1. To brag
2. To complain
3. To reach out

Angel Anderson, a technicolor dreamer and benevolent dictator (wonderfully described in her about.me page) explains the motivations for why we share and designing social tools for these purposes.

At the UX Speakeasy Conference she discusses six social considerations when designing.

1. Landscape

The landscape is crowded so design in such a way that users don’t have to leave their existing platform allowing them to cross post like Facebook’s integration with Twitter.

2. Relationship Framework

The way people share through dominance (ie Klout), commonality (ie OKCupid), or reciprocity (ie Quora) will depend on the framework that you design in.

3. Social Objects

What you share is based on the platform you use like Foursquare where you share your location.

4. Personal Boundaries

Design to allow people to maintain their boundaries and protect their personal information.

5. Privacy

Design to allow people more control over their privacy unlike Facebook’s privacy policy that is longer than the US Constitution.

6. Friction

The idea that frictionless sharing becomes meaningless. Sharing should be simple, but also meaningful. For instance, it’s not very meaningful when your Facebook “friends” wish you happy b-day. These are people you haven’t seen since you last felt like a zit was the end of the world.

Design for the User Experience

Angel stresses that sharing=caring. If we want to move forward as professionals, and as a society even, we must share more in order to improve and become better in this age of UX enlightenment she calls it. There are a plethora of social sharing platforms out there and we need to remember to design for the user and not for the platform. Design to improve the user experience. We need to remember to make the platform work for the user and not the other way around.

Check out Angel’s slides here.

This was not in Slideshare but David Horn was kind enough to share his slides with me – Techniques for Measuring Social Networks in the UX.

Content

Overall, from what I did see, the organization of the content and copy writing seemed to be well done and speaks in the voice of the brand that I am accustomed to hearing – friendly, approachable, contemporary, easy-going.

I honed in on The Southwest Experience section and was pleased to see how it neatly and cleanly grouped the key subsections from the landing page, which enable you to Learn More. I was still disappointed however that it made the same mistake it made in the primary navigation where it does not show which menu item you are currently in on the left hand navigation menu. The currently selected section should change to black text rather than remaining blue. What’s more, it labeled this left hand navigation (local navigation) “Related Information” which leads you to think that it is related information to the Finding Low Fares section or the current section, when in fact it is the menu for accessing the other Travel Experience subtopics.

Interaction Design

I found three problematic interaction designs on the website that are worth noting, because they point out useful lessons.

• Just because it works for some, does not mean it works for all
• Don’t get fancy for the sake of fanciness, it could hurt your cause
• Test your forms

Just because it works for some, does not mean it works for all

For some reason, Southwest decided to introduce faceted navigation on the Special Offers section. Faceted navigation is probably something you’ve seen on Kayak.com or perhaps a retail e-commerce site and it’s generally used to help narrow down search results quickly and painlessly by using sliders, checkboxes, or other toggles which then eliminate results that do not meet the selected criteria. This faceted navigation panel was poorly executed and likely does not fit the use case here. There doesn’t seem to be enough specials here to warrant using it. Generally faceted navigation is most effective when you have very large (more than say, 50) items that need to be waded through. It seems like this might have been a case of one of the following.

“This is cool. We should use one of those here.” OR
“The boss says we have to have this, so we’re putting it in.”

When used well, subset totals of results are shown. For example, before you even get to flipping the switches and narrowing down, there are subtotal numerals for each set to help guide you, and indicate how many results are available in each grouping. In this implementation, you don’t get to see the subtotals until you make your selection. Additionally, the website combined the faceted navigation with tabs, where tabs suddenly disappear if you begin making selections in the faceted navigation. I think Southwest may have been trying to make it easier to jump between the types of specials, which makes sense but it probably could have stopped there, and omitted the faceted navigation altogether.

Don’t get fancy for the sake of fanciness, it could hurt your cause

Another issue I found in the Special Offers is the call to action buttons. See the Rapid Rewards Partner graphics? How many of you thought those were buttons? Don’t be shy, raise your hands. Well…they’re not. But they sure look like buttons don’t they? The real call to action is the “More Details” link, or the blue title text of the special itself. This is problematic because you are more likely to click on those pretty graphics only to have nothing happen. I understand that Southwest wanted to brand the specials and flag partners, but my recommendation would be to change the styling to look less like a button perhaps through the use of a ribbon or simpler icon, and to reduce it in scale and placement so that it is not competing or overpowering the true call to action hyperlink.

