So, I gave my Facebook ID, waited for the invitation, downloaded the browser…

… and then I saw the Facebook Connect permission screen.

RockMelt Facebook permission screen

As much as I wanted to try this. There is no way I would consciously face such a screen and click “allow” for something I never got to try first and that I had time building trust with.

So. Here it is… My quick test of RockMelt… sorry if it appears shallow… )

PS: Woh… I posted something on my blog! YEEHAA! Let’s see if I can keep doing it.

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The Talk: Digital, Life, Design 2010: Audience Sourcing
Speakers: Tim Kring (”Heroes”) and Peter Hirshberg (The Conversation Group)
Duration: 27 minutes

Build around a strong message

Remember that one liner summarizing your vision that some consultant or trainer asked you to come up with. Well, that’s really useful to have. Heroes was created around the message: “Save the world”. This message was not only used in the series, but also in communications and activities organized around the series, with ultimately a game developed to get people to do good. Whether it is internally with your employees or externally with your customers, this message will help unite everyone and give a personality to the experience people have with your company.

Whether there exist a written version of this vision or not, all companies have one. Companies communicates this vision or identity through all its channels and making a conscious effort to phrase it and work with it makes a real big difference. As such this vision should be realistic in the sense that it reflects the nature of the organization. If it does not, it won’t resonate with employees and customers.

A strong vision is necessary so that innovation can happen. Many companies around are afraid to set a vision as it is seen as reducing the scope of possible ideas generated, but the truth is that not all ideas are good for a company. There is a crucial difference between ideas and innovation. For the “right” ideas to be uncovered, employees and customers have to be helped to the right path. The vision helps innovation.

Surrender some control to your customers

The vision set for a company has to be specific enough to inspire people, but it has to be opened enough as well to leave space for innovation and idea generation. This vision is not there to ensure the company will keep 100% control over its identity, it’s here to ensure the brand evolves in the right direction.

And this is the second important point. Now, branding as mentioned in the talk is not a one-way street. It is definitely a two way street and companies need to adjust their strategies to this environment. Allowing your customers to participate in the brand is scary, but by turning them into brand ambassadors it is also a huge opportunity. For Heroes, the community is encouraged to come up with artwork around the series, and pirating of TV episodes although not encouraged of course, is tolerated as a reality of life. In this second instance, the multi-channel approach helps monetizing these customers using different means instead of getting stuck on one dysfunctional touchpoint.

Stay close to your customer

That’s where user experience or design thinking comes in. In order to implement such an approach, it is necessary to stay as close as possible to your customers. To do so, a community was key to Heroes and their series, but in case of a company in general other tools should be used to keep this strong connection. An open channel for front-line staff to report their observations of customers  is always a very important component of this strategy. Other tools like ethnographic research, testing or other qualitative and quantitative techniques come in handy.

In the end, the approach to user experience should be a holistic one instead of one that is driven by individual projects. True innovation does not happen on demand. The right environment has to be cultivated for it to happen.

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1. Engineers vs. Businessmen

Smashing Book by Smashing Magazine

You live in Hong Kong and you are into Web Design, you may be interested in buying Smashing Book. The book is a compilation of articles from Smashing Magazine that covers graphic design, programming, but also user experience and web strategy. It looks like a very nice reference book to have by your side.

We are organizing to bulk buy a number of copies in order to enjoy some discount on the price. The more people we can gather, the better the price can be. So, if you are interested, please drop me a message below and I will add you to our list of people interested. If we can reach at least 20 people, we will order the book.

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I finally got this opportunity back in December. Below is my a short summary of my experience with it.

Visit UserTesting.com

If I had to summarize my impressions in one word I’d choose: “Brilliant”. I was really amazed by the service offered by this company for a price that is near to nothing compared to the cost of usual research techniques.

What it is

UserTesting.com is a website that allows you to organize quick non-moderated user tests with users in the US, the UK and Australia. As a client, you basically register, enter the website you want to test, write up the tasks you want users to perform and fill in some quick user segmentation information (e.g. gender, age group, technological know-how). UserTesting will then publish your tasks to its pool of recruited users that they trained in think aloud technique. Users will in turn decide or not to take on the tasks.

The service costs $29 per user, which is a fraction of what a standard usability test costs and that includes the fee that users will receive for participating in the test.

The deliverable

What amazed me the most with this service was the speed of getting the results back. I published the test and in less than 4 hours had all 3 test videos back. Each video includes the screen recording of what the user does on the website with a synchronized audio of what they are saying (using think aloud) at that time. Video are supposed to be around 15 to 20 minutes depending on the tasks you have included in your test. In my case, videos were around 20 minutes, with one lasting 30 minutes as the user got sidetracked a bit and spend more time trying to complete the tasks.

