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Putting Lean UX into action

2012-02-10T23:39:59Z

I wasn’t able to be at this month’s London IA event, which is possibly the first time I’ve ever missed it. Unavoidable, but a real shame because I had been looking forward to seeing Jeff Gothelf talk about Lean UX, and hear the debate that was sure to follow. By all accounts the Sense Loft was packed.

Jeff’s Lean UX slides have been immensely popular on Slideshare, which is one of the reasons it was great to have him in London.

Sjors Timmer has written a review of the evening for London IA: “Jeff Gothelf at London IA February 2012.”

I’ve just spent a few days bunkered down with a small team of developers to rapidly develop the next phase of one of our products. I’ve spent the time designing in the browser, with HTML, CSS, a dabble of Python and a smidgeon of PHP to bring it all together. The pace at which I could iterate the designs was much faster than if I’d been using any of my regular palette of tools, and at the end, the devs could even pinch little bits of my CSS to get the pages styled up.

The only deliverables I have at the end of the project are 32 HTML prototypes and one launched product. At the moment, I’m unconvinced why I would go back to working any other way.

“The Economist’s shift to digital”- Tom Standage at news:rewired

2012-02-10T08:55:32Z

One of the panel sessions at news:rewired last week was devoted to the paid content model. Tom Standage, digital editor of the Economist, gave an upbeat talk about the title’s success in transitioning to the digital era.

Tom stated that the point of the Economist had always been to be the weekly voice you needed to hear in order to make sense of all the other media noise. As digital has made that environment ever noisier, he said, the need for that voice has only become stronger. It should be, he said, the one magazine you’d want air-lifted to you if you were stranded on a desert island. Although, to be honest, I’d vote for an instruction manual on making rafts from palm trees.

With many magazine subscriptions, one of the biggest barriers to customer retention is people finding that they don’t have enough time to read them - leading to a sense of guilt as unread magazines pile up.

Their digital bundle model, Tom said, is designed in many ways to address that.

Because it can be an add-on to the print subscription, as well as a standalone product, it makes the print subscription feel like more value. It also means that people can consume Economist content in “information snacking” sessions during the day on iPhones and iPads, as well as having a stack of dead trees accumulate in the corner of the living room. Another innovation in the digital bundle has been the audio version of the magazine. Turning the content into a podcast means you can lose that “unread magazine guilt” whilst doing the ironing or the morning commute.

Tom Standage showed an amazing graph that illustrated that if you ask readers of the Economist how they consume the content now, 80% of them say in print, and 20% say digital. But if you ask them how they expect to consume it in two years time, an astonishing 70% say they expect it will be digital, and only 30% print. These are not some white-coated futurologists predicting the looming end of times for print, they are the Economist’s own most loyal readers. It was an astonishing thought that the readers themselves expect to shift that quickly.

The change in the Economist’s digital strategy had also seen them adopt a “metered paywall” approach. This, he explained, had been brilliant for traffic. After years of locking the search engines out, now suddenly their whole archive is available. A three year old article about Iran, he said, does just as good a job of advertising what they are about and why you should be reading them as the ones form this week. He said it was “crucial” that content could be “sampled and shared on social media.”

Just at the end of his talk, Tom made one vital point that underpins the entire Economist strategy - “the unspoken assumption is that you have distinctive content that people value.” He also made an interesting point about the nature of the Kindle device. “It isn’t an eReader”, he said, “it is a book store in your pocket.”

Next...

Also on the panel for this session was researcher François Nel. He gave a fascinating talk about “the alchemy of media business model innovation”, one which had a lot of focus on the Guardian’s digital strategy, and which sparked intense debate afterwards. I’ll be blogging my notes from that next week.

“Great for users. Great for publishers. And great for Apple” - Alex Watson on Newsstand at news:rewired

2012-02-09T08:55:50Z

“I hate getting my credit card out to pay for things on the internet, but as journalists and publishers we want everybody else to do it” - Katie King, MSN

One of the panel sessions I attended at news:rewired was devoted to the notion of paid content. It featured some interesting insights from Alex Watson of Dennis Publishing and Tom Standage from The Economist, as well as some scrutiny of the Guardian’s business model, which, for those of us who work there, made for some uncomfortable listening.

Alex Watson

Alex Watson was presenting the approach that Dennis Publishing have take towards building iOS apps and making available their titles in Apple’s Newsstand. He started by stressing that the app store is best understood as a retail environment, not as a search environment. Placement is everything, he said, and he illustrated that with graphs that showed huge spikes when their titles or apps were featured prominently by Apple.

It is always good to get some real numbers in a case study like this, and Alex revealed that since the launch of Newsstand, Dennis Publishing have seen 3.5m downloads of their apps and titles, which have yielded (once Apple and VAT have taken their share) over $400,000 in revenue. Not to be sniffed at, but Alex pointed out that if you have had a million downloads of an app as people get a free trial, and not many people convert, then you’ve spent an awful lot in bandwidth.

Alex reminded us that the iOS audience is a demanding one - they expect bulletproof reliability, and they want device specific features and high production values. It is all to easy to get a one star review in the app store due to minor defects with the first release of an app.

For most publishers Alex Watson believes that the only way they can achieve scale of publishing is to take a hybrid approach - using third parties to effectively render PDFs within shell apps for some titles, using platforms like Adobe’s systems for others, and doing some custom in-house HTML5 development. Once you get some sense from the data as to what is successful, you have a better idea of which titles to invest in.

Newsstand is, he said, “great for users, and great for publishers. And great for Apple.” There was one cautionary note thought - Dennis have been unable to make in iPad app for Bizarre, as they are unwilling to compromise on the content to meet Apple’s content rules and regulations.

Next...

Next I’ll have my notes from the digital editor of the Economist, Tom Standage, explaining how their digital strategy was ensuring the magazine will continue to thrive in the future.