Test Your Forms

In my quest for shoulder season deals, I looked for some last minute ideas in the Vacations section. From the landing page for Vacations, I clicked on Last Minute Deals and to my surprise I was taken off the main site to another site, SouthwestVacations.com. I was happy to see some deals and clicked on the first Book Now button right below the hero area which told me I could find some special deals as long as I stay for at least 3 days. Another surprise…I was taken to a vacation builder wizard, which started in a search form. But it auto populated my Departure City as Boston and my travel dates. I understand that Southwest filled in the Destination City and the Promo Code but why the other fields? I don’t live in Boston and I don’t want to travel on those dates. I thought it was a fluke until I tried booking some of the other last minute deals. All of them did the same thing. Very strange. And I couldn’t find any explanation text to help me understand why.

Overall, like any travel experience, there are high points and low points to Southwest.com’s user experience. Auditing the entire site would be quite a task and would take much more time. Here are some things Southwest Airlines should focus on.

• Southwest needs to concentrate on bringing better consistency to all the various departments and sub-brands not only visually, but also from an interaction design standpoint.
• There are numerous searching and results filtering patterns that have been created in each area that could probably be refined to surface a smaller handful of patterns that can be reused portal-wide.
• Too many methods make for a jarring, disjointed experience forcing the user to re-learn how the site wants him/her to think.

I’ll still be traveling Southwest Airlines, but I do hope it brings aboard some fresh perspectives on its online and mobile user experiences soon. So who’s traveling this shoulder season?

I decided to review their website and its mobile version, as well as its mobile app. Here are some of what I loved (and didn’t love) about their navigation, presentation, content and interaction design.

Navigation

On Southwest Airline’s website, the primary navigation menu is elegantly designed and shows very clear affordance (i.e. what’s clickable or clicked) for the Air, Hotel, Car and Vacations groups. But, for some reason, it didn’t apply the same affordance to the other menu items like Special Offers, Travel Guide and Rapid Rewards. When you click on those tabs, they don’t stay “down” so to speak. For example, if you click on the Special Offers tab, the only way you know you’re really in that section is to look at the small page title. Tsk-tsk…

Hero Area + Scoped Search = Functional + Promotional

What I like about this oversized graphic area is that Southwest has managed to use it not only for conveying a marketing message (what it’s typically used for), but also as a home for the primary activity that users want to do – search. Search for tickets, a place to stay, or a ride.

The tabbed search box makes it simple to do scoped searches on a specific form of travel with little effort. You don’t HAVE to go to the big “Hotel” section from the top menu to do a search for hotels instead of air. Also, it keeps the search form simpler than a catch all type of form where perhaps someone might have to think more – like on Travelocity. I’m not knocking that method, it’s just that this method is more appropriate for Southwest whose primary offering is air travel on one airline, rather than all forms of travel or all airlines.

The Case of the Disappearing Footer

Mmmm, mmmm….I love me some big juicy footers, don’t you? “Fat footers”, those big chunky footers we’re seeing a lot more of lately, work really well for exposing deep links and frequently visited content within a large site. But for some reason, the fat footer that appears on the homepage disappears on the Air, Hotel, and Car pages. After poking around a few pages, I thought, “Hrm, does Southwest have a blog?” Sure enough it does! But, I couldn’t get there from one of the interior pages because the link to the blog was in the fat footer that could only be accessed on the home page.

Presentation

When I thought about Southwest’s presentation, I immediately wanted to see how it carried its branding across platforms and devices. Do you enjoy the same experience regardless of whether you’re on the website, iPhone, Android phone, or some other type of smartphone?

Southwest did a good job of carrying the brand identity throughout the website, retaining a strong and consistent visual design language, for the most part. There are some confusing things I see happening however that perhaps most average users might not notice.

What the font?
If you take a look at all the various forms on the site, you might see that they don’t all look alike. What’s with all the different typefaces here? Subheadings, like seen in the Account Login in the right rail of the homepage, don’t look like they follow the same font families as the rest of the body or heading text.

Also, the form fields appear to be using different weights. In the tabbed search box, the grayed text that hints to you what to fill in is larger than the same kind of text in the Account Login panel.

Then if you compare the Account Login on the homepage with the Account Login on the Travel Guide section, you see a complete change in the way the form works. Instead of having hint text that you type over, the fields are now labeled. From a usability standpoint, I believe labeled fields are actually better. So why didn’t Southwest do this on the other forms? Is it trying to indicate that the 2 kinds of Account Logins are different? Not sure. The forms need to be consistent so that you can easily slip between all the screens without having to pause and think for a split-second about how the form works.

