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?
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.
A colleague of mine just dug up some old training material that I created in 2003 for an internal HTML training course at my company. We had a chuckle about the following section:
Tables are used to give the designer greater control over the layout of the page and positioning of elements. Tables give web pages their beauty by facilitating exact layouts in ways that normal formatting (align etc) doesn’t. Tables are where HTML gets REALLY REALLY cool!
There is also some great stuff in there about effective use of the <font> tag, but I have already embarassed myself enough for one day.
When I wrote that I was oblivious to the benefits of semantic markup and standards compliance. We never had an issue about building our site using the table methods and we were pretty bloody good at it. It’s amazing how things have changed in just 4 years!
Following on from my recent post about Photoshop moving online, I read this great post on Joel Spolsky’s site. Joel asserts that the new API is HTML and that the Windows API is in trouble. His premise is this;
- People buy an operating system because of the applications they can run on it
- People buy Windows because you can run a great variety of apps on it
- People don’t buy Mac’s or Sun’s not because they are inferior operating systems but because of the limited apps available
I definitely agree with that. I have resisted buying a Mac for a long time because I know what Windows apps work for me. I am now seriously considering buying a Mac with an Intel chip and BootCamp. Best of both worlds hey?
When this new and exciting arena of rich web apps matures, what will Microsoft’s competitive advantage be? It won’t be that their OS has the most applications written for it.
When Mac users and Linux users and Sun users are able to access the same software online as Windows users, people will pay more attention to the features, stability and security of the OS than they will to the variety of software that was written for that platform.
Further, it seems logical that developers will embrace the cross platform HTML API in order to increase their reach and OS compatibility.
Whether the application is built in Ajax or Flash or some other technology is irrelevant, although I do agree with Jeff Atwood that JavaScript will become more popular on the grounds that that is where the lions share of the development community is working.
The new uTorrent web interface is a great example of the power of Ajax to avail the core features of a desktop app online. It’s lacking a bit of polish and all of the features of the desktop version but it lets you get the job done!
I’m a convert!
I have always worked in a Microsoft shop. I have always worked with ASP, .NET, IIS and Windows. I have always wondered how I might go about setting up a CMS, shopping cart, BB or blog. I have done some research into these areas in the past and ended up throwing it all into the too hard basket.
I always avoided looking at Apache/PHP solutions because I figured I’d best go with what I know and stick to the technologies and languages that I was familiar with. Foolish!
In setting up this blog, I decided on WordPress as an engine, partly because I knew I could get it running on my Windows server.
When a mate offered me some space on his Apache server, I jumped at it and very quickly discovered the beautiful world of 1 click installation. Thanks fantastico!
I’ve just played with a bunch of shopping carts, CMS’ and BB’s and am now confident that I could set up these products on sites that I build.
Every question I have had has been answered by a quick Google search and there is generally a plugin/installer/script/instruction within easy reach.
Hmm, getting PHP, MySQL and Mambo running on my Windows box is going to be tough. Oh, apparently not! Thanks mambosolutions!
Anyway, I’m sure that I am preaching to the converted. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to get here, but I’m very glad that I have finally arrived. Now, I’m off to learn some PHP.
OpenID will succeed.
Where Microsoft failed, the open source, non profit OpenID will work. It will work because people are sick and tired of trying to manage multiple log-ins across all of the sites that they visit, there is no company at the centre for people to get nervous about handing their information over to and in these highly competitive times, where the user is king, websites are falling over themselves to make the user experience better than their competitors.
In every verticle we will see one player jump on board in order to offer a better experience and we will then see every competitor jump on board, not to be outdone.
I give it 18 months. By the end of 2008 I believe we will see 80% of the most popular websites supporting OpenID.
While still reeling from the MyHome debacle (read previous post) I happened to stumble upon Dark Roasted Blend, a really interesting blog. In fact there is so much interesting content that I’ll have to go back and spend some more time there.
Anyway, my link into the blog was to the page on Incomprehensible Intersections and Spaghetti Junctions which is a collection of aerial photographs of ridiculously planned intersections. Some of the maps are also quite amusing.
What these photos highlight is the fact that without effective planning, design is difficult at best.
I like to think that software application design and development are analogous with civil design and construction. The following are examples of software design roles and their civil equivalents:
- usability practitioner = engineer
- producer = architect
- graphic/visual designer = interior decorator
In a living, growing web application, like many of the ones that I work with, the design has generally evolved over time and the initial blueprint is very different to what the code is today. Spaghetti code replaces the spaghetti junctions but for all intents and purposes, the code is as difficult for a developer to navigate as the junctions are for a driver.
Every application I have worked on is full of spaghetti code. Is software doomed to be built as poorly as these highway intersections? Are software architects failing in the same way that these town planners failed?
I shudder to think what the off ramp at line 3225 of the MyHome website looks like!
Read/WriteWeb has an interesting article theorising that Web 3.0 will be the product of the following formula:
Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).
4C = Content, Commerce, Community, Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search
I tend to agree. Commerce and content have been the drivers of the internet for many years. Community is very 2.0, as is personalisation. Add context and vertical search and I think you’ll start to see a whole new generation of sites emerging.
It is a logical evolution. As the generalist 2.0 sites become so large, there will be a market need for more specialised and contextual information management and deliver.
Web 2.0 has just completed its Bachelor of Medicine. Let’s see what type of specialists the graduates go on to become.
The Eolas patent was bad news for the internet. It meant that millions of websites became less usable overnight. Depending on which side you are on, you would argue for or against Microsoft pushing the “security patch” that resulted in embedded objects requiring 2 clicks to be activated where they previously required 1. I believe they should have just coughed up the $40 million or so in order to ensure that users of IE had no degradation of their browsing experience.
So, reading today on CrunchGear about how Yahoo! have lodged a patent claim for a bunch of concepts concerned with the “creation of dynamic pages” I fear that the big news of 2007 may be Yahoo! enforcing their patents at the expense of innovation and user experience. I hope I am wrong!
A fantastic video, outlining the history and evolution of the internet. From humble, linear text beginnings, to user driven content where we become the machine. Fascinating viewing and a good 101 for those unsure of what this “whole web 2.0 thing” is about.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]
The premise that “we are the machine” is a little scary from an out there science fiction point of view. That much information about us, our habits, our likes and dislikes in the wrong, smart hands could be used to do all kinds of scary artificial intelligence stuff. Hell, this post could have me targeted by the machines as a conspirator against the machine uprising.
Well, I guess it’s time to read How to Survive a Robot Uprising again!!