Three things adults need to know about teens, Facebook and privacy

2012-02-08T07:13:53Z

Last week at news:rewired I was talking about the Guardian’s Facebook app. During the Q&A after my talk, the topic of privacy cropped up several times, especially with regard to younger people using the Facebook platform. Here are three important things that I think adults should know about when they are discussing privacy amongst teenagers.

Our idea of privacy is not their idea of privacy

Your view of what is private as an adult is very different from the view of a child. Danah Boyd made this point back in 2010.

“Kids have always cared about privacy, it's just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions. As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space ... for young people it’s not a private space. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result, the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control.”

Kids don’t get to choose holiday destinations, or when they have to go to a family gathering and miss a night out with their friends. Having a first shave, buying a first bra - even some of the most intimate changes that happen to them as they go through puberty will most likely not be completely private from their family.

It may seem extraordinary to us that teenagers think nothing much of posting pictures of themselves up to mischief on the public internet, but they have chosen to share that material, and they have chosen who their friends are online. After years of not being able to control their own bedtime, any privacy setting at all represents a new type of privacy for them.

Danah elaborates on this issue in a longer interview which is worth reading.

Password sharing is an act of trust, not a security breach

As adults it is drilled into us that we should be using a different, strong, secure password for every service. Meanwhile, Danah Boyd tells us “Pew found that one third of online 12-17 year olds share their password with a friend or significant other, and that almost half of those 14-17 do.”

For teenagers, sharing a Facebook password is one of the most intimate things you can do. As this piece in the New York Times puts it: “They say they know such digital entanglements are risky, because a souring relationship can lead to people using online secrets against each other. But that, they say, is part of what makes the symbolism of the shared password so powerful.”

Where would they get such an idea? Why, from the adults they grew up with of course. Danah Boyd again:

“The idea of teens sharing passwords didn’t come out of thin air. In fact, it was normalized by adults. And not just any adult. This practice is the product of parental online safety norms. In most households, it’s quite common for young children to give their parents their passwords. With elementary and middle school youth, this is often a practical matter: children lose their passwords pretty quickly. Furthermore, most parents reasonably believe that young children should be supervised online. As tweens turn into teens, the narrative shifts. Some parents continue to require passwords be forked over, using explanations like “because I’m your mother.” But many parents use the language of “trust” to explain why teens should share their passwords with them.”

This is just the background radiation of their lives

What looks from an adult perspective like radical technological change is just the background radiation of a young person’s life. No young person in the UK thinks there is anything remarkable at all about owning a colour television or walking around with a mobile phone - but I can dimly recall my parents renting a black & white television, and went through all of my school and university years relying on my parent’s fixed line phone as my communications device.

You learn to cope and make behavioural norms out of the technology available to you. Personally I find the idea that the peer pressure of being a teen would follow you home from school onto your computer and be constantly in your pocket horrifying. Yet, if Facebook had been around, maybe I would have actually had a wider support network, as the geeky indie kids from my neighbourhood would have had a much stronger bond of communication across schools and school year boundaries.

Any schoolkid now just lives with the fact that they are always in touch. Not just to bully each other or send sexy messages - although that makes all the headlines that adults seem to want to write. They can also use it to help with homework, and personal problems, and upheaval at home.

Getting a Facebook account is now almost a rite of passage of becoming 13.

And any 13 year old who signs up to Facebook today will never remember an internet without frictionless sharing apps.

“Did we get something of journalistic value?” - Liz Heron on social media success at news:rewired

2012-02-07T10:55:11Z

Last week Liz Heron gave the opening keynote address at news:rewired, explaining some of the social media work that the New York Times does, and offering some advice for those who are also involved in doing it for others.

She started by commenting on the pace of change - suggesting that even when she spoke at last year’s BBC Social Media Summit, the conversation still seemed to be around “should we be doing social media”, whereas now the focus had shifted to “how can we be doing this well, and distinctively”. Nobody, she thought, a year ago would have envisaged the President of the USA being quizzed about the CIA drone programme in a Google+ hangout.

For the forthcoming US election the New York Times have begun employing the hashtag #asknyt, and have journalists on hand to fact-check anything being said in debates, or even the State of the Union address, if the audience ask them. This real-time response invites the audience in to shape their coverage. For debates they curate Twitter lists in advance of interesting people who maybe have a unique insight, like people involved in the local campaigns. These tweets can then be embedded in the New York Times front page as the debate progresses. They also have something Liz jokingly called “the live blog of the live blogs”, looking out across the rest of the media sphere to bring together the best commentary and analysis from the web.

Liz described the New York Times audience as “a highly engaged, whip-smart, passionate group” who were often a useful source of information in their own right. She explained how she has encouraged foreign correspondents in particular to grow their Facebook communities as they could be invaluable in gathering local stories. For their “iEconomy” series they had gathered user reaction and testimony in Mandarin on the web in advance of publication, and then translated that into English to form part of the community response around the topic.

She also explained that “iEconomy” had been chosen as the name for the series because it would make a good hashtag to keep the conversation going on Twitter. Liz thought the “science” of choosing a good hashtag was important - something echoed later in the day when Nicola Hughes pointed out that people still tweet with the hashtag #iranelection even though the “green revolution” is two-and-a-half years old, because the network knows that this hashtag can be followed, whereas new ones using Persian or Arabic words will probably not be noticed and followed in the West.

“We're pretty jazzed about the hangouts”

The New York Times approach has been on “an evolution towards engaging our users with everything we do”, with over 400 journalists on Twitter, and 50+ experimenting with the new Facebook subscribe feature. Liz stressed the need to assess each platform and work out the strengths and weaknesses of it in order to decide how best to use it.

In the case of Google+ it has been the “revolutionary” hangout feature. “We're pretty jazzed about the hangouts” she said. They didn’t want to recreate the whole New York Times experience within Google+, but Liz stressed the value of the “deep discussion” takes takes place on there.

She did ask the audience, if, like her, they had “social media platform fatigue”. Pinterest is obviously the new kid on the block at the moment, but over the course of the last couple of years news organisations - or indeed any organisation - will have had to consider how they prioritise between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, social media dark horse LinkedIn, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare and so on and so on...