On the plus side, the website does direct you to mobile site – mobile.southwest.com.

iPhone vs. Droid vs. Mobile Site
Just comparing the mobile experiences alone, do you notice anything odd? It’s kind of like that game: “one of these things is not like the others” isn’t it? It did a great job of making the iPhone and Droid apps feel nearly identical, but the mobile site looks like it was completely abandoned. This isn’t ideal. It tells me that it either decided to stop developing or maintaining the mobile site, because it prefers people use the app version. But if you’re neither an iPhone nor Android user, and you have a smartphone your user experience will not be up to snuff and you’ll be forced to use a mobile site that feels very different from even the website version.

Southwest Airlines Iphone App

Southwest Airlines Android App

mobile version of southwest airline website

Visually, the mobile.southwest.com version needs work, because it doesn’t carry through any of the brand identity that we’ve become accustomed to via the website. It needs to be enhanced to stay on par with the website.

If you compare the two apps against the mobile version there are other inconsistencies beyond just initial look:

• Grouping
• Reservations – car and air – are grouped on the app, separated seemingly for no reason on the mobile site
• The app does a better job of grouping related tasks. Related action buttons are color coded to help group items and visually they are offset and bundled.
• Icons
• The mobile site’s icons feel unrelated from one another and give me the feeling that perhaps they are stock icons. Because they are full color and displayed against colored backgrounds, they are very hard to read quickly. The app icons with their unified style and purposeful color backgrounds are not only easier to read, but also make for a complete system or language that users can count on.

Stay tuned next week for Part II of my shoulder season user experience review where I discuss content and interaction design of the Southwest Airlines website. Got any of your own user experience observations that you’d like to share? Please comment below.

Three nights a week I attend a web professionals meeting, social media chat, or local networking event. I watch at least two webinars every week (my friends call me a “webinar-holic.”). As a volunteer leader for two professional groups, I help plan and market monthly events.

Oh, and yes, my days are spent designing and developing websites for small businesses and non-profits through my web consulting business.

I’m not a productivity expert. Working from home is a challenge. Staying focused takes a lot of work. And planning.

I’ve tried many strategies to improve my productivity. A lot of trial and error, and finally discovered some methods that work for me and allow me to feel productive gains in my life.

The Pomodoro Technique

My friend Meryl Evans clued me in on this time-management technique. I’ve been using it for a few months and it’s made a big difference in finishing my tasks and completing projects.

If you’re not familiar with the technique, the basic concept is:

1. Identify the tasks to complete.
2. Work for 25 minutes on a task (each 25 minute period is called a “pomodoro”).
3. Mark an X after each pomodoro.
3. Take a break for five minutes.
4. After four pomodoros take a longer break of 15-20 minutes.

It’s easy to start using the Pomodoro technique, all you need is paper, pencil, and a timer. With the short time period, it trains you to concentrate on one task. If you’re a multi-tasker, you’ll probably find it challenging at first.

Evernote

What could be better than a free application that synchronizes information on your mobile, desktop and web? And runs on Windows, Mac, Web, Android, iPhone, iPad, iPod, and more?

Evernote makes it easy for you to:

• take notes
• share information with others
• capture screenshots
• tag content
• organize content into notebooks
• find your information easily

I’ve used Evernote since it was a beta product. Once you start using it, you’ll find all kinds of ways to use it daily.

Don’t have your laptop with you when a client calls about an issue you resolved a few months ago? Check your notes in Evernote on your mobile.

Have unexpected behavior on a web application you’ve created? Capture screenshots with a quick one-key action on your desktop.

Share your research about mobile user experience by sending an email to people to access your notes. You can choose to share your information publicly or privately.

If you’ve used paper, post-it notes, or Microsoft Word for note taking and sketching in the past, you know you can’t always find the information months later. With Evernote, organize your information into notebooks, tag your notes, and search for your information quickly.

Evernote add-ons and built-in features make it simple to convert audio to text, send photos from your camera to your account, and email notes to your Evernote account.

A basic Evernote account is free, but limited in space. Upgrading to a premium account gives you more space, the ability to upload 1GB each month with files up to 50M in size, PDF searching, and more.

Dropbox

File sharing, backup and synchronization is critical for every developer. Talk to anyone whose system has crashed or has lost critical files, and you’ll hear stories of lost hours or days trying to recover files.

Enter Dropbox, a simple, easy to use, and free (initial account provides 2GB of space, but you can easily earn more by referring friends) cloud-based storage application.

Installing it on your computer creates a folder named Dropbox. Copy any file into the Dropbox folder, and the file is automatically copied to other shared computers and your Dropbox account in the cloud.

