Improving the user experience

I’m going to begin this entry a little off-topic, at least as far as the title goes; I was discussing browsers and ‘the browser war’ with a friend the other day when it seemed that I was, for some reason, ignoring my own advice, which was that everyone interested in speed should use Google Chrome. I was saying how I knew (‘knew’ in the sense that I had read in a number of reasonably reputable sources) that Chrome was faster than Firefox which in turn was faster than IE, and yet I persisted in using Firefox. We speculated whether Google had grown large and popular enough for my personality to turn away from the corporation, but of course realized this was false since (so far, at least) I love everything that Google does and, really, it’s getting kind of scary how much I trust them right now. My friend asked if I used Firefox extensions – of course, I said, they are great – and that of course was the true reason why I had tried Chrome and liked it but turned back to Firefox. Which is not to say that Google Chrome does not have its own extensions and plugins – it’s just that I am well-versed in the extensions of Firefox and so are my friends and colleagues, in which case there are too many productivity related (and, for that matter, non-productivity related) issues for me to switch to Chrome.

And this brings me to the topic of improving the user experience. First, let me say that I am about to whole-heartedly plug my favourite extension to date, because it has truly improved my user experience of browsing the internet, and that I will say right now everyone should be using this thing because it is really that great. The thing is called Ubiquity.

I will say a few things about it first, and then I encourage you to watch the video which I have (hopefully!) embedded correctly below.  (On that note, if anyone knows why I am so far unable to embed things in wordpress, please let me know.)  Ubiquity is about improving the way in which we interact with the internet.  The idea of the project is to create more  of a flow experience in that what you want to do online should really take as few keystrokes as possible – consider Ubiquity a shortcut to a less impressive but still amazing future not unlike the kind of object manipulation and interaction Hollywood has presented to us in films like Minority Report.  So, for example, if someone wants to meet you at a certain location and sends an address to you in an email, you should be able to press one or two keys and have a map of that place in front of you.  Ditto for adding that date to your calendar.  The idea (in my mind at least) is to create shortcuts that get away from the ol’ highlight text, copy, google search, click link, paste, hit enter etc. of yesterday and to get us closer to a future of true object and data manipulation in real-time.

From the Ubiquity about page itself:

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

While Ubiquity isn’t perfect, the great thing about it is that it exists today, it’s easy to install and use, it is fully customizable meaning you can program your own shortcuts (or mashups), and it really changes the way you think about all the little actions that make up everything you do online, at least in the sense that everything has a process, an order to it, which taken collectively makes the browser experience a series of repeated interactions and iterations that lack the level of interactivity that many of us have come to expect from the promise of a tomorrow that is never far off yet never quite comes into sharp relief.  The title of one of my favourite blogs sums it up best – Where’s my Jetpack?

more about “Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introdu…“, posted with vodpod

The second design and user experience thing on my mind can really only be seen to be understood, and so I will once again try to embed a TED talk onto this site.  This gets a lot closer to the Minority Report ideal, but of course, while this thing exists, unlike Ubiquity it does not exist (yet) for you and me to use.  But it is definitely worth a viewing and it is less than 9 minutes long.  It is entitled Unveiling the ‘Sixth Sense,’ game changing wearable tech and it is presented by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry, of the aptly-named Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab.

more about “Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense | V…“, posted with vodpod

My guess is neither of these will embed properly so I have, quite amazingly, used foresight and added links to each video.  Ubiquity’s is here and Patti Maes is here.  Man, I really can’t wait for the future when I can simply think and have a blog entry appear online.  Good times ahead folks.

What free online productivity tools do you use? Do you know of any other demonstrations of human-computer interaction that could change the way we use technology in the future?

Refresh!

Since my last post, I:

- finished the MBA program (and won an academic scholarship!)

- visited friends and family in Saskatchewan over Christmas

- moved into a huge beautiful house (photos are here)

- have made progress toward all of my new year goals

- have started running again

In any case, a lot of things have changed, most of which I am very, very happy about.  So it seemed time to update this blog and get things rolling again.  I’ll probably even revive my own more personal blog at lines can haunt you, and then see if I can get about a post a week into each blog.  It’ll be a bit of a tough goal considering how long it has been since I wrote regularly for either blog, but it is definitely achieveable with the proper will and discipline.  So it begins.

Welcome back.