Measuring success. And cost

One of the questions after Liz’s talk was how much time this all took. Whilst admitting there was an up-front time cost in getting people comfortable with using tools, she actually thought that a lot of social media use in the newsroom actually saved time. “Once they are sophisticated user,” she said “it becomes part of their process. It is a tool they can’t afford to ignore anymore.” She pointed out that sending out a 140 character update on Twitter was effectively the first draft of the kernel of the story.

In terms of success, it wasn’t about raw numbers anymore. “Success is not traffic. That is not where we are at right now.” Rather than numbers, they are interested in sources, mentions, and interactions. The thing to measure, Liz says, is “Did we get something of journalistic value?”

Next...

Over the next few days I’ll have some more notes from news:rewired, including some thoughts about the ethics of journalistic uses of social media, and my take on a rather feisty debate about the future business sustainability of the Guardian.

Interviews, readability and Kindle - My Guardian hack day effort

2012-02-07T08:55:34Z

Last week the Guardian held one of our regular hack days, where the developers (and other people in the tech department) get to spend two days putting aside their regular work, and instead concentrate on a project of their choosing. The rules are that basically, you can do what you want, as long as there is potential value to the Guardian.

Guardian Sport - The interviews

The idea of my hack was to make it easier for people to bundle together bits of long-form content from the site and deliver them to a reading device.

All of the content in our CMS is tagged with a variety of metadata. Some of this describes what the content is about, some of it describes what type of content it is. The initial navigation in my hack offers you a choice of the last ten pieces of content the Guardian has published which have been tagged ‘sport’, are of the content type ‘article’, and have the tone ‘interview’. We use ‘tone’ to describe the flavour of an article - for example whether it is news, comment, an obituary, a match report, and so on.

My hack - “Guardian Sport - The interviews”

If the user selects an article, then a call is made to the Guardian’s Open Platform Content API to fetch the full text of the article. This is presented in a clean style, hopefully for ease of reading. Regular users of this blog may recognise the layout somewhat. The typographical style is heavily influenced by the reading mode of readability.com.

I used a modified version of Twitter’s Bootstrap HTML/CSS framework for the templates - partly for ease, and partly so it would like the hack that Swells did on the day too. I used Adam Pickering’s Texturetastic Gray from subtlepatterns.com for the background.

I’ve also added one of the widgets from readability.com on the right-hand side of the page. This allows the user to email the article to someone, switch to a printable view, and, crucially, send the article to their Kindle. I’m a big fan of the device, and think the ability to email a document to some.name@kindle.com and have it auto-magically appear on the gadget for offline reading is a compelling piece of functionality.

To make this hack a viable business proposition for the publisher, I’d be interested in investigating whether a micro-payment could be collected from the user at the time they sent the article - a couple of pence or cents per piece. Readability.com do already have a publisher payment programme set-up. In the meantime, the commercial aspect of this hack for Guardian News & Media is that I have embedded a promo spot for our subscription Kindle edition in the footer of every article. You get the interview for free on your Kindle, and gently reminded that you could be getting every interview we do on every topic.

An ad for the Guardian’s Kindle edition is embedded into every interview

I’ve concentrated on sport here, because that was the theme of the hack day, but the ability to switch genres wouldn’t be too hard to add. I can imagine this working particularly well as a way of presenting our film, TV and music interviews, or our large political features.

Thank you

I’ve been doing coding of some sort or another, with long lulls in between, since I was ten or eleven. However, this hack is the first time I’ve produced anything of much complexity powered by Python. I’d like to especially thank Michael Brunton-Spall, who not only does a great job of organising Guardian hack days, but has taken a couple of hours recently to help get me programming again. He has written a very simple set-up package that gets you going using the Guardian API, and was on hand to help me with queries I had during the day.

I think it is a testament to the brilliant work of our technical architecture team in setting up the API that within a couple of hours, in a language I barely know, I’ve got a working prototype on my local machine, pulling in live Guardian content. I had hoped to deploy it on the web so anybody could play with it - but I fell at the final hurdle it getting it uploaded to AppEngine. So now I have a target of what I want to achieve at our next hack day :-)

More hacks

Jonathan Richards, Joanna Geary and myself live blogged the frantic presentations at hack day. Highlights for me included Dan Catt’s drone radio which automatically read out news headlines and generated ambient music to go with them, Jerry Bate’s “Should I watch Match Of The Day or not?”, Andrew Mason’s multi-participatory touchscreen game, and Ivan Codesido’s retro 3D effort. I blogged a little more about hack day yesterday, and hopefully you will also soon see some of them showcased on the Guardian site.

A busy week of hacking and Guardian Beta

2012-02-06T08:55:40Z

A flurry of activity around the Guardian last week as we tried out some new things on our Beta site, and had a two day hack day.

The Guardian Beta site

Beta and Tokyo

Our Tokyo City Guide featured a few experiments - immersive video, an alternative layout to our galleries, a Vimeo video slideshow, and even, briefly, the ability to skew the dwell time in our analytics package by playing Space Invaders and Street Fighter II in a mini-retro-arcade.

The Tokyo experiment has been covered on The Next Web and featured in a write-up and interview with Benji Lanyado by Justin Ellis for the Nieman Journalism Lab - “Hello Tokyo! The Guardian experiments in immersive video with Condition One”

At the same time as all of that Tokyo business, we’ve also launched a new design of the Guardian Travel front.

A wireframe from the Guardian Travel re-launch project

When the Guardian site had the last big re-build and re-design, Travel was the first area to get built in our R2 CMS system. It was definitely beginning to show. One thing we’ve introduced is a new directory style of trail-block. It allows us to provide some dense navigation taking up much less space than the long lists of links we have elsewhere on the site. See what you think.

The new mini-directory structure on the Guardian Travel front

Hack day

On Thursday and Friday it was the latest in a long line of Guardian Hack Days - this one for own developers only. On Friday afternoon myself, Jonathan Richards and Joanna Geary wrestled with our CMS to try and live blog the frenzy that is something like 25 different hacks being presented in 90 seconds each in short succession.