The video deliverable is very much like a standard usability test deliverable. I found that users were pretty good at saying what they were thinking about as they were using the site. The deliverable also includes a short questionnaire, but this was quite useless in the end as the questions were too general (as of today, it is not possible to add your own questions to your study). In any case, with the speed of delivery, this opens the door to some potential extreme iterative process to improve your interface and test different design options.

What I got from it

I used the service to test a new walkthrough we implemented on GoAnimate for first time users. We included 3 users only in the study to test out the service. Basically I asked users to register on the site and head to our animation studio. Once in there our walkthrough would introduce them to the different basic feature of the studio to make sure they could start using the tool right away. I feel that this type of scenario was a great fit for using UserTesting.com. It was a straight forward linear process for users to follow that did not leave much space for users to get side-tracked. As a result, the resulting videos were really focused on the effectiveness of the interface in presenting the features of our tool.

Although all 3 users finally were able to complete all tasks, from the videos, we discovered some technical bugs that could prevent users from easily completing the walk-through. More importantly we discovered ways to improve the layout of the explanatory text and some interesting insights into how first time users might be confused by the structure and naming of things in our studio. It did not lead to any ground-breaking discovery, but did point out to really interesting issues and opened the path to more investigation into areas we had taken for granted. In this respect, the results reminded me of standard usability testing, where the results always end up revealing unexpected issues.

UserTesting vs. “Standard” Usability Testing

This said, I think I have a problem with this service taking up the name of usability testing. Personally, in almost all the usability tests I was involved in, I found that the discussion between the moderator and the user and especially the pre-test discussions always led to very interesting insights and opened new paths to improve a product. More than just testing an interface, usability tests are also an opportunity to learn more about the users and their goals. I would think that a moderated usability test that does not use this opportunity to probe more on users’ goals and motivations is missing a very important opportunity. Moderated usability testing offers great flexibility for a moderator to probe issues.

In any case, I find it very misleading to compare the price of a standard usability test and of  UserTesting’s service as they offer very different types and amounts of insights. In this sense I do not really feel UserTesting’s claim to be 1/10th of the price of competition is a valid claim. They are just not really comparable research tools. This does not change the fact though that UserTesting delivers excellent value for money.

Careful with the tasks

As I mentioned earlier, I think I used the service with a set of tasks that particularly suited the service well. It was a linear set of tasks that did not leave too many open doors for the testee to wander around. Keeping the users focused is a very important aspect of “standard” usability testing, but even more so with UserTesting.com. The user can very easily get side-tracked with an unclear or unfocused task and there will be no moderator to lead them back to the right path. This makes the service unsuitable for more holistic studies.

Conclusion

I would highly recommend UserTesting.com to anyone working on web interfaces and wanting to perform some kind of tests to gain more insights about the effectiveness of their design. It is a great and powerful tool in the hands of the right people. One needs to be very careful though that it is not a silver bullet that can replace other user research tools, and moderated usability testing especially. UserTesting.com is great to use in conjunction with other user research tools or possibly by itself for very specific design updates. Like any other research tools it can be abused, but that does not make it a lesser valuable tool anyway. A must try!

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“Aren’t people in Hong Kong and China different from the rest of the world? Don’t they like clutter and pages full of content and links? All the sites are currently designed in this way, it must mean that people like it.”

Below is a prime example of a very popular site that just overwhelms users with content and flashy stuff:

Notice how much space the navigation area takes and how many links it includes. Also note this is the gaming area of the site, but the main content inthe middle at the very top is a news digest. See it live at http://games.sina.com.cn.

So, in this article I decided to use two examples from real life to try to show that industry standards and the status quo are not always there because they are best and that with a bit of faith in the concept focusing on really pleasing the user/customer can help you make a difference.

Chinese Restaurants in Hong Kong

Hygiene has been a ubiquitous problem in Hong Kong for ages. Tales of food poisoning pop up in the newspapers regularly. Yet hygiene inspectors and the government seem totally useless in trying to solve the issue. As a result, the norm now in Hong Kong when people go to their local “Dim Sum” restaurant is to start by washing bowls, spoons and chopsticks with tea before they are deemed safe enough to eat with.

Some might point to this habit as part of the local folklore, but as a user experience practitioner I cannot help but being revolted by a situation like this. Restaurant hygiene everywhere in the world is taken for granted, so why would Hong Kong people have to be worried about it and take matter in their own hands. Is that the best solution to this problem? Will we soon have to bring our own chopsticks to restaurants because of hygiene reasons?

