Posts tagged Great
User-Centric Design is Great, Just as Long as You Find the Right User
Feb 8th
My friend and colleague Esther Schindler has written a wonderful post over on SoftwareQuality Connection about encouraging user-centric design. The only trouble is figuring out the right set of users that your software is designed for. Put another way, this is the classic programming problem: the person who hires you (or who sets up the job) isn’t the ultimate end-user audience for the actual program.
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Schindler mentions the Abomination That Is Taleo as Exhibit A. For those of you that haven’t been in the job market lately, this is one of the go-to apps that employers use to collect resumes and screen applicants. The only trouble is that its UI is bad, really bad. As she says, “Features and functionality that would give joy to the most common hands-on-the-keyboard user (the hundreds of job applicants applying for a given position) may not even appear on the list of application requirements.”
And having agile programming practices can actually remove programmers from the ultimate consumers of the app, because you write so quickly and get close enough in your first build that you stop doing anything further. Or don’t get to have any further discussions beyond the initial meetings, if you even meet with your programming team at all, because the budget for the project gets cut.
Some of the problem is the Dilbert-ization of corporate life, where a boss gets the overview and the devil is in the details. Part of it is the level of communication in modern companies can be frighteningly bad, as work teams are more distributed and we all have more work to do as layoffs have decimated most IT departments.
It is a great article, and one that you should email to your boss when it comes time to put together your next project. Along with the appropriate Dilbert cartoon, of course.
N.B.: The agile turtle is from Sarah Maddox’ FFeathers blog.
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Weekly Wrap-up: Great User Experience, Pinterest, and Corporate Blogs
Feb 4th
Richard MacManus explores the characteristics of great user experience design. Alicia Eler explains what Pinterest is doing that Facebook should emulate. David Strom notes the decline of corporate blogging. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
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5 Signs of a Great User Experience
Great user experience is the result of thoughtful design. Richard explores 5 signs of great user experience, including examples from Path, Pinterest, Rdio and Fitbit. While he explains that great user experience isn’t the deciding factor for success, it plays an important role and just may help a company gain initial attention and widespread adoption.
What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn’t
News of Facebook’s IPO had many tongues wagging this week, but Alicia Eler focused on something Pinterest is doing that Facebook isn’t: impacting purchases. While Facebook has tried to make social commerce work, Pinterest is delivering traffic that results in sales. Facebook conflates the social graph with the interest graph, and Alicia says that’s a mistake.
Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500
A new study indicates the number of corporate blogs amongst the Inc. 500 has significantly dropped in the past year. Conversely, the number has stayed virtually the same for the Fortune 500. Instead, of blogging, the Inc. 500 seems to be focusing on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
From the comments:
Lorne Pike – “I can’t help but feel that any conclusions being drawn about blogging having peaked because of one year’s change are very premature. We know the Inc. 500 is a volatile and ever-changing group of companies. Many of the names on the list will change from one year to the next. How many of the companies that at first glance seem to have “stopped” blogging simply weren’t on the list last year?
The chart also shows that just a year ago we saw a considerable rise. Should we have concluded from that that the best days for blogging were still ahead? Blogging has many benefits, as do the other channels shown. To me, while it may be an early sign of things to come, the numbers shown here are hardly a sign that blogging is dead or dying or even has a slight cold. It’s just changing, like marketing always has and always will.”
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Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011
Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.
“As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company’s blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. More
Anti-Patterns for Technical Leaders
What’s the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles. More
How To Pimp Your LinkedIn Profile
I like using Twitter. I tolerate Facebook because I have to. And I’m on Google+ because everyone says I should be.
So that has left little time to give love to my profile on LinkedIn, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest niche social network or the smallest of the big, all-encompassing social networks. Some people will tell you that sooner or later, all of our networking, social and professional, will be centrally located on Facebook. More
Red Hat Quietly Joins the OpenStack Effort
Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn’t like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you’ll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects. More
How Lanyrd Uses HTML5 for a Great Mobile Web App
When it comes to HTML5 mobile Web app development, a lot of developers are waiting for a blue print of success to follow before jumping into the deep end. Sure, HTML5 mobile Web apps have the potential to change the entire mobile app ecosystem, but right now native apps are a tried and true channel that developers have come to trust. It will take several prominent and successful HTML5 mobile Web apps before the rest of the ecosystem jumps on the bandwagon. More
![[Infographic] Google Apps Has Some Big Paying Clients](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/backupify150.jpg)
[Infographic] Google Apps Has Some Big Paying Clients
SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users. More
Twitter Upgrades Will Include Analytical Tools
Twitter will unveil a series of new tools in the next few months, including sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager for news and journalism.
Anderson said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. She made her comments Saturday at Columbia University’s social media weekend in New York. More
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- Forrester Ranks Mobile Marketing Companies, Ignores the Brightest Startups
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- Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011
- Red Hat Quietly Joins the OpenStack Effort
- HP Cloud Services Goes Into Beta
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5 Signs of a Great User Experience
Jan 29th
If you’ve used the mobile social network Path recently, it’s likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it’s easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It’s a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path’s suggestions and its connection to Facebook.