The Guardian developers huddle together at the start of Hack Day

If you’ve never been to a hack day before, it is basically an excuse to set aside your regular work, and start afresh on a project of your own choosing. They usually have themes, and for this one we picked sport.

There were quite a few hacks around football statistics and football predictions, and one which caught the eye of Twitter when we mentioned it was Jerry Bate’s idea of “Should I watch Match Of The Day or not?” He used data from the games to give the programme a watchability rating based on the number of goals and how unlikely the outcomes had been. It was a way of deciding whether to stay up or not for Gary and chums, without spoilering the results for you.

A hack that I loved the idea of - but didn’t get to try out myself - was Ivan Codesido’s efforts to turn our sport website 3D, using old school red/blue glasses. Unfortunately we only had one pair of 3D glasses to go round the whole department so I didn’t get a peek, but I suspect it would have been better with a dubstep breakdown, anyway.

Ivan Codesido prepares his retro-3D hack

No hack day would be complete without a robot - Michael Brunton-Spall tried to programme this little one to avoid obstacles, which involved, he said, an unexpected amount of trigonometry.

Mary Hamilton, Michael Brunton-Spall, and a little robot

Next...

Despite running the live blog, and appearing at news:rewired talking about our Facebook app, I still found time for a hack of my own. Tomorrow I’ll have some notes about what I made.

“The Guardian’s Facebook app” - Martin Belam at news:rewired

2012-02-03T13:27:43Z

In September last year the Guardian launched our Facebook app as one of the media partners working on new features announced at the company’s f8 conference. The app uses the Open Graph to implement “frictionless sharing”, where the act of reading an article automatically pushes it as an action into Facebook’s database.

The Guardian Facebook app

Several of us at the Guardian - including colleagues Meg Pickard and Dan Catt - had thought for some time about what a “social news experience” might be like, but when we came to build the app we concentrated on shifting one particular metric. We knew that 77% of visits to the Guardian from facebook.com only lasted for one page. A good hypothesis for this was that leaving the confines of Facebook to visit another site was an interruption to a Facebook session, rather than a decision to go off and browse another site. We began to wonder what it would be like if you could visit the Guardian whilst still within Facebook, signed in, chatting and sharing with your friends. Within that environment could we show users a selection of other content that would appeal to them, and tempt them to stay with our content a little bit longer, even if they weren’t on our domain.

When we launched the app, some people were quizzical about the approach.

Christine Burns said in two tweets: “The Guardian are going the right way to kill off normal social exchange of references to their articles. Almost as bad as Times paywall. The Guardian has been pretty sure footed with social media until now, but their Facebook integration is a fundamentally illiberal mistake”

Jason Cartwright tweeted: “The whole thing is weird - why would you cede control of the distribution to FB? Feels like old AOL walled garden model”

And @Playwert got straight to the point...

“WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A GUARDIAN APP ON FACEBOOK WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OWN FUCKING WEBSITE” - @Playwert

A new audience for our journalism

One of the reasons we did the app was the relative audience sizes. The Guardian reaches 60m people digitally, and Facebook reaches 800m people. Which means there are at least 740m on there who could be reading our journalism but aren’t. That is a massive opportunity.

So far nearly 6 million people have signed up and installed the app, and one of the most exciting things is the demographic profile of those users. Over 54% of them are 24 and under, and 15% of them are between the ages of 13 and 17.

Demographic make-up of users of the Guardian’s Facebook app

This is a demographic that it is incredibly difficult for news organisations to reach. The app is putting our reporting and features in front of the grown-up audience of the future. Ken Doctor described Facebook as “a potential hothouse of new, younger customers.”

The younger demographic means that content that appeals to them become popular in the app. Some of the most read stories have been about the X-Factor, and I’ve seen some tweets suggesting that represents a “dumbing down” of the Guardian. To my mind, if we are producing that content anyway - which we do - then why wouldn’t we want it to reach as wide an audience as possible. We’ve also noted that stories about students or stories about Facebook prove to be very popular amongst students using Facebook.

How does the app work?

Our Facebook app is an opt-in alternative way to read our content. We don’t specifically edit it or choose which articles appear. It is entirely driven by user actions, and we were able to build it because of the Guardian’s Open Platform API. Any article, video, photo gallery, podcast or audio clip available in the API can appear in the app. Any link to the Guardian that appears within Facebook is a gateway into the app, whether posted on one of our on Facebook pages, or organically shared by someone pressing the Facebook share button on our site.

When a user clicks on a link to guardian.co.uk, we offer them the chance to try the app. This is in much the same way as when we detect the referral has come from a mobile device we redirect the user to m.guardian.co.uk. If the user declines the app, we take them through to guardian.co.uk as normal, and set a cookie so as to try not to ask them again. If they say yes, they read the article in the app environment, and that action is shared with their friends.

This has proved to be a divisive, and there has been some strong criticism of the social reading apps from people like Molly Wood - “How Facebook is ruining sharing” - and Kevin Anderson, who wrote “Why Facebook’s new reading apps are so darned annoying.”

We knew that this was going to be the case, as my colleague Karen Loasby user tested a prototype in advance. Half of those tested recoiled in horror at the very idea, and said that basically they never installed any apps on Facebook. The other half seemed completely unfazed, and even sometimes a little perplexed when she was suggesting to them that just maybe they should be a little more concerned about their privacy settings on Facebook.

Archive content lives again

One effect of this has been that old content has resurfaced by the app, and gained a whole new lease of life. Someone shares an old article with their friends, some of their friends either already use or install the app, and the viral effect begins to take hold. A piece from 2009 headlined “Too fat to be a model? The picture that caused a storm in the fashion world” about reaction to a picture of Lizzie Miller in an edition of Glamour has been viewed over 650,000 times in the app. It has generated over 1,000 new comments on Facebook, and some of those comments themselves have generated nearly 1,500 “Likes”.