You don’t want to rely on Dropbox as your only backup solution. I strongly recommend your backup strategy includes local external backup (I use several external hard drives).

Dropbox allows you to easily increase your storage space by referring friends, which I somehow managed to increase to 88GB of my own storage. I’m using the Dropbox professional plan now, but depending on your needs, a free account may work well for you.

What about you? Have you had success with the Pomodoro technique, Evernote or Dropbox? Do you have any tips for improving productivity? Share your stories and comments below.

About the Author

Deborah Edwards-Onoro specializes in front-end web design, usability and accessibility through her company Lireo Designs. She’s an officer with the Michigan Usability Professionals and group leader of Refresh Detroit. When she’s not at her computer or planning events, you can find her bird watching, bicycling, or shooting photos. Deborah lives in Canton, Michigan. You can follow her @redcrew.

I recently attended an event “The New Relationship Marketing” with Mari Smith, the social media guru and “raging extrovert” hosted by Linked OC. She has a new book out called The New Relationship Marketing: How to Build a Large, Loyal, Profitable. I’ve been following Mari in the social networks, reading her blogs and watching her webinars, but this was my first time seeing her in person. I have to say that she did not disappoint. The experience was a delight.

What is Relationship Marketing?

quality + marketing + customer service
The essence of relationship marketing is showing that you genuinely care (i.e. you remember people’s names). It is going above and beyond for your customers and making them feel special. Thanks to social media, you can go to the social networks to find out personal info about someone like a client to woo him/her. You’re not leading with dollars first. It’s relationship first and business second. It’s about meeting up with people and shaking hands, which goes beyond social media requiring an offline component to marketing. The longer relationships are sustained, the more profitable your company will be (i.e. building a relationship on that email list of yours). I would also like to add that relationship marketing relates to user experience in that you have the customer at the top of mind and that you are offering a high quality and easy experience for your patrons.

Here is her four part formula to relationship marketing:
1. Quality
2. Content
3. Consistency
4. Caring

Mari’s Tips

• Use first names in the social networks as if you’re in a conversation. This builds trust.
• Get a better retweet rate by leaving a comment in a RT. This brings in your opinion which offers more trust.
• 80% of the population is in the Eastern and Central time zones, so try tweeting earlier in the day.
• Keep your Facebook posts under 80 characters and leave a call to action (i.e. Click “like” if you agree or, add your comment below).
• Don’t forget to integrate your offline marketing.
• Twitter backgrounds are underutilized so make sure you make the best of this real estate by displaying all the ways people can connect with you.
• Don’t be afraid to give your best stuff away.
• Before you write something online, ask yourself what is your deepest intent.
• Apply the 80/20 Rule – help others 80% of the time.

Mari’s Quotes To Share

“New marketing is about relationships, not the medium.” – Ben Grossman
“What the world needs most is emotionally intelligent leaders.” – Martha Beck

Social Media is vital to today’s business – why? The old adage, “Make a customer happy, they’ll tell a friend. Make a customer angry and they’ll tell 10 friends,” takes on a whole new meaning in today’s world. In fact, it is more like, “Make a customer happy or angry and they are telling 10,000 friends.” The truth is when a customer has a poor user experience or customer service experience with your company they are not going to go to your website or call you – they are going to their friends on the social networks. Social Networking also provides your business with exposure to customers you may never have reached otherwise. Traditional marketing has a limited reach that Social Media does not.

While there are many social networking sites available, the ones we are most familiar with and those that are most recognized in supporting business, are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Of course, Google+ has also entered the foray and is attempting to become friendlier to business in many aspects including usability.

Stupidcat.com has come to the conclusion that Twitter is far superior for promotional and marketing efforts to any other social platform. This article will provide insight into why we believe this to be true, as well as provide a glimpse into the future in terms of where we believe the medium is headed.

In working with the various social platforms, we have found the following with regard to how they are used and their effectiveness:

Facebook (750 Million Registered Users)

Facebook is the network for family and friends. It has evolved over the years, but it continues to be short of the glory in terms of a truly effective business social network. Of course, it all depends on your approach.

The problem comes when you begin to look at less known brands, local business and B2B companies not supporting consumer based activities. Creating a Facebook tab and offering coupons on Facebook is not enough. Ever notice people on Twitter thanking you for following them and then asking you to like them on Facebook? For business, Facebook requires support of other marketing approaches in order to make it work.

