It’s also great for business. Twitter’s growth statistics speak for themselves. Nielsen Online reported recently that in the past 12 months Twitter grew by 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009. That’s an amazing amount. To go from 100,000 users to 1.78 million speaks volumes. The visitor stats make compelling reading. In less than 3 years they've become the third most visited social networking site in the United States of America. I remember not so long ago there were stories on the internet of disgruntled staff leaving Twitter for a variety of reasons. Some might remember Blaine Cook departed because of service reliability issues. That was big news back then and it looked certain that Twitter was going to implode.

Yes I know, this is another blog post on the interweb about Twitter but instead of me telling you how good it is and why everyone should be using it, I’m going to describe something that happened to me over Twitter recently which left me impressed, surprised and slightly confused at the same time.

I work for a branding agency in Scotland, quite a big one at that. As such we’ve done a fair few websites for clients and it’s important to ensure that those sites are up and running consistently.

Recently I’ve had some issues with our hosting which is provided by Mosso. Rather comically a quick Google search for ‘Mosso’ the first sponsored result reads “Is your server down?”.

Mosso, up until recently, have been pretty good to work with. Their technical support was always reliable and seemed to get the job done when they were required the most. Recently though things seem to have taken a downward turn there. Their tech support no longer seem interested. The majority of issues we’ve had over the last 6 months have been resolved by ourselves and it now seems as though the only thing they know how to do that I don’t is get the damn error logging working for PHP. But I digress.

I posted a tweet on Twitter, a rather immature one at that, which simply read “Mosso, you suck!”. I felt slightly better it has to be said, letting a little steam off and all that. No more than an hour or two later I received a tweet from Mosso themselves saying that they were sorry I was having issues and asking if there was anything that they could do to help. I didn’t reply, instead waited a while so that I could thing of a response. But before I could respond I received a phone call from another hosting company. They called me at work. The lady on the phone went through her sales pitch mentioning that they were one of Mosso’s biggest competitors and that they had a lot of former Mosso customers switch over to their service. All I could think of was how did she know I was a disgruntled Mosso customer and how on Earth did she get my office number.

After she finished her pitch I asked her how she got my number? I wasn’t angry just curious. She told me that she had seen my tweet, went to my profile page and clicked the link to my personal site, browsed around and found the company that I work for, got the phone number for the office, called and asked for KJ. I was impressed. Sure it’s not a complex procedure and anyone could do it, but the fact that she did and made the effort I was more than happy to let her send me some information about her company.

Twitter, originally designed for networking and keeping friends and family up to date with your doings, has now obviously been embraced by big business and it’s a wise move. When people, like me, are pissed off about something and they have a Twitter account they are more than likely going to let people know.  Businesses are now looking at Twitter as a way of providing secondary technical support and customer service. They are also using Twitter as a way of finding new business and it makes total sense.

Garnter released a short report detailing how business are embracing Twitter to their advantage.

Despite the fact that Twitter is primarily aimed at individual users in the consumer market, many of those individuals work for companies and ‘tweet’ about business issues, leading businesses to explore how they could best use it,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner.

Perhaps the time is soon upon us where Twitter becomes the avenue for ensuring customer satisfaction in future. Not only is the user happy when the receive help, advice or apology but by publicly appeasing unhappy customers the business improves its own public image in the eyes of the users contacts and goes someway to countering negative publicity surrounding the business.

As long as the line between spam and genuine lines of inquiry are not crossed then I don’t see this as a problem for me. In fact, this might be an avenue we'd pursue as a way of keeping in contact with clients.

Just a thought.

The biggest shock was that, when it comes to researching property purchases, people tend not to spend a lot of time looking at websites. Our experience, backed up by expat anecdotes, is that internet connectivity leaves a lot to be desired in the Emirates, something that has to be a contributory factor when most marketing sites these days would have had a 'broadband only' warning if made 5 years ago.

To add to this there is much less of a reliance on email, with text messaging being the electronic text platform of choice. One of the most significant influences behind this is emails not being considered legal documents, something that keeps fax machine sales buoyant here.