In Hong Kong the traditional "Dim Sum" starts with a cleaning session

Yet, everyone around is just used to this situation and now this cleaning process is part of the going to a Chinese restaurant experience, deeply embedded into people’s habits. Does it mean new restaurants should not care about hygiene in their kitchen because of the current status quo?

Real Estate practices

Hong Kong people spend a large amount of their time hunting for flats. In a sense you would think that something so important for Hong Kong people would have long been optimized so that anyone could take part in it with very little learning required. On the contrary, many rules and ways have to be learned first before hunting for a flat in Hong Kong.

One such rule concerns square footage. Simply looking at square footage on a advertisement for a flat is useless in Hong Kong. The information is only meaningful when looking at the combination of the square footage with the building where the flat is located. That’s because the advertised square footage is gross (it includes walls, public areas and lots of other things), so depending on the building where you want to purchase your flat, the net square footage might be actually somwhere between 70% and 90% of the gross one.

Knowing the real size of a flat requires learning the utilization rate in all buildings in Hong Kong. Great to train memory, but...

So, it is impossible to go out and shop for say a 800 sq. ft. apartment and just look for this number on advertisements. You have to look at flats with a higher square footage and calculate yourself depending on the utilization rate of the building what is the actual usable size of a flat. This is the standard in the industry and people who took the time to learn the rule take pride in having mastered this trick. Still, this obscure rule makes it very hard for many people to actually know the size of their apartment. Not very user friendly.

Conclusions

I see two conclusions to draw from the above two examples. First, standards are not right just because they exist. Historical factors, bad regulations or bad designers may be the reason for such standards to have appeared. If nothing is there to challenge the status quo things remain and the end user suffers, while company fail to differentiate and offer better services.

The second conclusion, very important in Asia, is that the culture here is one of adaptability. People are used to made do with what they are given, instead of rebelling against it and trying to change things. As a result (and because of many more cultural traits) it is naive to think that users or customers in general are going to openly criticize an existing situation or design. As mention above, it takes a leap of faith, but focusing on users and their needs is bound to pay off here, as everywhere else.

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3. Follow-up on user-generated content…

The “Kindle 3″

Time Inc. Tablet Demo for Sports illustrated

These videos can make us wonder whether reading, watching, listening will soon be all merged into one seamless experience around content consumption. Great sources of inspiration.

Related posts:

1. Reading Ahead: A Research by Portigal Consulting

Reading on the Kindle

In a world of ever greater device integration, ebook readers seem to be anachronisms. iPhones enable phone calls, taking pictures, web browsing, gaming, reading and much more… all in one device!

What do ebook Readers do? Well, they allow their users to … read books. So, what is so special about ebook readers that makes them an item of choice for many? And how can the ebook experience be pushed further to lure more people into purchasing them? These are the two questions I’ll focus on in this first post.

In a second post, I will focus more specifically on the Kindle interface design with its goods and bads.

Why ebook readers?

I remember two specific conversations I had after purchasing my Kindle. In one over MSN, a friend of mine showed his total incomprehension when I said I had bought a device entirely dedicated to reading books. His iPhone could be used to read documents and books. Why would anyone buy an ebook reader? And in another instance, another friend as we were discussing the Kindle with other IxDA members took out the book she was carrying and said that she could never switch from physical books to electronic ones. She mentioned the much wider array of sensory stimuli she felt as she was reading her book – its smell, the coffee stains on it, etc. (More on this in my previous post about Steve Portigal’s research)

Good for any book?

As I was trying to justify my purchase to these two friends it appeared clearly to me that ebook readers are not for everyone, and are not for every book as well. It does not make any sense at this point to purchase a design book or say a book relying heavily on visuals on the Kindle. The technology with the black and white screen is just too limited for that. But I would argue that it only takes a try to realize that for more or less any other kinds of books, an e-version is a very good option.

Good for anyone?

Then, are ebook readers for everyone? Well, in Hong Kong especially where there is very little reading culture, an ebook reader is just not going to be appealing to the mass market. People read very short articles or reports. And for that a mobile phone and a computer are very good reading tools. The great contrast and clarity of eink may not represent a huge plus. The advantages of ebook readers appear more clearly for people who read a lot of books. In my case, I have no significant bookshelf space in my small Hong Kong flat, every book I buy lies around somewhere and ends up being a burden after I finished reading it. Only books that I really enjoy and would read again find their permanent place in my home (this may actually still make me buy real books after I enjoyed reading them on the Kindle).

Giving more choice?