Facebook has worked hard to monetize its business and offers advertising – however, this is another of its pitfalls for business. These ads perform far less than a banner ad on any other site. Ask yourself, when you are on Facebook, do you really look at the ads? Check out the Mashable story on this topic.

LinkedIn (120 Million + Registered Users)

LinkedIn takes the traditional meet and greet of the afterhours Chamber of Commerce organizations to the virtual set. This is where you rub elbows with other business leaders and “network” in order to get your foot in the door.

It can be very effective for businesses of all kinds (including those that Facebook tends to fail, like B2B companies and others).

However, some say it is suffering from similar Facebook privacy woes and several companies have banned its use by its employees and sales staff. Some companies have reported that employees were taking company confidential information and distributing it through this social site.

Some users are annoyed at LinkedIn’s practices concerning unannounced updates and security/privacy impacts caused by these changes. Check out this article on LinkedIn’s privacy.

Google + (25 Million + Registered Users)

Google has become the love of every technophile. If you are one of those geeks who like to get under the hood and are a little more than the average “gadget guy/girl”, then you are likely a fan of all things Google. Android device enthusiasts are generally more technical than the typical smartphone or consumer level user. Like Apple, there are passionate fans in the Google camp. Google user interfaces seem to be designed by engineers. They don’t generally have intuitive or well packaged design within their interfaces. They are clinical or cold designs that leave the user unemotional about their product user interfaces. This can be challenging for them as seen in the Google+ offering.

Google+ tried to bridge the gaps left by Facebook and, at the surface, it first appeared as though they were going to really have something. The Circles feature was the key security/privacy feature that Facebook was missing (at the time). It gave a feeling of confidence and allowed me to make the choice of what content I wanted to publish publicly.

As time goes, however, Facebook has begun to add some Google influenced enhancements and is trying to improve its offering and rebuild user confidence. Yet, Google+ still suffers from a drab user interface and has lost its luster with early adopters. Even as Google+ continues to try and enhance the system, it is bleeding members and has failed at its first attempt to provide business pages. Who knows where this story will go next?

So why is Twitter better?

Twitter was designed to be a way to update your current status to many people from a single SMS message.

Twitter was launched in March of 2006. Twitter has 200 Million Registered Users.

Since 2006, we believe that Twitter has been primarily responsible for the social movement. We believe this because it facilitates users’ following, engaging and building relationships with people with like interests – not just family and friends and known entities. For instance, the Twitter “Who To Follow” feature is a perfect example. It suggests other Twitter accounts for you to follow. These are not people you are necessarily friends with or that are family members. These are folks who are interested in the same things you are. This is much different than Facebook’s Find Friends, for example, because there is some sort of relationship associated between you and the suggestion such as a friend of someone you are friends with, etc.

Of course, there are recommended methods to engaging with people on Twitter. You can’t be successful charging in with the traditional offline marketing and sales techniques. Instead, you have to engage, build relationships and become a subject matter expert. You have to UN-Market (read this book!).

These elements are what make Twitter the leading social platform for business use. From a sales relationship building perspective, Twitter allows you to create relationships in record time. It takes the “cold” out of “cold calling.” Tweetchats and Hashtags are also key in the Twitter arsenal that can be used for creative marketing.

People are learning to communicate with 140 characters at a time – it is much quicker to get your point across – it is your online elevator speech.

Business moves at the speed of light – Twitter is a tool supportive of this fact.

The Future

So, what is the future?

Facebook has started to stall by losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.

Twitter’s growth has been astronomical! Just think, in March 2010 Twitter had 50 Million registered users – today they have 200 Million.

One of Steve Jobs more recent decisions is to include Twitter in the latest iOS operating system update for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch being released any day now. Apple has worked with Twitter to tightly integrate at the operating system level. Twitter will be available across applications (that support it) including the camera, email contacts, Safari and more. With the millions of devices that are in consumers’ hands and have the option of upgrading to the latest OS, we foresee a mass movement in the Twitterverse.

It is our opinion at Stupidcat.com that this decision (coupled with the continued decline of Facebook, Google’s weak positioning and LinkedIn’s lack of device integration) is going to catapult Twitter to the leader in social networking over the next 18 months.

Conclusion

It is important that every strategy considers all the possibilities and opportunities. Building the right web presence is like mixing the right ingredients for a recipe. Every presence is different and requires a unique approach.

So, of course, we are not advocating “pick one and drop the rest”, here. No, every strategy should include a plan for expanding your visibility online. You need a web presence, not just a web site. We ARE saying that if you want to focus on one success driven social network – Twitter is the way to go.