In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn’t the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that’s particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it’s where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you’re using has a great UX – and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.
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1. Elegant UI
A great user experience isn’t just about the user interface, but it helps a lot. While I’m not a regular Path user, today I opened it up and browsed for a bit. To like an item on Path, you click a little smiley icon in the top right. If you really, really like an item, you can make it a heart icon. There are three other options: a winky face, a surprised face and a sad face. So Path has cleverly created 5 different types of ‘like’ using subtle but obvious icons. This is something that Facebook hasn’t yet cracked; it only has one style of ‘like’ and many people have argued for a ‘dislike’ option, at the very least.
2. Addictive
A nice design is one thing, but you also need to see value in it. It must either solve a problem for you, or be a pleasurable distraction. Time and time again. In other words, it must be addictive. One of the current trendy services on the Web is Pinterest, an online pinboard that has become an addiction for many. In a text-heavy social Web, Pinterest has nailed the concept of a completely visual user experience. It solves a problem, because it gives you a place to store images around topics – such as the very popular wedding gowns section. It brings you back every day, if you get hooked.
3. Fast Start
The Kindle Fire as a product is not as aesthetically pleasing as the iPad 2. The Fire is rectangular and small, looking a bit like the iPad’s runty little brother. But what the Kindle Fire does far better than the iPad is get the user started – and hooked – straight out of the box. With the iPad, you need to connect to iTunes to get things started, which can often be a time consuming and awkward experience for newbies. But the Kindle Fire comes pre-loaded with your Amazon profile, which enables most users to start downloading content as soon as they switch the device on for the first time.
Note that the rest of the Kindle Fire’s user experience is not always pleasurable. But the start up is one part that is.
4. Seamless
With so many Internet-connected devices and screens nowadays, it’s important to have a consistent experience. One recent example of this for me is the online music app Rdio. It only just became available in my country, but I was immediately impressed by the consistent user interface between Rdio’s iPhone app and the desktop app on my computer. Rdio takes that seamlessness a step further though, in allowing you to download whole albums onto your mobile device so that you can listen to them offline. It’s easy to get that functionality wrong, for example by enabling download on 3G and giving you a huge cellphone bill. But by default, Rdio only downloads songs onto your mobile phone using WiFi (you can turn on 3G download if you think you can afford it). It’s the little details like that which make a great user experience.
5. It Changes You
Arguably the most outstanding tech products are ones that revolutionize the way we do things. The iPhone and iPad are two high profile examples from recent years. Twitter is another. These are products that create a brand new user experience, or change old habits in a good way.
When I asked for examples of a great user experience over on Google+, Chris Brogan commented that FitBit has changed the way he manages his fitness. “The information it gathers is useful,” said Chris, “plus the way it’s displayed to me challenges me to do more with it.”
Having an overall great user experience is difficult to pull off. Some of the products mentioned above only get part of it right, for example Kindle Fire and Path. I even said that the iPad, an otherwise glorious product, is slightly disappointing in the start up.
What products or apps have given you a great user experience recently? We’d love to hear about what’s making you happy.
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YouTube “Your Film Festival” To Award A Half-Million To Great Storyteller – ReelSEO Online Video News
Jan 19th
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YouTube "Your Film Festival" To Award A Half-Million To Great Storyteller
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… Google has been giving users "instant previews" … |
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The Great Wall of Europe: Fear of the Patriot Act Squeezes EU Out of the Cloud
Jan 19th
Prospective cloud customers – both consumers and enterprises – throughout Europe are wary of the possibility, however remote, that the contents of their cloud deployments may become open to inspection by government authorities. Not European governments, mind you, but American, by virtue of the Patriot Act. Passed into law before legislators ever pondered the prospects of virtual servers in the cloud, the U.S. law grants federal investigators authority, under court order, to ask service providers for information from and about their customers, for use in anti-terrorist surveillance.
Leading U.K.-based telecom analyst firm Informa has been measuring the extent to which European carriers have been withholding their investments in cloud technology, in U.S. dollars. This morning, Informa released its findings, which indicate an almost crippling setback for the continent as it struggles to stay competitive with North America and Asia/Pacific.
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According to Informa’s figures, carriers worldwide invested about $13.5 billion in 2011 in technology and resources for delivering cloud services to their clients. Of that figure, North America and Asia/Pacific combined accounted for $12 billion, or about 90%. European carriers accounted for only 7% of the world’s total carrier cloud investment.
This despite the fact that European carriers and telecom service operators, according to the Informa chart above, account for 24% of the global total number of operators providing service. Over time, that percentage too has been in decline.
Ironically, one of the companies making the most headway last year in designing next-generation carrier-based cloud services has been France-based Alcatel-Lucent. The fear among European customers, including in France, is that once they deploy their services in a hybrid or public cloud, entire virtual machines could travel transparently over countries’ jurisdictions into the U.S., where federal regulators might gain the authority to peek into their contents. In a Bloomberg interview this morning, a security engineer with France Telecom articulated the fear of his own customers: “If all the data of enterprises were going to be under the control of the U.S., it’s not really good for the future of the European people.”