Another major problem – also pretty specific to Hong Kong – is that the choice of books in bookstore is very limited. Many times, Amazon.com is the only channel available to get books here and the Kindle seemed a good solution to alleviate this problem. Unfortunately, a few searches for books in the Kindle store after my purchase revealed that the Kindle’s range of choice was actually pretty limited as well, thus not solving this problem in the end.

Real-time Connectivity

Finally, and for me one of the most important feature of ebook readers is their real-time connectivity, arguably not an ebook feature, but more the fact that they have wireless connection. Now watching a show on TV, reading an article and simply walking in the street, if I see a book mentioned, I can just go on the Kindle store and download a sample of that book to see if I am interested. This really has changed the way I purchase and consider books. I now have around 10 samples on my ebook reader and one of them will be my next read. No more aimless trips to the local bookstore not knowing what to buy anymore.

So, can ebook readers get better?

My feeling since I purchased a Kindle is that this is not a mature product yet. It has great features and changes the reading experience, but it could be much more than what it is right now. There are two main points I’d like to highlight here. The first one has to do with publishers and the other one with social media.

Wake up publishers!
Since BusinessWeek stopped the Asian edition of its printed magazine to refocus on the web, I canceled my subscription. A very high price and articles less relevant to me were the main reasons. I now have resubscribed to BusinessWeek on the Kindle. The price is much more affordable and I do not have to carry any magazine around to read the articles. Still, I wish I could get my Asian version of the magazine back. If printing cost is the main issue why printed magazine are refocusing their activities, aren’t devices like the Kindle opening up a brand new low-cost store front for them? Plus, the ease of purchasing content on the Kindle, the trial periods and the scary lack of realization users have when spending money (better have great self control if you buy a Kindle) really make the Kindle a very attractive platform to sell content. Somehow, I am very ready to pay to get a magazine delivered to my Kindle rather than pay a subscription on a website to get roughly the same thing. There is a huge difference having content “delivered” to you instead of having to “go and get” it yourself.

The new paradigm of sharing
The world is changing and reading has evolve with the times. One of the biggest paradigm shift to me in recent years is the fact that doing is not enough anymore. We don’t do things for the sake of doing them anymore. The end result of what we do needs to have a “resell” value, it has to be shareable and broadcastable, it has to help us build our personal brands. Blogs, like this one, are great example of course. But the change is more profound. Kids are now publishing videos on YouTube explaining others how to use the software or game they just purchased. If nobody knows what you are doing, it seems that the value of doing that thing drops tremendously.

The same shift applies to reading and I personally see great opportunities in this space. What if reading became something we shared with everyone else? What if highlighting content in a book meant it was posted to Twitter? What if we could easily create blog posts out of the notes we took? What if we could create discussions for example on Yahoo Answers around specific aspects or paragraph of a book? What if each book would automatically have its own Ning-like social network? ebook readers and their connectivity really have the power to integrate very well into the existing ecosystem of user-generated content. It looks like Amazon’s competitors and Amazon itself are gearing up to offer more of these. Amazon just released the Kindle for PC for example which could be a great enabler for this kind of additional features.

To conclude

In terms of reading experience, I love my Kindle. I wish it would do more and I feel right now it doesn’t offer a complete experience like the iPhone does for example… but I am confident very soon it will do more and when it does I’m sure I will always keep this device close to me. And Amazon’s latest software release allowing us to read pdfs on the Kindle is a great move in the right direction.

Related posts:

1. Reading Ahead: A Research by Portigal Consulting
2. Two videos about the future of reading
3. The web auditory experience

Along with this new design, I aim at changing a bit the topics I blog about to re-centre myself on the web a lot more. As a result, expect to see more posts about web strategy, start ups, online user experience and behaviour and web design. Of course, as all good rules mean to be broken, my first posts (still being worked on) will be about the Kindle, which was released internationally about a month ago. But as Amazon released Kindle for PC, talking about the Kindle is almost on topic…

I will also try to build some more resources around the blog, especially in relation to user experience in Asia, as well as resources I use on a regular basis in my work and personal projects. Yes. Personal projects will be another aspect of this blog. I have been advising people regarding web strategy and user experience, but in the end, I only rarely put myself out there and this is about to change. With two friends, we are working on a project called go2gethr and I will be blogging about how the project is going as it unfolds.

Let me know your comments about the new design and especially tell me if you see broken stuff!
Enjoy the reading…

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Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg from Portigal Consulting just released the findings from a really interesting research study they performed on the topic called Reading Ahead (study performed out of their own interest). I strongly recommend checking out their different blog posts about this and especially listening to their findings presentation.