So what do you think? Is Twitter the more marketable social platform for business? Do you see the “Apple factor” as being the fuel for a Twitter launch? Tell us in the comments; we want to hear what you think!

About Steve Crandall

Steve in a nutshell – Husband. Father. Graphic artist. Collaborated publisher of an anthology graphic comic book series titled The Barbed Rose in 1990. 90s hobbyist BBS operator (Trade Wars was awesome!). Programmer. Entrepreneur. Founder of Stupidcat.com. Web designer. Amateur Photographer. Star Trek and Star Wars fan. Geek. I have been in the web design business since 1993. My experience spans all things web including HTML, CSS, jQuery, Classic ASP, a little PHP and all things User Interface related. I have always been supportive and helpful to the web industry by assisting where needed. Feel free to hit me up with your questions @stupidcatdesign.

The Cloud offers many services including security, compliance, storage, data backup, redundant power, basically the IT infrastructure. Companies either offer SAS (software as a service) or IAS (infrastructure as a service), essentially software and/or hardware services on the Cloud. There are three types of Cloud services – public, private, and hybrid. The Public Cloud is for both customers and employees to gain access to company resources that are both free or/and paid (i.e. Bing, Google, Yahoo, The New York Times). The Private Cloud is only accessible to those who are authorized to use the services such as employees (i.e. VMWare, Citrix). The Hybrid Cloud is a mix of both public and private services.

There appears to be a consensus among all the panelists that the Cloud works in their business models for a number of reasons.

Scalable

With the Cloud there is no longer a need to invest in a physical infrastructure and numerous datacenters, especially on applications without a competitive advantage according to Dawn Trautman (Sr VP of IT and Strategic Planning at Pacific Life) or for consumer driven sites like Myspace and less popular applications according to Cindy McKenzie (Sr VP of Enterprise Application Services at Fox Entertainment). Also, you are better equipped to justify the idle months versus the busy months. The Cloud allows for economies of scale.

Agile

What was once a project in itself – deploying an application – is now only a task because rather than a lead time of say, several weeks, it only takes minutes on the Cloud. Also, software updates have become a thing of the past, saving a tremendous amount of time and money.

Cost Savings

No technology infrastructure, no data centers, and less IT support are all costs that can be either avoided or mitigated in the long run using the Cloud. Your TCO (total cost of ownership) can be significantly less using the Cloud. Some of the spending can be shifted to hiring experts who are experienced in reviewing and managing vendors, which is an absolute must among all the panelists.

So what are the challenges?

Contracts, contracts, contracts! That appeared to be the accord among all the panelists. SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards) audits are recommended for commercial sites that are end user focused. SAS vendor contracts were discussed extensively in terms of its legal ambiguity due to the boilerplate contracts that vendors offer. Geraldine Ramezani (CTO at Toyota Financial Services) advises that you “look before you leap” into any contract and Jena Lee (VP and CIS Officer at Apria Healthcare) suggests that the more certifications vendors possess that can demonstrate their security the better. Cindy urged to do a review process on these vendors and put everything in the contract stressing that you can’t overemphasize the security that you need for your company. Involving the major departments, especially legal and risk management is necessary to ensure your company is protected from security breaches or catastrophic failures. Also, they indicated that SLA’s that guarantee 99.9% uptime is non-negotiable. This is why hiring an expert with strong supplier management skills is pertinent and essential to finding other creative ways to negotiate contracts with vendors.

Josh Fraser (VP of Biz Dev at RightScale) stated that the Cloud has “introduced things never possible in the past that’s possible now.” And he added that because of the Cloud there are “no barriers anymore” and loss of some control is inevitable. Cindy noted that the Cloud changes the entire system development lifecycle and advises that you start early and get departments involved.

Personally, I have a small user experience design company and most of my resources are on the Cloud from Google Apps to BaseCamp. You may not realize it, but you’re probably using a wide array of Cloud services as well.

So what do you say to Cloud Computing? Yay or Nay and why?

I travel. A lot. About once a month, I try to get on an airplane somewhere. Anywhere. Last year, I spent 140 days outside of San Francisco. It’s not that I don’t like the city, but I get impatient.

I also travel light, so I use my iPhone as my primary device when I travel.

Strangely, most “top” mobile applications people think would be useful for traveling aren’t. I don’t want to book a hotel room, a flight, or a car — I’ve planned that already. I take care of that sitting on my laptop, because entering credit card information on a phone is something I never want to do.

I want mobile applications to fill a very specific need. I might have several applications on my phone like that. When you consider how much traveling costs, I think spending $25 for a few applications is worth the investment for a better trip.

