pet care company vision is growth into new revenue streams, you may want to take a more strategic approach to social. Think about offering your customers a sponsored sharing marketplace for your customer community to exchange good and services from crate exchanges to cat-sitting. In return for advancing a “collaborative economy” community, your company gains access to new, younger markets, and intelligence into demand for emerging products and services. This is a uniquely social opportunity, tied to your overall business vision.

    As Kane points out from his teaching, “Classes that include both types of students are often more effective than either one taught separately.” The power of the mixed-capability team holds true in a business setting as well. Build a social team with procedural and strategic capabilities combined to avoid the pitfalls of silos and hierarchies. You’ll end up with a social-enabled organization that’s less reliant on a SWAT team and more aligned with your business goals.

  • Emerging law for data inheritance

    More broadly, America’s Uniform Law Commission, a non-partisan group that creates model legislation that is then adopted unchanged by many American states, has a “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets” committee working on amendments to existing ULC laws that would give executors many of the same powers over digital assets that they have over financial and physical ones, while absolving service providers of any liability. These adjustments could be incorporated into some states’ laws as soon as 2015, though some federal fiddles may be required as well. In her paper, Ms Perrone notes that such uniformity would mean that “people would no longer have to rely on companies’ varying terms of use to determine how to manage digital assets.” When dealing with death, a little certainty can be a great comfort.

     

    – The Economist reports on “Who owns your data when you’re dead.” Good summary of a recent paper and legal progress on how to distribute data post-mortem in a world with a couple thousand years of familiarity with the concept of physical asset inheritance.

  • Friday 5 — 07.19.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Game development company Valve continues to think different. This week it launched Pipeline, an experimental project to introduce high school students with minimal experience to the video game development industry.
    2. Is user experience finally moving beyond the tech domain and being perceived as a strategic business asset? Robert Fabrikant describes how UX is the new black.
    3. A Pew survey finds that middle and high school teachers believe that students’ use of digital tools encourages creativity and personal expression (78%) as well as greater collaboration among students (79%). Regrettably, this doesn’t always translate into effective writing, and teachers expressed concern about students’ ability to “read and digest long or complicated texts.”
    4. Readwrite describes how to get the most out of Google+, with a good explanation of its different (and clever) hashtag behaviors. I still believe the unintuitive navigation poses a barrier to widespread adoption, and that community is hard to cultivate without that critical mass.
    5. Twitter released a gorgeous data visualization of all the verified accounts. It’s colored by category: blue for news, purple for government and politics, red for music, yellow for sports, and green for TV. You can zoom in close to see the verified account names. The yellow patch bottom right shows sports accounts in with music and TV at bottom right — at first glance, it looks like mixed martial arts tweeters are making a big media splash.
  • How to manage deceptive online reviews

    How to manage deceptive online reviews

    reviewVia Bits Blog, an academic study on deceptive reviews explores why web reviewers make up bad things. It turns out that false negative reviews are not written predominantly by competitors or disgruntled employees. These reviewers are often loyal customers who have made multiple purchases from the company — just not the product in question. Customers writing false reviews may be upset about a different transaction, see themselves as “self-appointed brand managers,” or be seeking social status and validation in a public forum.

    The paper offers some recommendations for those designing business rules for review sites to consider:

    • reduce social status ties to reviewing like “elite reviewer”
    • stop reporting every user’s number of reviews
    • make it more difficult to see all reviews by one reviewer
    • require prior purchase of the product before writing the review

    False reviews provide a terrific example of unintended consequences, like these unexpected benefits and perils of showing quantifiable metrics like a user’s number of reviews. Review sites are communities where human primate behaviors, as one colleague likes to call them, tend to inflate rather than retract. It’s clearly worth investing time upfront in experience design to increase the likelihood of legitimate reviews, and ongoing analytics to spot the trends surrounding the deceptive ones. You might want to leave just a little room for gaming the system, though: the 4,288 reviews of the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer are priceless.

