Designing for Experience

How to twitter Part 2 What not to do

March 13th, 2009, posted in Social Media, Twitter

This is part of an ongoing series, see part 1

Twitter is a newish medium, and it is still growing and changing very rapidly. I could go on and on about how in the last year alone twitter has grown by 10 times, how the simple convention of “@ replies” and hashtags (a word preceded with a #) were developed independently by users and now @ replies are part of the official twitter interface and program. As such many, many surprising things are happening on twitter. One of the twitter founders even gave a TED talk about it. So yes there is a lot happening there, but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

Just today I had someone follow me on twitter. They were very good about customizing their twitter page, added a bio, a real name, even a location. They didn’t choose to show their face, but rather an image they felt conveyed the image they were trying to project, that is OK, but still not what I wold recommend. They even customized the background image of the page and the colors of the fonts etc. It actually looks quite good. They made a few mistakes though:

They followed over ONE THOUSAND people in a short period of time
They haven’t updated their status AT ALL.
They crammed too much in and used all caps.

Let’s run it down by the numbers. You can’t possibly interact with that many people that quickly in any meaningful way. IF you hoped to just drive a few hits to your website and you don’t really plan on participating on twitter you are essentially a spammer. You are not welcome, go away, no one wants that. This is like inviting 1000 people you don’t know to a party, but it’s at a public park and all you have there is a sign telling people to go somewhere else. The party metaphor is a powerful one, I recommend reading this if you are interested. In what twitter calls a “one line bio” they tried to add way too much information, and then half of it is in all capital letters. This is akin to shouting, and most people think shouting is rude. So essentially if you are being genuine in your efforts and are not a spammer you’ve sent way too many people to no where, been rude to them, and add no value at all to their lives.

Next up we’ll talk about what to twitter.

How to twitter Part 1, the how

March 6th, 2009, posted in Social Media, Twitter

Unlike what is claimed above twitter isn’t exactly that, and there are lots of good reasons to join twitter, but more importantly how do you get started? There have been some attempts by others that explain how to twitter, including some by twitter themselves. You can certainly google it, and you’ll find some decent things, but a lot of that is about the why.

First go to twitter.com and sign up. It looks just like the image above, click get started–Join. Your username will be important, so choose one you like, most people use some variation of their name or nickname, I recommend something like mine (houssian) or my good friend Kevin Makice (kmakice). Once you have signed up, in order for anyone to take you seriously you need to add some information to your profile, I’ll talk more about why in a later part. To do this:

Click on settings (this is near your name/picture on your twitter home page)
Fill in a location, city and state is what most people use, I recommend this, or just the state.
Fill in a one line bio, something short and to the point.
Click save
Click on picture
click browse and select a picture of yourself from your computer (I recommend something that shows your face or if you’re shy, some image that is clear and works in a small format.
Click save
From your twitter homepage put in your first update, if you don’t know what to say, try a variation of: trying out twitter for the first time. Or something funny like: I am a future twitter-holic, you may need to plan an intervention now.

Now you are credible to others, you have joined a community and by doing those things described you have shown you have a minimum level of fitting in. I’ll write more about the theories behind why this is true, but for the moment trust me that all this is a vital part of it all.
So you joined, now add people you know on twitter (follow them).
To do that you can either go to their twitter page (twitter.com/username) and then click the follow button up top below their name and pic, or type into the update box “follow username” without the quotes of course.

Once you start following people you can visit your twitter page and see what they are saying and doing. If something interesting is happening you can respond to it. You do that by starting your message with @username of the person you are responding to. The web is a good way to start with twitter, but almost all twitter users download and use a program to access twitter. There are lots of them, I personally would recommend twitterific to Mac users, and for PC users I would recommend thwirl. A client program is easier to use unless you like going back to the twitter web page regularly. The nice part about many programs is that new tweets (that’s what messages are called) appear and then fade away.

So now you need to find people you know already on twitter. There are a number of tools to help you do that, the most effective of which is the email finder, you give up your login info for a webmail account and it searches for your contacts, or you can upload a contact list. Alternately you can search for things that interest you at search.twitter.com. I work in the intersection of several fields so I search for those terms and then add the people who are talking about those things (so I search for HCI usability user experience etc). Alternately there are people who twitter about hobbies and religioun and everything else in between, if you blog about something regularly, search for people already talking about those things.
Once you have started following people, you can click on their profile page and see who they are following, you may find even more people to follow that are interesting.