This article has been a phenomenal success in the app

I’m comfortable with stories like that getting audience attention. The story itself might be from 2009, but it isn’t as if the debate about the size of the models used by the fashion industry was done and dusted a couple of years ago. Our archive content, presented in a social environment, has sparked a contemporary conversation. And if you’ve got a brilliant feature about the Rolling Stones discussing fifty years of their career, it will always be a brilliant feature about them at this stage of their lives, whether you read it in two weeks, two months, or twenty years time.

We’ve got over 1.3 million articles live on the website, so that is a lot of content to be discovered, and the app means that suddenly any page, languishing unloved in our database, can become a new landing page. When an article becomes popular in the app, we sometimes package it with content. Because we know the attention has come at a specific time from a specific place, we can add related links that are appropriate to the audience rather than to the original content.

For example, a piece about Derren Brown spread virally because of the headline just around Halloween. We packaged it with other spooky and paranormal pieces that had been popular in the app around that time. It looks a little incongruous now, this 400 word 2003 piece that everybody had forgotten we ever published, splashed with content about Halloween from 2011, but when you’ve got the audience there, you need to optimise for them.

This 2003 article has been repackaged now it is a landing page on guardian.co.uk

We’ve made continuous changes to the design. Some tweaks are small - for example pulling the dateline up above the headline to try and make it clearer for users when they are reading archive material. And in the last few weeks we have added photo galleries, video and audio into the app. We’ve just revamped the homepage to showcase these new types of content.

The article dateline is subtly more prominent in the app iteration on the right

And it isn’t all old stories or X-Factor gossip that is getting read and shared. A Jonathan Jones piece “The meaning of 9/11’s most controversial photo” has had more than three-quarter of a million views in the app, and other immensely popular pieces from the last few months have included Naomi Wolf writing about Occupy, a piece about twins with different skin colour and the arrest of a woman accused of a racist outburst on a South London tram.

One of the most popular articles in the Guardian’s Facebook app

Where’s the money?

The Guardian Facebook app is a canvas app. That means the bulk of the page is served by us within an iFrame on the Facebook domain. All the revenue from advertising served in that area of the page is ours, and for launch we engaged a sponsor to take the full inventory across the app. Facebook earn the revenue from advertising placed around the edges of the page. The app is growing us audience in a new space, and as those people use the app, they also promote our content to all of their friends, who, even if they decline to try the app, often still end up on our website.

And the future?

Facebook have invested heavily on the Open Graph and their new timeline feature. They see this as the future of their platform.

In effect, once we push an action into the Open Graph, we hand the responsibility for the UI and presence of our content within that environment over to them. One of the criticism’s of the new “frictionless sharing” has been that a few companies are dominating people’s news feeds. As more and more apps start to use the feature, this effect will diminish.

The “frictionless share” comes in at the bottom of a hierarchy of activity, where a “Like” and a “Comment” are still much stronger signals of activity. The Guardian actions of reading, watching and listening are pretty conservative - I’m sure that in time you will see that friends playing games will be frictionlessly sharing that they just harvested a crop, or assassinated a mugwump. For Facebook to succeed, they will need to keep their users happy that this level of information is manageable and interesting.

For the Guardian’s part, the app will continue to iterate. We are constantly looking at ways that we can improve the social side of the app. The key to success will be surfacing the right content for the right users.

Thank you

I’d like to thank the many people who have worked on this app, amongst them: Matt Andrews, Gideon Goldberg, Stephen Wells, Sheena Luu, Lynsey Smyth, Karen Loasby, Lisa Villani, Piers Jones, Joanne Ellis, Anthony Sullivan, Grant Klopper, Daithi Ó Crualaoich, Nathaniel Bennett, Sally Goble, Meg Pickard, Dan Catt, Hayley Dunlop, Andrew Lepki, Hannah Freeman, Charlene Prempeh and Nina Lovelace.

Frictionless or not, on Facebook or not, people love to share on the web

2012-01-30T19:23:42Z

The release of 60 new apps that employ Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” has sparked another round of internet debate about the value of the functionality, and the shift to getting users activated on the site’s new Timeline design.

A poll by Sophos suggests many users are unhappy with Timeline and Philip Landau posed the question on the Guardian’s work blog: What if Facebook Timeline was read instead of your CV?.

Nick Bradbury blogged about how actually more friction is added to the sharing process, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped 5 billion song plays being shared. Whatever that means.

Predictably, Charlie Brooker’s rant about “frictionless sharing” - “I’m all for sharing, but why the online obsession with revealing every detail of your life?” - has performed very well within the Guardian’s Facebook app (which I worked on), as his content always does. Any why wouldn’t it? The “frictionless sharing” effect amplifies articles that have become popular, driving even more users to read them, and share them.

Away from the app, in the space of 24 hours, over 1,000 people have voluntarily clicked the “Recommend” button on the article when viewed on guardian.co.uk, sharing Charlie’s woes about over-sharing with their friends. And nearly four hundred people have shared their feeling in the comments about it.

Frictionless or not, on Facebook or not, people love to share on the web.

Paul Sutton wrote on Future Comms that the system represents “the Gruesome death of choice” as Facebook introduce “60 new Timeline apps that work BY DEFAULT UNLESS WE TURN THEM OFF.” His Caps Lock, not mine.

My colleague, Meg Pickard, by contrast, has written a post explaining some of the clear options around “frictionless sharing”, not least of which being that installing them is an act of choice itself - “Meg Pickard just published a blog post about frictionless sharing and Facebook.”

One issue that keeps coming up is that the presence of “frictionless shares” diminishes the value of things that have been deliberately shared. These apps push an “action” into Facebook’s data centres, and the UI of presenting that back to users is up to them. You can see that Timeline displays the two very differently. I don’t think the aim is to replace the active share, but it is to add another set of actions into Facebook’s graph - of much less value than a comment, less value than a “Like”, but of interest nevertheless.

Different Facebook Timeline treatments of content that has been actively shared (left) and frictionlessly shared (right).