  • Google Reader, you still autocomplete me

    Google Reader, you still autocomplete me

    Google autocomplete

    Google Reader may be nearly two weeks gone, but Google Chrome’s autocomplete feature just took me back to our 7+ year, highly co-dependent relationship. Reminder: you have until tomorrow (12pm PST July 15, 2013) to download a copy of your Google Reader data via Google Takeout.

    Where should you go from here? Some people aren’t replacing their readers at all, where others view this time as an unexpected RSS renaissance. I’ve been deep in feedly for a while, but look forward to checking out digg.

  • Friday 5 — 07.12.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. What would reddit be without GIFs? Buzzfeed asks if imgur is not-so-stealthily taking over reddit from the inside.
    2. Coursera brought in $43 million in an allegedly oversubscribed round — raising their total VC funding to $66 million. Goals are to grow team, expand into mobile, and improve third party integration.
    3. The Washington Post reports on new research on women leaders and the Goldilocks syndrome. Still a double bind between being assertive and acquiescent, but some progress in perception of the assertive.
    4. For those of you obsessed with productivity hacks, IFTTT goes mobile with an iPhone app. Who knew back in sixth grade math that if-then statements would be an important part of daily life?
    5. Hard to believe that it was only five years ago that Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors. Here’s a recap of some of the significant advances during that half-decade, like the creation of a $10 billion new industry, and impact of a mobile workforce on enterprise IT practices.

  • Try it: Visualize your gmail network

    immersion graph of gmailUse gmail? You might want to try MIT Media Lab’s immersion, a terrific service that maps your email correspondence through metadata and provides you with a clear view of your email networks and correspondence habits over time. The colored clusters above reveal my own family, friend, and colleague configurations over 8.5 years of gmail use. You can segment by time period, which lets you juxtapose your shifting networks with personal or professional events like a wedding or a job change. Sliders allow you to increase or reduce the number of nodes or links among them viewed. You can choose to view or hide the node display names — I’ve chosen to hide them here to protect the innocent.

    node network chartA drill down feature allows you to see your network from the perspective of a single node. In this case I have singled out Melyssa Plunkett-Gomez (the orange dot in the middle), a former colleague from Crimson Hexagon and now a friend. The lines radiate out from Melyssa to individuals in colored network clusters, which are identified by the frequency of correspondence among the group. The width of the line indicates frequency of the messages.

    Sidebar content quantifies our mutual correspondence statscorrespondence back and forth over the years, and it’s easy to see the volume peak during our time as colleagues. A section not shown here shows who introduced us to each other  (no one — that transaction occurred in Facebook, not gmail), and lists the people Melyssa has introduced me to over the years.

    This post skims the surface of a complex and illuminating tool. The death of email continues to be predicted, but it seems inevitable that the way we manage it have to get better. Analyzing the metadata to reveal and understand the networks and patterns in our correspondence is an intriguing first step.

  • .nyc enters the domain name fray

    nyc domainJust over a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts about generic top level domains (gTLDS) — what people were applying for, and the risks of domain expansion.

    Last week Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced .nyc, a top level domain the city will make available only to NYC-based businesses and residents. The theory is that a high-rent, sought-after internet domain is a brand benefit, and an opportunity for NYC-based businesses. There are still a number of legitimate questions about the both the execution and the benefit, but it’s an interesting effort in the context of Bloomberg’s broader digital innovation legacy.

    On the coattails of this announcement, GoDaddy announced a marketing effort to push Los Angeles firms to adopt the .la domains. Unlike the newly approved .nyc, the domain is already available, and assigned to Laos. Not sure how much traction this will get as a non-exclusive offer without alignment to broader digital city initiatives.

    Is there value in .nyc and other city-based geographic domains promoting locale as brand? Or will knowing domain names become a charming anachronism, like knowing telephone numbers (1-800-54-GIANT, anyone?) before an age of one-click mobile Yelp and speed dial? Traffic referrals today come primarily from search and social, with mobile social on a rapid rise. If I had a relative investment to make, I would prioritize optimizing for social before the additional domain, but am curious to see who opts for both.