Review: Click – What Millions of People Do Online and Why it Matters, by Bill Tancer

As the full title suggests, Click is full of fascinating facts about our collective web browsing behaviour.  It poses problems for marketing managers that puzzle the mind and provides solutions that make sense only after the fact – in a way, this book is like Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy – but of course for the online marketing, rather than physical retail world.

The central tenet to Tancer’s book is that he identifies the internet search (usually google) as our new collective confidante; because we are relatively anonymous on the web, we feel free to ask (and therefore tell) google everything.  Because we feel so anonymous we get away from the problems that research from surveys cannot avoid – people don’t need to consciously report how they feel about a certain subject, it is simply an observable behaviour at a time when the participant probably feels they are not being observed in any meaningful way.  All one needs to do is reflect on all of the different search strings one has entered into google to realize the rich data that could result from everything that follows.  

Obviously, this would be somewhat meaningless on a small scale – but aggregating and anonymizing data across a large and representative swath of the US population, Hitwise (the internet data analysis company he works for) has created a powerful tool that can be used to predict and understand otherwise unobservable human behaviour – retail or otherwise.  The data is very rich – subsets and profiles can be created to drill down and unearth more relevant data to particular businesses and industries.  Chapter by chapter Tancer takes us through baffling conundrums that we are able to observe through data but which do not make sense without serious analysis.  

For example, why is January the most popular month for “prom dress” searches in the United States when the big dance isn’t until June and dresses are normally advertised by retailers in March/April/May?  Tancer’s probing questions and thought processes walk us through the strangeness of the data and ultimately illuminates the reason – certain popular teen magazines (like Teen Vogue) have pushed forward their prom issues to December – this of course was known, but not that it might change buyer behaviour to such a degree.  This recent behavioural change has created an opportunity for dress retailers to help their potential customers make a decision and get acquainted with their styles, and Tancer’s data has helped remove a market inefficiency that remained in place because of ‘conventional wisdom’, which said that if purchase is made in May and June, your marketing should start in March, not January.  

However, for all the interesting tidbits in Click, there are certain problems with Tancer’s presentation of alternate hypotheses (or lack thereof) to explain perplexing data.  This is not to say they don’t exist or that he hasn’t considered them, only that they do not always appear within the margins and so one is left to wonder whether they exist at all or if this book is simply directed at the millions of readers who are looking for an entertaining read without the diligence required to confirm what truths this book proposes.  For example, Tancer illustrates the difference in our collectively reported phobias through a large sample size survey and what google tells us about ourselves.  Of course, the difference is quite striking; Tancer assumes the survey data is misleading because we are afraid to admit, even to a voice on a telephone, that which most makes us tremble.  This is a valid point – undoubtedly, whether conscious or not, we probably will not tell anyone exactly what it is we are afraid of, especially if it might be seen as weird.  But upon inspection, the top nine fears the survey gathered (which include bugs, heights, water, public transportation and closed spaces, to name a few) the potential for availability bias seems quite rampant as well – these are things that most people see and are in contact with everyday – so what am I afraid of?  Buses, of course.  This doesn’t undermine the wealth of data he has amassed on what google is fed (where the number three fear is reportedly clowns), but intent is still unclear in many cases – am I exercising the demons of some dark fear in my soul or am I simply interested in what a fear of clowns might be like because I saw it on an episode of Seinfeld?  In any case, what the data lacks in explaining why we google what we do, it makes up for in entertainment value (fear of being touched on the neck and fear of the theory of relativity being two of my favorites).

In the end, the book is both too general and too specific to be of great use to the average online marketeer (though it is a must read for those in the prom dress industry); if there is one great lesson to learn it is to forget about your assumptions – just hire Hitwise to confirm or disconfirm whatever it is you think you might know about your customers.  There is one chapter, however, that is a must-read to all managers of Web 2.0-related sites (which, as user generated content and interaction increases across websites and market segment, will soon be just about everyone).  In Chapter 7 Tancer dispels the 80/20 Pareto rule that regularly applies to many things business, and in its place gives us (by way of Jakob Nielson – father of web usability studies) the 1-9-90 rule.  One percent of users will generate ~99% of content while nine percent generate just 1% and the remaining 90%, the so-called “lurkers,” will only consume whatever is there to be digested.  That’s some food for thought when considering how to attract and keep customers or users of your service if their participation, or maybe your reputation, is required.  Who those 1-10% are, and how to get them, is another matter.