If you are interested in finding out more about the Guardian’s Facebook app, I’ll be talking about it on Friday at news:rewired, as part of a panel session on “Social Media Optimisation” alongside Wired’s Nate Lanxon, the BBC’s Chris Hamilton, Kevin Anderson and MSN’s Darren Waters. I’ll be publishing the notes from my talk on this website on Friday.

And, talking of Facebook, I’m experimenting with a page to bring together all of my writing output from sources like this site, FUMSI and TheMediaBriefing. You can find it - and hopefully “Like” it - at facebook.com/currybet.

This is Martin Belam’s personal blog. The views expressed are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former employers or clients. Read my blogging principles.

“Slow social media” - This is my jam

2012-01-30T08:55:52Z

At the Guardian, most days we have a five minute talk about something digital during morning conference. Often it is our own products and services we showcase, but sometimes we talk about something outside the building that has caught our eye digitally. Last week I was talking about This Is My Jam.

This Is My Jam is a social music sharing and discovery service. So what, you might think - we’ve got last.fm and Spotify, and the Ping thing in iTunes that nobody uses. But This Is My Jam is quite different. It invites you to share just one song at any given time, and that becomes your “jam” for up to seven days. When you visit the service, you see a list of your friends “jams”, and hitting play on one of them starts playing them in sequence.

It is like internet radio where the playlist is determined by your friends and their choice of “jam”.

(I should, at this point, apologise for being my age and saying things like “jam” in public in the context of music - if it helps, imagine I am saying “hey pop-pickers, that is a groovy 45” instead.)

If you don’t know the service, you can find out more about it and sign up for the beta here. Or find a friend on Twitter who is using it, and they can invite you in.

I think the service is interesting for three reasons.

Slow social media

This Is My Jam is the very opposite of Spotify’s Facebook integration or last.fm’s scrobbling. It isn’t about all the things you’ve listened to. It is about carefully choosing and curating one song at a time to represent you in a social digital space. Slow social media.

It also introduces an interesting phenomena - social media stage fright. It is like DJing slowly, one track at a time, and once you’ve posted something that has attracted likes and followers, you feel desperate to avoid clearing the virtual dancefloor by picking a clanger.

Lean build

If you think of the full scope of the service, you might consider building a registration system, a way of hosting lots of different music formats, and employing an army of music industry lawyers to clear the rights and sort out the royalty arrangements. Then you’d need to build the player, and the way of connecting together people.

Actually This Is My Jam dispenses with a lot of the hard work. Registration is handled by integration with Twitter and Facebook, and although there is scope to upload your own mp3s, the main way of sharing music is by embedding videos from YouTube. That shifts the burden of hosting and legal obligation onto Google, and allows This Is My Jam to concentrate on the bits of the service that are unique to them. It is a lean way to get up to a minimal viable product quickly.

Great use of notifications

The team have made great use of notifications. When you post your “jam”, you get regular emails telling you that people have “liked” it.

Assuming they do, of course.

It means even if you don’t revisit the service during the seven days your track is available, you get a background feeling about whether your track has gone down well. The service then sends you an email when your track is about to expire, reminding you to pick a new one. It is a gentle way of driving people back to the site to engage with it.

You can find me at thisismyjam.com/currybet. At the time of writing, my jam was “Witches” by Low.

Online newspaper metrics? The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks

2012-01-29T15:57:33Z

There’s been quite a fuss around the latest set of usage figures for news websites, with comScore suggesting that Mail Online has overtaken the New York Times as the world’s leading online newspaper. The Times has taken the odd step of both disputing the figures and the relevance - saying the inclusion of thisismoney distorted the number by adding an extra million or so. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy added

“a quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.”

The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks.

The Mail’s trajectory is such that I doubt whether the extra bit of traffic from their finance site will be the significant difference in a month’s time, and if you didn’t see them as a competitor, why comment at all?

Especially as I think we are beginning to see a fight over out-moded metrics.

ComScore are quite clear that their methodology, based on a panel and supplemented with their own tags, excludes mobile duplication. But I’m equally clear that during the course of any given month, I must register in the analytics tools of nearly every major news site in the world from a variety of mobile devices, laptops and desktop machines, as well as via some brand specific apps. And I’m not alone in being promiscuous with my use of news sources, and owning more than one device that can connect to the internet.

Predictions that mobile usage of the net would overtake fixed desktop usage have tended to suggest that 2014 or 2015 is the likely cross-over point. We are hurtling towards that faster than ever - back in February Google’s Eric Schmidt said of mobile growth “We look at the charts internally and it’s happening faster than all of our predictions.”

As news sites start saying that 30%, 35%, 40%, 50%, and 60% of their audience are connecting via mobile, it becomes untenable to sell to advertisers the idea that these people are mutually exclusive from the desktop users, and selling their eyeballs twice.

Just as “hits” died as a measure of web activity, I think “monthly unique users” is on its way out. I’m impressed with the Mail’s digital strategy and the audience growth it has brought - but they may have just won the game at the very point where the rules change.

Piling up “unique cookies” just isn’t going to be good enough to impress advertisers in a world of ubiquitous smartphone access to news.

Do you hunger for stories, or hunger for sales?

2012-01-27T09:35:51Z

If the question for this month’s Carnival of Journalism is “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?”, I’m immediately minded to ask instead “Should a good journalist also be a good capitalist?”

Michael Rosenblum asks why journalists can’t get themselves together and charge more for their work, or take on more of a business and entrepreneurial role. There is definitely something in what he says. For a long time I have argued that the big media companies are going to have to get used to being smaller, and becoming more like commissioning houses. Need coverage of an eco issue? Go to an eco-journalist who runs their own site. Building up niche audiences by specialising in a specific topic, and then cashing in when the commissions come around will be one way that journalists might scratch out a digital living. But it isn’t going to be a cash cow.