The best applications are designed with the user experience in mind, by filling needs within the context of your trip. For example:

• Is my flight delayed?
• How much does it cost for a taxi to my hotel from the airport?
• Where do I get something to eat that’s inexpensive, but recommended by locals?
• How do I get to a neighborhood?
• How do I call a taxi?
• Where’s free WiFi if I’m out of the country?

These are immediate needs. You aren’t sitting in your hotel room browsing through the yellow pages; you’re standing on Columbus Avenue in North Beach.

Which restaurant do you go to, and how do you get a reservation? (Hint: the best restaurants aren’t on Columbus Avenue).

Here are my recommended iPhone apps for traveling within San Francisco, because it’s a great model for what works and what doesn’t.

1. FlightTrack

There’s nothing worse than getting to the airport and your flight is delayed, like, three hours (read: average San Francisco International delay on a Friday evening in July).

To solve that, download FlightTrack. It’s an application (formerly free, but now starts at $4.99) where you can enter your flight information and get takeoff times, landing times, see the flight in transit, and get an idea of how often the flight is on time. You can hang out a little longer in the city by the bay, while your airplane finds its way from Philadelphia.

Why it rocks: It has everything you need in an application to track your flights. The interface is elegant, and you get push notifications when a flight is delayed, but only in the professional version.

Room for improvement: They need to find a revenue stream. I could point them in a few directions, like more travel services. In reality, there should be no professional version – they should just charge for it.

2. Yelp + OpenTable

There’s nothing worse than standing in a city, lost, and you don’t know where to grab a good steak or great Chinese. Greasy food makes me sick, so I prefer restaurants that have decent food.

Enter Yelp! + Open Table (I know, two apps). I use both together because I want to find out the semi-recommended restaurants in the area and see potential reservation times. Restaurants that have few available reservation times override Yelp reviews, because it shows they are busy.

Why they rock: Yelp is a good alternative to the current yellow pages and finds nearby places. Additionally, OpenTable is a stupid-simple reservation system. Registration is a tricky process on the phone, but signing up on OpenTable.com first makes reserving a table easier.

Room for improvement: Yelp’s reviews are overwhelming in some cities (San Francisco) and invisible in other cities (New Orleans). OpenTable is a proprietary system that doesn’t cover every restaurant and is really weak in places like New Orleans. I find I have to use both to find good restaurants. The user experience would be much better if these two companies joined forces.

3. Instagram

Screw checking in with every single social network from Foursquare to Facebook: I want to take photos once and send it everywhere.

Welcome Instagram, the little app company that could. The four employees at the wonderful little application make it possible for you to take photos, add some amazing filters, and upload (and check in) to Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter. You can also geo-tag your photos, so you know exactly where you took them.

What’s more is that you can connect with and view photos from others, browsing pictures taken by the people who live in the city that you will be visiting.

Why it rocks: Carrying the application fills my need to document my trip in photos and check in socially and in style. The integration with social services and geo-tagging is user experience at its best.

Room for improvement: Not much, other than figure out how to make a living at it. If photos can be uploaded to Flickr, Picasa or Facebook Albums, that would be really cool. I would pay for this.

4. UberCab

UberCab has a pretty limited reach now; but once it gets to other cities, it’s going to kill the market. UberCab lets you call town cars in San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. You can see right on your phone where your car is and how many minutes until its arrival.

You can call your driver directly from your phone, and there’s no need to tip. The application charges your credit card without pulling out your wallet.

UberCab has been a wonderful addition to the San Francisco transportation scene. I had an epic cab ride (http://www.yelp.com/biz/yellow-cab-san-francisco-4) with Yellow Cab, and whenever I need to get somewhere on time and in style I take Yellow Cab.

Why it rocks: It provides feedback instantly and fills an immediate need – fast transportation.

Room for improvement: Signing up on the phone is impossible. Sign up on the site before your trip. Also, UberCab’s service is a bit pricey (the app is free though!).

5. iCommute SF

For those who like to see the city through mass transit, the best option is iCommute SF. This application finds your location and shows you the closest bus stops, when the next bus is, and where it’s going. The service is scary accurate (using the NextBus system), and shows you the delays.

Why it rocks: It shows the expected times of the next bus and how to get to where your going. What more do you want?

Room for improvement: The Google Maps format for routes is absolutely useless. It would also be nice to see connected routes, and maybe routes that show you the best of the city.