These two factors force us to rethink our traiditional strategies when it comes to property marketing with a much higher reliance on deliverables that enhance face to face marketing. This has actually played to our strengths as our most innovative digital marketing has been desktop application based which suits the kiosk environment and the exhibition take away well.

Background downloading—making use of idle connections allows us to deliver broadband-like experiences in territories with less than optimal ISP offerings. We're taking an infrastructure limitation and using it to diffferentiate our offering. It's easy to get used to superfast internet connections and an internet savvy audience, but although it may feel like we live in a global village, we must adapt our offering to stay relevant to disparate markets.

This is true innovation at its best.

::thumbs up::

Image courtesy of flickr user jm3

Griffith explains that they looked honestly at a candid list of all negative aspects of car hire, and fixed every single one.

Problem. I need to hire a car to get to the car hire place to pick up the hire car.

Solution. Ziplots are small car lots scattered strategically through densely populated areas with the ambition that customers shouldn't have to walk more than 10 minutes to pick up their car.

Problem. Hire cars lack charisma. I wouldn't choose to drive a Chevrolet Aveo.

Solution. Extensive user surveys were carried out to find out what Zipcar's demographic aspired to drive and then they went out and bought those cars (and vans) including Minis, BMWs, Smarts and Toyotas.

Problem. When I pick up a hire car I have to wait in line to fill out excessive forms - and it's the same information on the same forms every time.

Solution. The process of picking up your car is automated. You reserve on the website, or by text message, or iPhone app and then the car you've chosen is sent a wireless command to allow your 'key' to open the car during the time you've booked the car.

Problem. When I pick up the car the guy doing the paperwork tries to up-sell me a more expensive insurance policy. I feel pressured and I don't know if it's worth it.

Solution. Included in the cost is a Liberty Mutual policy that offers very extensive cover - usually more cover than most car owners have.

Problem. When I drop off the car I have the hassle of having to find somewhere to fill it up with fuel.

Solution. Fuel is included - all Zipcars have a card in them that can be used to fill the car up.

Problem. The best hire car deals are for durations of at least 2 or 3 days but sometimes I just need to pop down to the supermarket.

Solution. Zipcars can be hired by the hour, and it's really easy to extend your hire period while your out and about.

image courtesy of flickr user Marcin Wichary

I love this pragmatic approach to the design of a business. It's an extension of form follows function, the modernist methodology I was taught as an architecture student. Where the large car hire companies rely on marketing to drive market share from each other, Zipcar concentrate on the user experience to create a new market.

Five things make it all possible.

1. Zipcar is new. When they started out they weren't in the business of car hire which allowed them to start with a blank sheet of paper removing any assumptions about how a car hire company should work. Instead of a product marketing department they created an Experience Team.
2. Being an IT company has allowed them to use innovative technology directly - when they come up with a good idea they can go ahead and do it. They learned from and openly credit the likes of Amazon and Netflix for doing much of the pioneering work in creating technology to deliver great service.
3. Growing concern over environmental issues in our daily lives are becoming more and more evident, from LEED accreditation for buildings to hybrid only parking spaces, and people have finally begun to consider the impact of car ownership. The environmental credentials of Zipcar are not to be sniffed at. Each Zipcar takes 15 to 20 cars off the road, and at last count they had 6,000 vehicles.
4. Our retail experiences are becoming more reliant on self service. Self service culture started with ATMs outside banks and has grown to self service checkouts at supermarkets. Being able to book and pick up a Zipcar without having to wait on hold or stand in line to complete forms both keeps costs down and provides us with a better experience.
5. Digital social networking, and the internet in general, have allowed the creation of widespread communities that are highly connected and tech savvy. Zipcar is a 'car sharing club' and it's members are called 'Zipsters' (as are all staff).

