Scoble writes that iMovie now comes with really tight integration with YouTube. Remember my AppleGoo post? Still on the cards? Me thinks so!
Archive for August, 2007
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how technology has changed the way we live. Last night, I called my mum at home. No answer. I then called her mobile. No answer. I sent her an SMS and she called me this morning. It made me think about how we used to contact people. Before answering machines and mobile phones, we used to call back, and call back and call back - until someone answered the phone. Today, we just make sure there is some record of our ping, and the ball is then in the pingees court.
Something else I am thinking about is how marketing must change in order to be effective in this time of social networks and mass connectiveness. People are now connected to their friends en masse, all the time! Need to have a question answered? Post it to Facebook and have a bunch of responses within the hour. Where is a good place to get new tyres for my car? Where should we go for dinner tonight, feel like Indian? Which mobile phone should I buy? These used to be the questions that marketers pondered. Need they bother any more? Is anyone listening to marketing anymore or is it all just spam?
I know that I pay much less attention to advertising or marketing than I used to. What I’m not sure about is whether that is because I am becoming older and more cynical wiser or whether I am more inclined to go to my network when I have a decision to make.
I think marketing/advertising is the one area that will suffer a lot from the change in the way people make decisions, but then again, I suppose the US$550 million that MySpace made from advertising revenue last year may counter that assertion.
What do you think?
10
Aug
When Users Matter
I recently attended a great course - Designing With Users - at Hiser. While the majority of the concepts covered in the course were not new to me, the way that Hiser work them into a process for bottom up requirements gathering was fantastic. From user interviews/site visits, through affinity diagramming, collaborative design and ultimately user testing, you could really get a sense that the process ensures the end product is in line with both business and user needs.
Having just completed a project with Hiser, I was very impressed with their process, methodology, professionalism and documentation. Although we haven’t yet developed the product they assisted us with, you get the feeling that it will be well received by users and will have a positive impact on the business. The research and collaborative design process has ironed out issues with the interface and further testing closer to launch should ensure that the product is fit for purpose and well received.
Contrasting this approach with Facebook’s mini-feed mini-disaster it is clear to me that there is a point in every business (especially a Web 2.0 startup) where what has always worked suddenly fails. It is not possible or necessary for a startup to invest as much in research and UCD as a larger business with established clients. The mantra of the 2.0 startup has been “Deploy, test, refine”. But, what is the catalyst that changes that? In Facebook’s case it was the revolting (as in up in arms, not disgusting) users who were very rapidly very many.
It’s not surprising at all that Facebook’s designers were out of touch with who their users were and what they wanted. In the incredibly rapid growth do you think anyone at Facebook had the time or inclination to slow things down by doing some formal user profiling or research. Facebook has been all about geting it out. Fast!
What this case highlights is that at some stage, the users suddenly matter a whole lot more than they previously did. I doubt that there will be any long term damage to the Facebook brand as a result of this, but I’ll bet that they have started to think a lot more deeply about the implications of their deployments and will be more rigorous in their research and testing with users.