When considering travel mobile apps, think about where you’re going and what you’ll need. For me, I like to try new foods and know what disasters I can avoid (flight delays, bad tourist traps, traffic, etc). What mobile apps are the most useful for is preventing in-the-moment panic by finding a quick solution to your travel gripes, which usually involve transportation, dining/nightlife, staying connected to others. Give these apps a whirl, you won’t be disappointed.

Got some of your own favorite travel apps? Please share below.

About the Author

Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform. He’s working on three pet projects: UX Drinking Game, Pick An Excuse and Perks Locator. You can find his blog on Usability Counts.

Back when you got started, what made you become interested in applying cognitive psychology to technology?

I was a psychology grad student, working on a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. Penn State had a language requirement for grad students, but you could substitute a programming language for a foreign language. So I took my first programming course. This was many, many years ago. Computers were not user-friendly – in fact the term “user-friendly” had not been invented yet. I became interested in what would happen when everyday, normal people had to use computers…not computer scientists. (Back then you only interacted with a computer if you were a specialist.) So my career in usability/human factors was launched the moment I received my first computer printout that said, “Job aborted”.

What motivated you to write this book?

The book comes from my blog. In October of 2009 I started the series “100 Things You Should Know About People”. I had just read the book and seen the movie, “Julie and Julia”. The book and movie are a real life story of a woman who started a blog to write about making all the recipes in Julia Child’s book over the course of 365 days. I became interested in what made a blog really popular. I decided that people liked going on a “journey” with the blog author. So I decided to write a 100 things blog series. I didn’t realize at the time that it would take me 1.5 years and would turn into a book! I like to write books. When I decided to write another book turning the blog into a book was one of several ideas that I sent to my editor at Peachpit/New Riders. He liked that idea the best, so that’s what the book became. With the popularity of interface design/usability/user experience, there are people from many different disciplines who now “do the work”. Many, if not most, of the people doing the work these days do not have a psychology background. And, of course, because I have a psychology background, I think the psychological point of view is critical to design.

How did you narrow the book down to these 100 things?

It wasn’t easy! I kept writing and writing for 1.5 years. I reviewed new research and old research, and then worked to organize the material in a way that I thought would make sense. It was very hard to come up with exactly 100…no more, no less.

As an Asian person who grew up in the west I found #39 “Culture Affects How People Think” unbelievable. Have you applied this concept to any of your own design work? If so, could you share an example?

I don’t personally do design work for other cultures. I work collaboratively with colleagues in those other cultures, but I don’t do the design for those projects. It’s probably better to have people from the culture do the design. But now that I’m familiar with that research I try to make less assumptions and then test, test, test, of course.

In #46 “People Actually Can’t Multitask,” you wrote about how age does not determine better multitasking experience. Are there any studies about sex and multitasking – I heard that women are better multi-taskers since we have a much thicker Corpus Callosum (bridge that connects the right and left frontal lobes)?

The latest research shows that it is not true that women have a thicker corpus callosum — Luders, Eileena; Narr, Katherine L.a; Zaidel, Eranb; Thompson, Paul M.a; Toga, Arthur W. (2006). “Gender effects on callosal thickness in scaled and unscaled space.”. NeuroReport 17 (11): 1103–1106. doi:10.1097/01.wnr.0000227987.77304.cc. PMID 16837835. (Although interestingly which gender you feel you are is determined by the shape of your corpus callosum– Dubb A, Gur R, Avants B, Gee J (2003). “Characterization of sexual dimorphism in the human corpus callosum”. Neuroimage 20 (1): 512–9. doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00313-6.PMID 14527611)

#56 “People’s Ability to Delay Gratification (or Not) Starts Young” is intriguing. Has there been new data from the research that is still in progress?

There is ongoing, longitudinal research on delaying gratification. It seems to be a personality trait that you are born with or not, and being able to delay gratification is a marker for success in our modern culture.

Even as a pioneer in the industry I’m sure you look to others for inspiration, who do you follow to stay fresh?
I have many blogs that I follow that review various research studies. I am also a voracious reader. I usually have about 5 books going at any one time. I am a fast reader. I read literally hundreds of books every year.

What are the key things you want people to take-away from the book?

That there is a body of research and knowledge about people that you need to know about and apply if you are designing anything a human is going to use, and that people are endlessly fascinating.

About Dr. Susan Weinschenk
She has a Ph.D. in Psychology (from Pennsylvania State University) and over 30 years of experience applying psychology to the workplace. She has written several books including the aforementioned and Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? (New Riders Press). She is Chief of User Experience Strategy at Human Factors International. She is also a great speaker and presenter. You can catch up with her on her blog What Makes Them Click or follow her on Twitter at @thebrainlady.