Another big key to Zipcar's success the heavy use of user testing and a fast feedback loop to create an iterative design process that's more often seen in software development than business process design. Zipsters are quick to post their experience on user forums and Zipcar pay close attention to what is being said and the resulting feedback is fed back into the design process.

This focus on user experience and the dedication to user testing requires executive support and maybe this is Zipcar's trump card over the big hire companies who rely on consultants. At the UX Week conference in San Francisco last month Don Norman asked an audience of a thousand user experience professionals how many of them were in executive position. The sad answer was two - and they were both execs for organisations with less than ten people.

There will always be some city dwellers who won't/can't let go of having their own car, but the implications of this new paradigm shift were underlined when Griffith met with a Toyota executive over from Japan who admitted, "I'm not sure we'll be selling cars in cities in twenty years".

What is a sprinkle?

Well, hopefully you always take the trouble to put some icing on your cake. But how do you make your cake even better, even tastier? In a word, sprinkles.

Sprinkles are additions to a website that take it up a notch, from 'good' to 'great'. Something that enhances the user experience, whether in terms of aesthetics or functionality. Sites might work perfectly well without them, but with sprinkles they becomes unique and memorable. We've started keeping a prioritised list of potential sprinkles when working on a project, so that we know what to come back to if there's some spare time at the end of it.

A few examples.

Firstly Yay Hooray's custom smileys, affectionately known as pinkies.

skinnyCorp specialise in creating online communities (maybe you know a tshirt site called Threadless), and these cute graphics emphasise the exclusive/fun/designer vibe of the Yay Hooray forum in a way that default smileys couldn't:

Yay Hooray's smiley set

Secondly, Vimeo's illustrated footer and login screens. Again they make it feel like a destination/community and not just another video site. Check out this video by Chad Pugh which was the inspiration for the graphics:

Vimeo's login screen

On Marque's own site, the contact page usually lists studios like so:

Marque's default contact page

But visitors in the USA (or at least with an IP address we think is located there) see things slightly differently. A subtle sprinkle but one that could make the difference between a potential client picking up the phone or not:

Marque's contact page as seen by US visitors

Last but not least, Apple's ajax search feature, which although not perfect, really pushed the bar for search:

Apple.com's Spotlight-esque search

A Little Piece of Mind homepage

The site is is made up of one page containing many smaller boxes (or "patches") of content. Clicking on a patch brings it to the foreground. As the project grows & develops, more patches of text, images, etc. will be added.

Currently, the site has several patches explaining the project, a form to add yourself to the project mailing list, and a shadowbox form for submitting work to the project. To add a touch of dynamism to an otherwise static page, the background fades in/out three different patterns.

The javascript heavy-lifting is done using jQuery & Shadowbox, while the page generation and forms use PHP & MySQL.

Its previous incarnation had a few significant usability issues. Firstly, the entire site (and all the content) was stored in a swf. Secondly, it opened in a tiny 710 x 567px pop up window (full size screen shot).

So, Lee needed a clean, image-rich space to display his photography to prospective clients. It had to have large images that could be dragged onto a viewer's desktop. He also wanted visitors to be able to browse through collections using the full screen (as opposed to the full browser window). The final requirement was a robust, yet easy to use content management system to keep his site up to date.

The new homepage

Given the site's simple, portfolio structure, we decided to use Indexhibit as the CMS. It didn't take very long to write a few plug-ins to customize look and feel of homepage & gallery pages. There was also a wee bit of tweaking to the config files, but that was to be expected. To address the browse-images-in-full-screen-mode issue we used Marque's very own SWF Lightbox. All of the javascript animation was taken care of by script.aculo.us.

Screenshot of SWF Lightbox in action.

This is a statement sought out by organisations focused on customer service as it is often an X marked on a treasure map of opportunity to differentiate their offering.

There was a time when most online stores had a line of code along the lines of this for a basket summary.

summary = 'You have ' + nItems + ' items in your basket.';

Nice and neat. A single line of code, the smallest piece of additive logic. But it means that when I add a £2500 television, my purchase is summarised with "You have 1 items in your basket." 1 items? Imagine this in a physical store. I'm about to hand over two and a half grand for a telly and you're not even taking the time to acknowledge I'm buying one item instead of many. Why not go the whole hog and call me Sir/Madam?