I’m also reminded of something I’ve seen Karen McGrane say about the UX world, where lots of people seem anxious to prove that they can be an IA and a UXer and an interaction designer and a visual designer and a developer. She says look at the end credits of movie. There are hundreds and hundreds of names with hundreds and hundreds of weird job titles. Hollywood studios know that it takes all of these people to make a film. Nobody goes into a big film production saying I’m going to be the sound engineer and the key grip and write the screenplay and sing the theme tune and plan the marketing.

There is a place for specialism, and journalism can be a specialism. Rewriting press releases doesn’t take much effort, but taking a complex series of events, synthesising them into a narrative and conveying them to an audience is a skill. Coaxing information out of people in an interview is a skill. Interrogating data to prove or disprove the arguments of a politician or elected official is a skill.

But no journalist worth their salt wouldn’t write about a plane falling out of the sky on their hometown because it happened on a Thursday, and Thursday is the day you’ve set aside to phone local businesses to drum up ad revenue.

I think you have to ask yourself, do you get out of bed in the morning with a burning hunger to find and uncover stories, or do you get out of bed in the morning hungry to make sales?

I’m unconvinced that you can do both.

This is my contribution to January’s Carnival of Journalism

Content strategy lightning talks night

2012-01-26T10:12:28Z

As part of his talk Michael Alves described content as “all the things that are fun in your application”, and there was no doubt that the lightning talks evening about content strategy arranged by Jonathan Kahn and Richard Ingram was fun. Limiting the talks to five minutes each and using the Ignite format meant the event ran like clockwork, and between 6:30 and 8:00 a parade of eleven different speakers had given a range of talks on topics like semantic mark-up, web governance, open source software, feeling gloomy and kicking things in the pants.

Peter Springett finished the night with a talk about putting value on content. He made two great points. Firstly, he thought that it was great that the job title “content strategist” suddenly seemed to have opened the doors for content people to have conversations with IAs, designers, developers and so on, in a way that didn’t happen a few years ago.

Secondly, he put an emphasis on speaking the language of the business - if you can’t convey the value of content to the CEO in terms that they understand, the business will fail to grasp the value of content strategy.

I couldn’t agree with this more. I always find it so odd in the UX world that we go to great lengths to empathise with the end user, and then give jargon-laden presentations inside the business which don’t empathise with the requirements and understanding of the financial director or marketing team.

Jonny Rose raised a laugh when he pointed out that being a CMS wasn’t good enough anymore. Publishing platforms like SiteCore have registered trademarks like “compelling web experiences”, although we all know the experience of using most CMS tools is a painful one.

Tom Bamford was talking about improving semantic mark-up, and giving a quick run-through of why you should be using mark-up like <abbr> and title="" on our pages. Standards-based semantic HTML has been the the thing to do for a good number of years now. I couldn’t help feel that the fact that Tom still feels the need to give a talk like this in 2012 shows how far behind web standards many CMS vendors - and the dreaded “HTML” output of Word - are.

Mags Hanley gave a lovely talk which was a small case study of a small business. Formums.net is aimed at mums in the Chiswick area, and Mags said “Kate does not have a proposition if she does not have a content strategy.” This means thinking hard about defining a manageable set of content to be producing, planning ahead for special events like Valentine’s Day, and having a genuine focus on the needs of the audience.

At the opposite end from a small-scale business, David Farbey explained why corporate content needs a kick in the pants. He talked about the common problem, that whilst your internet and marketing team can carefully hone the copy and micro-copy that greets visitors when they reach your website, the chances are the technical specifications document, brochure and help guide were not written with the end web user in mind. Corporations often can’t even force their staff to use the same PowerPoint template, let alone enforce a style guide.

(Incidentally, with his talk being about a kick in the pants, and an early promise that he was going to finish with a picture of a “wide open space”, I was quite concerned that the last slide was going to be goatse)

Magus were sponsoring the evening, and gave a talk about their software ActiveStandards which can monitor a large website to find breaches in standards, and identify bits of the operation that are going off-piste. Sadly, I think we are still some way off of being able to plug the Guardian Style Guide into an algorithm and then send it off looking for mistakes on websites like mine or the Guardian itself, which try to adhere to it.

Steve Parks pointed out an interesting study by Gartner about the composition of software used inside enterprises. Where the split between proprietary, open source and internal build software had been skewed heavily in favour of licensed proprietary software, the last few years had seen a massive growth in the implementation of both open source and internal builds. He conjectured that this was because these two forms of software were able to collaborate - some internally developed tools get outsourced, and open source libraries help speed the development of internal tools. He said collaboration was the key to making progress, and outlined some rather progressive Drupal sharing between Sony and Warners in a vertical not known for their forward-thinking about open source technologies.

There are another couple of more comprehensive sets of notes from the night from Gabriel Smy - “Struck by content strategy lightning talks” - and my self-styled “arch-event blogging rival” Adam Tinworth - “Content Strategy, Like Lightning...” The event was also filmed, so I expect the talks to be online in due course.

“Pulling the news from the social media noise” - Storyful’s Markham Nolan at #cmLDN

2012-01-26T08:55:55Z

Last night I went to the Community Managers meet-up in London which had been organised by my colleagues Laura Oliver and Hannah Waldram. Although I’ve never directly played a community manager role, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with people who are, acted as “host” on the BBC’s Points of View message board, and as resident “token techie” on Comment Is Free at the Guardian. I’ve also done my fair share of designing social interactions for apps and the web.

This was the second time the group has got together. Laura explained that community managers are quite a rare breed, and often find themselves either working in isolation in a business, or doing the job but not realising that there is a job title for what they do. The point of the meet-up, she said, was not to be a formal conference set-up, but a place where people working in community within different areas could meet and share tips, ideas and support. I met people who worked at other media companies, but also people working in charities, the games industry, and students. Crayon hosted, and Markham Nolan gave a talk about Storyful

Markham Nolan: Pulling the news from the social media noise

“We have a small core community of people who had value to the news.”

