What are personas good for?

Continue Reading: Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself

Earlier this month we held our first North Shore Web Geek Meetup here in Newburyport, MA, USA. It was amazingly cold. Still, we had 30 or so folks from the area show up and it was great. We even had two folks from Providence! come: Adam Darowski and Michelle Riggen-Ransom. (they won prizes for coming the farthest)

So, back by popular demand, we’re doing it again: a North Shore Web Geek Meetup on February 7 in Newburyport, MA.

This time we’re doing a new venue: The Grog. The Grog is a great spot a bit closer to Market Square. They have good food, good beer, and will not force us out of their place with a band like Rosie’s did. In fact, I’ve reserved a private area with its own bar so we should be all set. They know we’re coming this time.

And, while Jeff won’t be there to hand out Leopard disks, we will have prizes. Haven’t decided on the criteria for winning yet, though. I want everyone to be able to win.

Here are the details:

Date: Thursday, February 7, 2008
Place: The Grog (see map)
Start: ~6-7pm
Ends: ~9-10pm

Travel tips:

• By Car: Downtown Newburyport is ~3 miles off of Interstate 95, so it’s very easy to find and fast to get into/out of by car. (this ain’t the city)
• Commuter Rail: Newburyport is at the end of the commuter rail…if we have any folks coming on the 5:36 or the 6:15 we’ll do a pick up (the train station is about a mile away from the pub) (commuter rail schedule)

If you have any questions/comments/concerns, feel free to contact me.

NOTE: The last venue (Rosie’s) and the new venue (The Grog) are just down the street from each other.

View Larger Map

Continue Reading: North Shore Web Geek Meetup: Feb 7 in Newburyport, MA

In this New York Times piece Putting Buyers First? What a Concept (hat tip Mark Hurst), author Joe Nicera, while describing a positive experience with the company, drops an absolutely astounding number:

52% of people who shop online do product research at Amazon.com

And, perhaps even more amazing is that what those shoppers are going for isn’t even provided by Amazon: customer reviews. Nope, much of the valuable information on the site is provided by other people who write reviews, describe their experiences, and help others watch out for bad products.

That’s the power of social interaction. While we probably listen to the people selling us products some of the time, what we’re really interested in is what other people like us have to say.

Unbiased, unvarnished, authentic voices. Are you designing for them?

Continue Reading: Fifty Two Percent

Hi Everybody. My name is Josh. I’m a web worker.

I recently got the chance to review Connect: A Guide to a New Way of Working by my friend Anne Zelenka, who is the editor at large at Web Worker Daily, a blog focused on people who work on the web. Here follows my review of the book.

First, the verdict: Highly recommended. Connect is an excellent guide to working on the web, offering an comprehensive overview of all the things to think about and consider if you’re working from home or your job happens to be primarily web-based. I would recommend it to anybody who wants to improve their productivity. In addition to covering all the aspects of web work, Anne also throws in some psychology that underpins a lot of what web workers do, noting that it can be lonely and myopic place at times while giving out a raft of ideas on how to cope.

But I’ve also written up some more thoughts in case you want to know more about why I like it…

Continue Reading: Connect: A Guide to a New Way of Working (book review)

If you’re a regular reader of Bokardo then you know I think issues like the Facebook Beacon incident, the Facebook News Feed incident, and the Digg gaming incident(s) are big deals. (I’ve written about all three here on Bokardo)

The reason why I think they’re big deals is because they’re canaries in a coal mine of privacy, so to speak. What Facebook and Digg are doing (or trying to do) is exactly what everyone else will be trying to do (or having to deal with) in the near future. Why are Facebook and Digg able to do it now? Two reasons: they have flexible platforms which allow them to make changes relatively quickly and have big, savvy audiences who grew up with tech. Other social apps aren’t dealing with the same issues yet because they’re simply not innovating as fast as these two. But they will have to deal with them, and soon.

I was chatting with another designer the other day and we were surprised at how little we hear other designers talking about these issues. Why not?

It’s an interesting question.

Continue Reading: Facebook, Lifelets, and Designer Responsibility

A quick notice for any web-minded folks in the Newburyport, MA, USA vicinity in early 2008.

