Piers Jones

Covering #uksnow with Twitter

2010-01-07T12:03:19+00:00

I enjoyed being a small part of the Guardian News blog coverage of the snow across the UK today. The editorial team included a component on the page which looked for tweets from a selected list of twitter accounts when the hashtag #uksnow was included. So having been included on the list I had the opportunity to send a few tweets with that hashtag and let more people than usual know about the delights of my daily commute.

It was a quick, effective and relatively easy way of showing real time coverage of an event that had an impact across a wide area. Alongside the UK Snow map which shows pictures submitted to twitter with a postcode, I thought it was a really cool way to cover the big freeze.

Magazines on a tablet

2010-01-05T12:31:47+00:00

With the arrival of hardware like tablet PCs people will be able to consume news and media in new ways that build on how they read print but take advantage of the capabilities of online.

I can't help thinking that the iphone user interface has had a major part to play in shaping how that might look for the next few years.

I like this concept for reading magazine content on a tablet called Mag+ from from Bonnier and can imagine myself reading a magazine like this on the train. What do you think?

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

thanks to one man and his blog for finding this over a coffee

A summary of User Experience in 2009

2009-10-13T09:47:22+01:00

For those interested in Product Development and User Experience, this is a good summary of how User Experience design has evolved from the Information Architect, Jesse James Garret.

Its quite a long video and quite heavy on theory but worth the effort if you have half an hour to set aside.

Jesse James Garrett | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Twitterjobsearch

2009-07-07T16:33:19+01:00

A relatively new job aggregator twitterjobsearch is pulling together all the jobs posted to twitter across the web. In this interview with Robert Scoble, cofounder Willaim Fischer claims that in the past month twitterjobsearch have used natural language search to publish 280k unique job vacancies to their site, making it one of the top five job boards in the world by jobs volume already.

found on cheezehead

Talking to users of your product

2009-06-17T16:57:14+01:00

It goes without saying that the more people that you talk to that actually use your product, the closer you are going to get to understanding what they need. Then you stand some kind of chance of delivering a product that actually meets those needs. However its very easy to forget to do that as often as you should and get wrapped up in the process of delivering products instead.

In my experience as a Product Manager to date I've found a variety of ways of taking feedback from users in order to improve the quality of what is delivered. There are times when pouring over web stats or undertaking formal usability testing is exactly what is called for. Sometimes though its just good to get out of the office and go and talk to people.

Today I tried out a new and very easy way of gathering product insight by using some software called Silverbackapp. I had know about this software for a while but never actually used it in the wild so to speak.

Its very very simple, you can talk to website users and as you have a conversation with them the software records the on-screen activity as well as filming a video of people's reaction to the product. This all plays back in a video at the end.

With the expert help of Martin Belam - we recorded quite a number of sessions today from website users. I hope the results will help us design some improvements to the product we were discussing based on those insights. I would recommend silverback app to anyone wanting to try more informal testing of their product - as well as recommending that getting out from behind your desk and talking to real customers is a really worthwhile thing to do for anyone in product development. You learn a great deal for free, just by asking.

Here's a video explaining silverbackapp in more detail:

Web Trend Map 4

2009-04-09T10:03:46+01:00

Web Trend Map 4 Final Beta, originally uploaded by formforce.

A new version of the web trend map, just in and well worth a look.

Via information architects

Essential strategies for creating a successful web product from Dion Hinchcliffe

2009-01-27T10:00:47+00:00

There is some excellent advice from Dion Hinchcliffe in this article outlining '50 essential strategies for creating a successful web 2.0 product'

Although web 2.0 is mentioned in the title I think these ideas could apply to most online products, especially "start by solving a simple problem".

I have a feeling that this is one of those reference articles that I may have to come back to from time to time. Its a great checklist.

The history of the internet video

2009-01-08T11:20:05+00:00

Apologies if you have seen this already, but this 'history of the internet' video is well worth a look and very nicely animated.

I had never realised that the evolution of the internet owes so much to the cold war.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

via information aesthetics

a nice cup of tea

2008-11-13T15:34:32+00:00

a nice cup of tea, originally uploaded by vanilla.sky.

Tired of the recession? Find yourself a nice cup of tea...

This feed taken from from the main Guardian website and then filtered using feedrinse does not contain any of the following keywords:

Recession, Credit Crunch, Downturn, Unemployment

How to send an RSS feed to your email account

2008-10-30T10:28:30+00:00

From the RSS Blog a new and very simple service which allows you to send a website's RSS news feed to your email account called http://www.feedmyinbox.com

Great idea

UPDATE:

some additional tools that do this

mail chimp provides rss to email updates

A similar service to feed my inbox called feedmailer

If you know of any more please add them to the comments below