Most online stores have seen the light and use something along the lines of this.

summary = 'You have ' + nItems + ' item' + (nItems<>1 ? 's') + ' in your basket.';

But to a programmer this is messier, it lacks the elegance of the original line of code, but an organisation with a user centric approach realises that their customers see the output of the code, not the code itself and their programmers understand graceful code should never come at the cost of user experience, in the same way that beautiful design should never come at the cost of impaired functionality. Yes Apple, I'm looking at you.

The observant of you will be realising I am a pedant and wondering what difference 1 items really makes. Very little, I suspect, but it's the little things that make a difference between a good user experience and a great one, and fixing 1 items tells your users that you are paying attention to them and that you care about them.

The best thing about this approach is that the cost is usually negligible in relation to the potential returns. This example of 1 items was prevalent and was very easily fixed as I've shown, and I'm convinced that other examples are worth fixing too. '1 items' has become the term I use to describe any lazy or inconsiderate bit of coding that impacts on the user experience and although there are few literal examples of 1 items these days, there are plenty of examples of the thinking behind it.

The 1 items that annoys me most exists on every airline website I've used recently. I fly a lot, and almost always on my own. I always check in online and always look to improve my seat position. Here's the system logic behind this process.

1. User clicks to change seat and is presented a list of passenger on this booking with seat map that highlights currently assigned seats.
2. User selects a passenger.
3. User selects a new seat.

I have been doing this regularly for quite some time now but I still forget to click my name in the list of passengers and go straight to click on the new seat only to presented with an error asking me to select a passenger first.

Hold on. It's just me here, do you see anyone else? Nope, there's the list of passengers - I can see you know it's just me, so why do I need to click first to dismiss the error and then scroll back up to click my name, only to scroll back down to try and find that new seat with extra legroom at the exit.

This is a system considered from the system's perspective. It is logical and probably runs from short, neat code. Sure it's not optimal for the user, and although we could optimise it, why bother? Nobody else does. And besides it wouldn't make that much difference if we did it anyway. After all users that get it wrong are just being stupid - we even have step by step instructions at the top of the page.

Well maybe I am being stupid, but N.E.R.T.F.M. and why wouldn't you want your system work the way my mind works instead of expecting the instructions to modify my minds process to match the process you created for your system.

At the risk of stating the obvious, here's how your users naturally approach the seat allocation process.

1. Hmmm. I wonder if there is a better seat available. I'll click the button and check.
2. Look! There's a great seat near the front of the plane where it will be quieter than sitting behind those big engines. Give it to me!

If I have 1 items in my basket then the system knows that I want me to sit on the newly selected seat. It won't take a lot of code for your system to work it out and I then won't be hassled unnecessarily - just return me to the page with the option to print my boarding card, confirming that 3C is my new seat.

The beauty of taking a user centric approach to designing your systems is that you start to discover other opportunities to improve the experience. I started writing this article with the goal of fixing the 1 items problem in seat allocation, but by considering the user's logic I now see that I can improve the experience for that couple flying to Paris for a dirty weekend.

Their logic is the same as mine, despite having 2 items in their basket. They look for better seats and when they see the two available seats in row 5 they click the seat to begin the process. You can't know for sure which of them intend to move to this new seat, but instead of displaying an error, why not just provide a prompt with the list of passengers asking for who's to move and then continue as if they'd done it the other way round - the 'logical' way. It might even be worth assuming it's the first person in the list of passengers as it was them that booked the flight so there's a good chance it's them doing the online check in, but it would be important to make it easy and obvious to the user how to change which passenger was just moved.

So who's going to be first to reconsider seat allocation from a user's perspective. It's a simple fix that's all about logic - and a little extra code. It's not going to save me any significant time in checking online but it will prevent the tinge of alienation I get when you ignore the fact that we can both see that I have only 1 item.