You can respond to something someone says or just send a public message to someone by starting your message with @username, so for me you would write @houssian why did you bother writing a how-to? I need help.
Wade in, see what’s happening, and try updating a few times over the next few days.

Now one of the reasons I’m writing this is my mom-in-law saw that Fox News had a twitter feed where you could ask questions. To do that, you need to direct a question to them with one of the at replies I mentioned before. So when they are on the air and say twitter us your questions, then type in @Foxnewsusername (I don’t know what it is and I don’t watch Fox) then your question.

I will continue this series with what to do after your first few days, how you can get twitter and Facebook to play nice, and some of the why of twitter, as well as some of the theories behind why I told you to do those things and why I think people use twitter.

EDIT March 13th: Chris Brogan has an interesting piece I just read. I’ll get there I think.

Here’s part 2.

Social Media Design

February 19th, 2009, posted in Design, Social Media, Twitter, User Experience

So I’ve started musing about social media design lately. I place social media design as a subset of communication design. I’m making these terms up as I go, but I think it shold make a fair amount of sense. Commnication design is the process by which you design your communication strategy & infrasrtucture. Social Media obivously is much the same but focused on social media. Social media if you wanting a definition is are technologies that connect people. They usually involve a profile, and the ability to connect with people in some way, prototypical examples of the day are twitter, facebook, myspace, & linkedin. You can design communications for an organization as well as an individual.

What I’m proposing is that just like any other design situation what you do should be intentional, and should serve the real human needs of those involved. What I mean by intentional is that it is not haphazard or something that simply grew up over time. I’m all for organic growth of systems, as long as there was some intentional starting point, and preiodic review of those systems to make sure they are still serving the needs of those using them.

So many organizations today are saying both internally and externally: we want to blog, we want to get out there and get into this whole social media thing. I say, for the most part, that is probably a good thing, but you shouldn’t do it just because it sounds cool, you should do it to serve some purpose, whether that be to further the bottom line, open the lines of communication with your customers, enahnce your brand, or some combination of the three plus many of the other possibilities. Blogging for blogging’s sake is silly and may be counter productive.

Here are my initial recommendations to organizations that want to get involved in social media. You need to:

Identify what you want to accomplish with social media
Identify people within your organization that already feel comfortable with social media
Get an understanding of what your stakeholders/clients would want via social media
Find some way to measure your efforts, i.e. we’ll be successful when:____
Make sure 1&4 align.

I’m going to write about this more, but this is a first shot.

My next step is to look at how traditional design process fit into this model.

Being a preferred candidate

February 16th, 2009, posted in Games, Grad School, Internal Stuff

Here’s the position I just got notice that I’m the preferred candidate for: (complete details on the entire project here)

Description: In recent years, the paradigm for industrial research and innovation has shifted from a ‘technology push’ model towards a ‘user centred’ model so that industrial research and innovation is now more than ever focusing on application development that addresses end-user needs. Although techniques such as Contextual Design also aim towards a contextualized understanding of user needs, they do not meet the current needs of the industry, i.e., limited focus on a specific class of products, and limited understanding of user needs. What is needed is a better understanding of the contextual settings in which innovation occurs. By positioning user insights between problem states and desired states, consumer insights are formulated and further exploited for creating innovations by means of techniques such as a value propositions. This project will develop methods to enhance the market relevance of existing user centred creative processes, as these apply to industrial research by steering user centred innovation practices with marketing data. The proposed method will be refined through its application in creative problem-solving practices within Philips Research.

Outcomes: Methodology development, towards an integrated approach for a user insight driven creative process, will focus on: (i) ethnographic methods for collecting rich contextual data from which user insights can be derived; (ii) techniques for translating user insights into consumer insights that can be validated in terms of their market relevance; (iii) methods for deploying consumer insights into the creative phase of formulating innovative propositions.