As cloud service providers told me recently, a frequent request of Europe-based customers is that they make express guarantees in their service-level agreements that their data and virtual machines never be migrated to servers under U.S. jurisdiction. And as my friend and colleague Ron Miller reported last September, American companies touting the benefits of the cloud at European customers are met by resistance from would-be customers, some of whom say they would rather do business with Canada than the U.S.
Amid the climate of fear, Informa reports, cloud operators in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are growing faster than in Europe, which may be painting a picture of itself as a barricaded fortress in an otherwise burgeoning market.
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Wikipedia Blackout: Five Great Alternatives and A Humorous Substitute
Jan 17th
In less than ten hours, Wikipedia will begin a blackout to the English-language Wikipedia. The blackout, which begins at 12:00 AM (EST) tomorrow and will last 24 hours, is a public protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Here are five great alternatives to Wikipedia to use during the [...]
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Oh Great. Google+ Got A Built-In LOLcat Generator
Jan 17th
Google+ now has a meme text generator for images, allowing the Internet to parody itself until it’s no longer funny. The Google+ stream, already jammed with animated GIFs, full-width images and videos, Google Music players (theoretically) and 1,000-word rants, is now a full-fledged competitor to I Can Has Cheezburger.
Google engineer Colin McMillen announced the feature this morning. The Google+ Creative Kit for editing images already had a text tool with lots of fonts to choose from, but this “funny text” tool is more brutal. Just drag an image into the share box, click ‘Add Text,’ and then there are boxes for top, middle and bottom text. The default font is white Impact, perfect for LOLcats.
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The thing is, already has Google+ has powerful image editing features. Google is proud of the photographers who have taken to the service, and it has given them a suite of ways to enhance their images after uploading. If someone wanted to use Google+ to make a meme image, they could do so before. But today’s update reduces the friction, which means it’s all too easy to slap huge, white fonts onto images. Hooray for “engagement.”
Do you think any good can come of a meme generator built into the Google+ sharing box? Sound off in the comments.
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My Search Rankings Are Great! But My Traffic Sucks! Now What?
Jan 11th
Most of the time an increase in search engine visibility does generate additional organic traffic, but what should a B2B marketer do if it doesn’t? Have you ever been a victim of this scenario? Below are three aspects of your SEO Program to analyze and improve to ensure that your SEO…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
10 Tips to Hire a Great SEO Agency – Practical Ecommerce
Jan 10th
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10 Tips to Hire a Great SEO Agency
Practical Ecommerce Before just picking the number one result in a Google search for “SEO,” make sure to investigate the agency. I've worked on both sides of the SEO equation: at an agency and, now, as the in-house SEO manager of a publicly-traded company. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
You Don’t Need A College Degree to Be a Great Coder
Jan 7th
Okay, so we all know that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished their Harvard degrees, and look where they are now. But for the rest of us who just aspire to have a full time job, let alone an equity share in a hot startup, is a college degree really necessary to code? Maybe not, according to this blog post from Good Technology.
Erin Biba, who wrote the post back in November, asks: “Programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?”
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Exactly. And she cites a recent study by Dice.com that puts the number of available tech jobs at more than 84,000. While not all of them are programmers, certainly a good portion of them are. It is a good time to be a nerd.
The stories about the perks at Google and Facebook are now the stuff of urban legend. I was recently in the trendy SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and visited a typical 200-person tech firm that had the required bicycles, snack room, and catered lunches and dinners. So why do hiring managers insist on the sheepskin (that means the actual diploma, for those of you too young to remember the reference)? Tradition, perhaps?
I went shopping around a few typical college Web course catalogs, looking for the kinds of software engineering classes that would teach kids today how to do a Hadoop cluster or learning CSS/XML. I came up empty-handed. Granted, I didn’t spend hours on this research.
Take a look at this course listing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Computer Engineering Department. Disappointing, from a place that has an active software community. Or how about this list of classes offered at the University of Urbana-Champaign, where the Web browser was invented? You can find plenty of advanced computer research happening on campus, but teaching something practical to undergrads? Not in the catalogs that I could find.
Both Vatterott and ITT Technical Institute teach Java programming as part of their certificates, so there is some hope for those who have the time and money to afford these expensive programs. But not on every one of their campuses.
As the software market heats up (and you have noticed that it is heating up, right?), the idea of a degree becomes less and less necessary, especially if you can prove your coding chops and demo what you have actually built. As you can see from my brief exploration, sometimes a CS degree doesn’t mean that you can actually program, and many schools are woefully behind on teaching the sorts of tools and techniques that the bread and butter of modern Web apps.
Granted, teaching programming skills is a lot more than offering a course in Java. But you need both the theory of software design and the actual language instruction too. It would be like teaching French by only showing what art you can find in the Louvre and d’Orsay museums. In the meantime, we need a better match between courseware and software practice, and better understanding by hiring managers of what is important.
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