1. Introduce the game's narrative in the Tutorial
2. Rename the Tutorial to Level 1.

By calling the tutorial Level 1 it takes on a new importance from it's new mandatory state underscoring the importance of delivering as compelling an experience here as in the rest of the game. The reason N.E.R.T.F.M. is because the main event is far more compelling, which is why making the manual part of the main event is a great solution.

And the best games deliver Level 1 seamlessly. Take Oblivion as an example. I started the game a skeptic, convinced that overcomplicated gameplay would damage the rich narrative I hoped for. After more than 30 minutes of play I realised that all this time I had just been taking part in a Level 1 that was equal parts tutorial and intro, and now all of a sudden I was being let loose on a massive free flowing world with a fairly adept understanding of how to interact with it.

Is it possible to use this approach elsewhere? To establish this we need to understand what is going on.

1. Users are identified as new.
2. New users are given reduced functionality, but are put in an environment where the initial limited functionality is adequate.
3. A basic level of knowledge is assumed so as not to patronise users - game tutorials assume you can use a joystick to move around.
4. Abilities are introduced one at a time in context with the users need to use the new ability to overcome a relevant obstacle.

If we consider the Level 1 approach for an application things are not as simple. If I spend several hundred dollars on the new version of Photoshop and after installing it I'm denied the clone tool as it is something I'm going to have to earn the right to use I'll quickly become frustrated. Bearing this in mind we would have to offer users the option to skip Level 1 activating the full functionality of the app right away.

This has been tried before. Back in the day, Kai Krause brought us his Power Tools, a creative hot bed of over the top filters for Photoshop. Kai was a bit of a hippy and had an anti-establishment approach to user interface and software development - he openly encouraged students and enthusiasts who didn't have the budget for his software to steal a copy of it and if they ever made enough money for it then they could buy it.

User interface for Kai's Power Tools Spheroid Designer

Although Kai's Power Tools was accessed from the Filters menu in Photoshop, when selected a new UI full screened over Photoshop's menus and palettes which initially had limited functionality, which was a good thing because the interface was genuinely weird. As the software was used, more functionality starts to reveal itself, but only functionality relevant to the type of work being already being done. This meant that my installation of KPT ended up with different functionality from your installation.

Although this sounds extreme, it's not far from what Microsoft have tried with recent versions of Office where the apps decide which menu items should be shown at first click based on the type of use, with the full menu available after a few seconds delay. This however proved frustrating for many users as it resulted in menu items being hidden unexpectedly resulting in disorientation.

So perhaps reducing app functionality is a step too far, but we should at least recognise a novice user and offer them more support. Most apps have tooltips active by default and more and more feature a landing screen when opened without a document visible - both steps in the right direction.

Empy tabs in basecamp offer a video tutorial of how to begin.

When you visit a tab on a Basecamp project with no submitted content it displays a link to a tutorial video on how to use that section - a simple and effective example of helping beginners that isn't overly intrusive to expert users that simply haven't added data to that tab yet.

I'm going to end this article with a quote from Mr Krause himself.

"An interface is about hiding complexity from the user, It's about guiding a process, without cognitive understanding of what goes on beneath. Interface design is the art of enveloping the observer in an enticing, "try this" exploration with ever-new elements and designs as the tools to triumph in new territories."

The problem: A webhost generates log files filled with useful debugging information. Unfortunately if you don't have shell access to the server, in order to read the logs you have to download the entire log via FTP, then open it on your local machine. This process has a lot of overhead, especially if you just want to monitor the last few lines of the log (where the most recent messages live).

The solution: WebTail. Just upload the WebTail folder to your remote server, navigate to http://yourdomain/path/to/WebTail/, type in the URI to your error log, and hit 'Restart log'.

Head over to the WebTail download page to get v1.0, and see the full instructions.

WebTail was originally made by Marque to view PHP error logs on our Mosso hosted server. Therefore, it has only been tested in a few environments.