Markham Nolan was talking about the social media curation service Storyful. They’d shifted their business model in a significant way since starting out - something I really admire when I see a company be flexible enough to change their mission when they spot an opportunity. The company was born out of a frustration of seeing journalists filming pieces to camera on a rooftop miles away from the action in a war zone, when you knew that at the heart of the battle many people were armed with cameraphones. The original plan of “bringing together a community of active citizen journalists” had become one of sourcing citizen journalism and packaging the content and contacts for mainstream network clients.

Their mission now is to “pull the news from the noise.” They have built up reliable communities in a range of countries, so that when news breaks, they have contacts they can call on to help verify locally-originated social media content. This was important, as Markham said “We don’t want to be first, we want to be the first to be accurate.”

They’ve also developed an expertise at surfacing this content, whether that means the ability to search in Arabic, or having developed knowledge of advanced search techniques. As Markham put it, their dashboard “distills a global community of people, who, with their cameraphones, are making the news, and they don’t even know it.”

Markham explained that for every news story, a community forms around it. Their trick is to identify those communities. When news breaks they go to their existing contacts, or build a new set by making and refining Twitter lists, and working out who the authoritative tweeters and original sources are. And, importantly, they keep a relationship with them. They have, for example, a panel of people in Syria who they have regular contact with, to help keep them informed about the situation there.

This wasn’t all new-fangled and revolutionary though. Markham said “All we’re doing is applying old journalism to new media.” He compared sizing up a source on social media to the way you might size up a new contact in real life - look them up and down, work out if they “feel” genuine, make a couple of calls to corroborate who they say they are.

It was an intriguing talk, which also touched a lot on the ethics of contacting the people providing the content. Questions were asked about the sensitivity of trying to contact people who have witnessed and filmed some kind of disaster in the immediate aftermath of it, the duty of care owed when contacting someone who might be at risk from retribution by an oppressive regime, and local resentment if someone got paid for their content and was thought to be exploiting the misery of others.

Another question from the audience asked how sustainable their business is, and whether they risk teaching people how to use social media more effectively in a way that means clients can dispense with their services. Markham admitted they were working in a “window of ignorance”, and said that any news business that wasn’t investing in data journalists and the ability to make deep and meaningful searches of the social web was missing a trick. He was also confident that however much news organisations learned, Storyful would always be six months ahead. I tend to agree with that view, not least because a smaller company is always likely to move more nimbly into new social and digital arenas before big media companies have even got them on their radar.

“Verbs. Zombies. UX.” - Mary Hamilton at London IA

2012-01-25T08:55:09Z

We don’t really do “headline” slots at London IA, but at January’s meet-up, we’d kind of figured that it would be hard for anybody to top the gun-wielding zombie antics of Mary Hamilton.

“Verbs. Zombies. UX.” was her tale of running Zombie LARP, which, for the uninitiated, involves paying for the privilege of running around a deserted shopping mall trying to survive a zombie attack. Or as they describe it: “You and your friends, armed with NERF guns, trapped in a zombie-infested building. It’s a live-action game of combat, suspense, black comedy, and high-speed occult fear.”

It is all quite a long way removed from “Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.”

Verbs

Zombie LARP effectively gives the player very few verbs. In fact, it basically gives them “shoot” as in “shoot the gun at the zombie” and “run”.

And “die horribly” Mary added.

One important digital UX parallel to draw here is that a limited set of verbs governs the user having a limited set of actions. When we say to users that they can only “Like” content, then “Like” doesn’t carry any nuance. When people use the “favourite” button to mark something as “read later”, “this is dreadful”, “that’s funny” and “I agree”, then forcing them to use one verb robs the action of semantic meaning.

But the trade off in giving a choice in some digital environments is tricky. I mean, who thinks that hacking Millie Dowler’s phone was “inspiring”, “funny”, “hot” or “crazy”? The UK Huffington Post gives you the chance.

Community

Mary explained how the community has taken the idea and done things that they would never have imagined when setting up the games. They have people turn up dressed as sexy zombie nurses. People argue with zombies that they cannot be harmed because they have absolute faith in science. And they have had one unexpectedly effective invasion of co-ordinated Morris Dancers, whose gentle brand of working as a troupe perplexed the zombies.

Which boils down to people being great - as you’ll have seen if you’ve ever been involved in any online or niche community. It doesn’t take long for in-jokes, shorthand references and improvisation to take hold amongst a bunch of people with similar interests who are trying to have fun. Which leads to...

Iteration

Another software development parallel was with iteration. Mary explained that they have people oversee the games as referees which allowed them to iterate. They sometimes have to run around and change the rules during the game. Which is, I think, how I feel when I am running around saying “Yes, I know that is what it said on the wireframes, but what I meant was...”

Joking aside, the point was that there is no point carrying on with a set of rules which are proving themselves not to work. Why wait for the whole game to play out, when you can see an improvement or stop a bad situation developing?

Rule zero

One of the most retweeted things we’ve had at London IA for ages was a snapshot of the Zombie LARP “Rule zero”:

“Don’t be a dick. Seriously. Don’t”

As Mary said, it makes you examine whether your behaviour is a bit dick-ish. And gives the players explicit permission to say to someone “Sir, you appear to be being a bit of a dick. Please desist forthwith.”

Or, as she explained it, made it OK for the zombies to relentlessly pursue someone being a bit of a dick in order to remove them from the game.

In (stick) pictures

Mary’s brilliant slides, drawn by Grant Howitt, are available online.

Next...

The next London IA will be Tuesday 7 February 2012. Jonty Sharples will be hosting, as I won’t be able to be there, which is somewhat crushing as it looks set to be a great evening if you have an interest in how agile and UX work together.

Jeff Gothelf will be presenting “Lean UX – Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” which will be followed by a Q&A about anything/everything agile with James O’Brien, Johanna Kollmann, Leisa Reichelt and Mark Plant.

The first batch of tickets will be available on Eventbrite at 12pm on Friday 27 January 2012, the second at 12pm on Monday 30 January 2012, with a final chance at 6pm on Wednesday 1 February 2012.