In more simple terms it is this: today companies realize that technology alone cannot be the driver in creating and innovating on products or services, we need a user-centered perspective. What makes this project fairly unique is that they want to fuse user-centered design methods to create a concept, and then use marketing research and business ideas to validate that concept.

In the simplest terms we want to let all the qualitative goodness of design driven research and add in quantitative marketing data and business values.

So what does it mean that I’m the preferred candidate?

It means that the project head and local committee have given me the thumbs up, and that the head of the overall proect committee have to say yes as well, but it would be fairly unlikely that they wouldn’t have the same decision as the people who are heading the project, interviewed me, and will be working with me directly. We are VERY excited about the prospect of it, and as long as the final offer comes back close to the numbers they gave me initally with some decent benefits (which is likely given the difference of health coverage in the EU) then we will undoubtedly say yes.

They initially wanted an April 1 start date, but of course I’m planning on attending CHI in Boston so it will have to be after that. We are thinking of having me go directly after CHI and getting things all set up and then Vanessa and the boys following after the school year ends and Vanessa has her performance with Indy Opera in late May.

Some thoughts on the research

Of course it’s interesting that design and user research is positioned between problem states and solutions. Of course that is a huge step forward from letting design and user research just be a final step, but as per some of the conversations over at NextD that I’ve been participating in, it seems that design is moving and changing and moving even farther upstream towards the problem framing stage. My thought however is that even when design moves farther upstream and it’s not as if we should then let technology or engineering be the driver from there on out.

The two things I am very excited about are these: adding in some vast amounts of marketing data, and the fact that I’ll be workign directly at Phillips research. I won’t be simply coming up with some theoretical business process, but starting with what is currently going on at the User Reseach group at Phillips and then moving forward, putting the methods and theories directly into practice.

The power of “25 facts” phenom on facebook

January 30th, 2009, posted in New Media

I think that many of us remember chain letters, actual letters one would receive in the mail. I’ve gotten a few, never written any. Many more of us have had chain email letters, you know you’ll be cursed if you don’t send it to ___ people within 2 days, but if you do then something good will happen to you.

Out of that concept came an email chain letter where you receive an email from a friend with answers to a list of questions and they sent it to you and a bunch of people and then you were supposed to write them back with your answers and send it to a bunch of other people too.

Now with facebook we have a similar phenom, but there are several reasons why it works better, and I’m guessing will be more popular than any of those other methods were. Here’s how it works: 1) You write a note, you include 25 facts about you, usually things that are kind of obscure that many people wouldn’t know. 2) You tag 25 people in your note.

Why it works

It’s viral by nature: This isn’t really new, the point of chain letters is they are viral, but by tagging you are are much more likely to read it. In facebook, if someone tags you, it will show up not just in your timeline, but in the timeline of your friends, even if the person who originally posted it isn’t your friend. When the comments start goign it attracts more attention too, and this in turn prompts more virality.

It’s semi-public: This is one of the big changes from email or chain letters. Notes in facebook are much like individual entries in a blog (and in fact you can import your blog automatically as notes in facebook) in that at least your friends, if not everyone can see your posts. This pique’s people’s interest, and it’s not just you responding and sendig it to one person or a few people, but ALL of your friends, and possibly many others can too.

Discussion is possible: This is also something that changes online. Facebook now allows you to comment on just about anything, a status, a photo, and notes. In general people enjoy discussion, and even they don’t participate, they lurk (or observe). This means that it’s not just a one to one interaction, but a many to many interaction.

People are curious: People enjoy getting to know each other, hence all the profiles we fill out online, but this kind of exercise allows you to get to know things about people that perhaps you would never find out.

Thanks to @mmeller for reminding me of this: It’s free form. This is a big point. One of the biggest previous incarnations of this had a list of questions you had to answer, many of which were silly or didn’t apply or I simply didn’t care about. With 25 fact you can choose what to talk about and for how long.

Social Media is here to stay

Some cynics think social media is just a fad, something that will come and go, but I think that as long as people have the opportunity to enhance or make social connections online, then social media will be around.

Oh and here’s a copy of my twitter message that links to the note that I wrote:

“Couldn’t resist writing my 25 facts about me on facebook. http://twurl.nl/trm7cx.”

EDIT:

Inside Facebook got a little bit of the statistics showing how big this has gotten.