My buddy Jeff Watkins (Jeff is an ajax developer at Apple) and I are planning a web geek meetup Jan. 3 in Newburyport, MA. We know quite a few web geeks in and around town, and the North Shore is teeming with them (you). Every week or so I get wind of someone else who I know of online who happens to live in the area. Unfortunately, North Shorers can be up to an hour+ outside of Boston, so it’s not always easy to get to meetups there. In addition, those folks in Portsmouth are even further…we’ll have done well if we get some Portsmouth folks involved.

So come and meet some other like-minded souls to predict what Apple/Facebook/Google is up to next (isn’t that what web geeks do?) over a pint of beer. And, by the way, Jeff is an loyal employee of Apple…I can’t get even the slightest hint of details out of him.

Details:

Date: Thursday, January 3, 2008
Place: Rosie O’Sheas Irish Pub (see map)
Start: ~6-7pm
Ends: ~10-11pm

Travel tips:

• By Car: Downtown Newburyport is ~3 miles off of Interstate 95, so it’s very easy to find and fast to get into/out of by car. (this ain’t the city)
• Commuter Rail: Newburyport is at the end of the commuter rail…if we have any folks coming on the 5:36 or the 6:15 we’ll do a pick up (the train station is about a mile away from the pub) (commuter rail schedule)

Continue Reading: North Shore Web Geek Meetup: Jan 3 in Newburyport, MA

Digg continues to improve their interface to counteract gaming. How they have evolved the site over the last year provides good design insight for anybody working on social web apps.

Back in Sep 2006, the social news site Digg was coming under massive scrutiny because of claims of gaming the system by a group of 30 or so Top Diggers. In my post Digg’s Design Dilemma I argued that the members of Digg were not to blame…the design of the site was.

Now when I say “blame” I don’t mean they deserved punishment. I mean that the design was enabling the behavior, in some cases it was even promoting it. The diggers were simply doing what their environment allowed them to do.

Since then, Digg has made some subtle interface tweaks that help to curtail gaming activity. These changes were made over time. (I’m only just now writing them up) They highlight some of the challenges of having a growing user base with active participants.

Continue Reading: Digg’s Design Dilemma Redux

An interesting article in the New York Times: On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data. It describes several research projects being done on the social network site.

Here are some interesting findings:

“Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.”

This is fascinating. People put real social weight on the number of Facebook friends you have, almost as if Facebook friends are a actual signifier of something. So even though we know that in many cases these aren’t “real” friends, we still perceive those people with more as somehow more popular, attractive, etc. This, to me, is just another signifier at how important social network sites have become. We are using them to gauge social capital.

‘students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family.’

Weak ties is an interesting theory because it explains why acquaintances (not necessarily friends) are so valuable to know. They give us opportunities that lie just outside our normal daily routine. Since we talk to friends often, we know most things they know, and so after a time our combined knowledge becomes similar. But acquaintances are always introducing us to new things, as they live in quite different worlds than we do. If Facebook is really good at making weak ties, then its worth might be more than simply cultivating the friendships we already have.

Continue Reading: Facebook a wealth of data for researchers

Continue Reading: Comic: Facebook Movie Quiz

Before anybody claims that I am an Amazon fanboy (as I reference Amazon *a lot* in my talks), let me just say that in addition to some really great design they also have areas to improve on. Here’s a particularly baffling one: wish list sharing.

Sharing is crucial in social design. It allows people to share your application/service/web site with others in a way that you as the designer can’t. What other people say about you is an order of magnitude more powerful than what you can say about you.

If you don’t have smooth, easy process for sharing you are hampering the growth of your app. Sure, people will share to some extent on their own, but why force them to? When someone sends a personal, relevant message sharing something, the recipient will take notice. Make that as easy as possible.

Here is the sharing form for Amazon’s wish lists. It’s a typical sharing form: a bit of explanatory text, an email field, and a message.

But for some reason, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why, Amazon doesn’t let you edit the message. And they really should, as the message suffers from several problems…

Continue Reading: Amazon Wish List Sharing gets it Wrong