Basically it is so good it got me to post again after such a long time away from my blog…

Note: I won’t summarize the study here as my post is already pretty long, so to fully put my reflections below into perspective, it’s better to look at their slides and listen to their presentation first (the presentation lasts 1 hour and 20 minutes).

There are several thoughts that came to me as I was listening to the presentation. Let me try to structure a few below.

Device Integration: Loss of Important Emotional Stimuli

Steve and Dan go through a lot of impacts arising from going towards a digital reading experience. One impact they mention is the loss of a direct link between the object (the book) and a set of memories or emotions. A book is a physical object and it ages. When you see it on your shelves or take it in your hands, it will automatically trigger specific memories (when you bought it, where you read it), specific feelings or moods. Taking an ebook reader in hand, will stimulate an emotional response as well, but using a single device for reading will make this response much shallower and less rich, as the response will mostly be linked to the device instead of the individual book.

As I listened to the talk I thought about a similar revolution that happened in the past when emails appeared to replace normal mail. Letters are single objects in themselves and are directly attached to memories, moods and other people. In the past, we were free to store these letters in different places according to the emotions they would trigger. Now, with emails (and this is re-inforced by the huge quantity of emails we receive), this link has totally disappeared. Going back to our archive in our email client and digging an old email will not have by far the same effect as reopening a box where we stored all our love letters. And this leads to a different type of emotional attachment, where users are attached to the device (the email client or the eBook reader) rather than the actual content (mails or books).

A changing world: Speed Versus Reflection

Right after listening to the presentation, I read this article from the Los Angeles Times called “The Lost Art of Reading” by David L. Ulin. This article strongly reinforces the insights extracted from Steve and Dan’s research to show how deep the reading experience is. It also highlights a very important fact which is that books are not only fighting a war against technology. They are also fighting a war against our changing way of lives.

As the article discusses, we live in a world where speed is of the essence – where we need to react to information we gather in the next second in fear of losing our edge. Books are all about a different way of life. Books can take years to write and for the most part could not care less about current events happening on the day you read them. Books are about unplugging (term used in Steve and Dan’s study) yourself from the world. Books are about reflecting on things. And these are less and less tolerated in the world today… but I am wandering off topic here (as I usually do), as this concerns the future of reading books in general and not the tension between physical and digital books.

Design Opportunities: Giving Life to Notes

Steve and Dan at the end of their report go through some opportunities that digital books’ designs can integrate to make the digital reading experience a stronger contender against the traditional reading experience. One that they do not discuss (unless I missed it) is notes. I would split notes into two categories in the reading experience: notes from the author and notes from the reader. Both of these categories of notes could be revolutionized by the advent of digital reading.

What would added interactivity do to author’s notes for example? What if you could click on a referenced article the author mentions and read that article the next second? Or even get a review/summary and ulitmately purchase another book the author also happens to cite? This would add a new depth to books and provide an exceptional experience to the reader (not to mention a great marketing opportunity for publishers). As Steve and Dan discuss in their presentation, this can of features would have to rely on a great ecosystem to provide this integrated experience. That’s something not in place at all today (especially outside of the US).

The other category of notes is user notes and this is where to me there is an even greater opportunity. Right now, you can highlight things in a book or put sticky papers on pages you think are interesting. What about searching for a term you saw in the book after you finished reading or looking up all the pages where another author is referenced? What about building yourself a set of quotes and comments about the book that you typed as you where reading and that are organized and retrievable anywhere after you’re done reading? What about co-reading even? See what people felt or commented as they read the book you are reading. What if the digital book allowed you to share your experience with other readers thus giving the digital book a life of its own, turning each book into a vertical social network almost…

As usual, I am just following a spur of the moment to write this post and I ought to have put more reflection into it (sorry… I am a product of the new changing world where speed is everything), but I do hope that it can even so modestly contribute a tiny bit to the discussion surrounding books and the reading experience. I am personally a big fan of physical books, but if the digital reading experience and a good ecosystem were in place, I would definitely juggle between both physial and digital reading (similarly to the way I do with CDs and digital music).

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1. Agile User Research
2. Kindle Lover? – The eReading Experience
3. Doing Research on the Web

One major realization I had while working is the power of the community. I have been humbled by what and how users have been using the platform. We first designed it for people to create short funny stories, and we now realize that quite a number of users are now using the platform to create whole animated episodes that sometimes last more than 10 minutes. We also see amazing thing happening in terms of users sharing their creations and the content they upload to the platform. Overall it is amazing to see the dedication and passion of the users on the platform.

Passion that sometimes expresses itself in some strange ways, as the following video shows:

There is no question the Internet is magical in the ways it empowers people to express themselves in such diverse ways… for better and for worse. ;o)

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3. Changing the advertising experience?