Bradley Howard's Blog - Filed under 'usability' - with views of digital media, innovation, loyalty and business in the real world

Understanding Pinterest

Feb 16, 2012 at 10:24am

So the latest social network, in fact the best social network since Facebook, is now Pinterest. Barely a day goes by without a top headline story from the likes of LinkedIn and Mashable promoting the increasing take up of Pinterest.

I’ve been using Pinterest for a few weeks now. Since then it’s been interesting to see more people joining and following my ‘boards’. It’s principally the same group of early adopters who keep signing up to the latest new social websites in search of the next big Facebook.

Pinterest is a super-simple concept. If you see something interesting on the web, you ‘Pin’ that content to Pinterest, which inserts a good looking graphic from the interesting page on to a virtual cork board.

In the past, this type of site was called a bookmarking site and would have competed with Digg, Delicious and a thousand other startups which have been acquired by the big .coms (and then spun out again).

Pinterest seems to make bookmarking interesting again through a few simple new concepts:

Grouping ‘Pins’ together as interest groups
Keeping it simply to Pin items to Pinterest
Adopting the ‘following’ principle of social networks

It’s the user interface that’s the knock out factor. There are some key aspects of the site that sets Pinterest apart from other sites, and we’ll start seeing the usability features on other sites.

One of these features is how the site horizontally scales so well. At home I have a large widescreen monitor. I can easily fit a browser window next to a Word window, and Skype or Yammer around those. Looking at Facebook when a browser window is maximised looks ridiculous – a thin sliver of content among a wide, white page. However Pinterest constantly fills the entire screen, adding more content as the browser window expands vertically and horizontally.

There’s no doubting that Pinterest has been growing very, very quickly. The site is still very fast at loading and rendering, despite most of it’s content being graphics.

I don’t think Pinterest is the killer app for bookmarks.

I still use Delicious, mainly because I’ve been using it for several years and have hundreds of bookmarks, but also because most of my links are stored because the content was interesting, not just a graphic on a page.

And I still use Flickr for all my images because BT gave me a Pro account with my broadband package and it stores the graphics in such high resolution.

If I see an interesting graphic on a page, such as an infographic, I typically put it on Twitter and if I need to find it again, I’ll search my tweets.

As for Pinterest, I’m not that sure where it fits in. Most of the boards seem to centre around fashion and food. So maybe Pinterest will end up as a niche site for these industries. Until the next big social network comes along.

tags:

Facebook, design, innovation, social media, trends, usability,

1 Comment

New BBC Homepage review

Dec 5, 2011 at 4:41pm

So, the new BBC Homepage has now been rolled out for all users as the default landing page for bbc.co.uk.

The BBC have a huge usability challenge. The site covers everything from the most popular news website in the UK to CBeebies, from the excellent iPlayer to detailed microsites on most scientific explorations.

There’s a huge amount of content on the site, and sections of the site aimed at toddlers who can’t read to silver surfers.

In my opinion, the new homepage addresses the usability challenge very well. I like the 3 tabs along the bottom as different ways to browse content (Most Popular, What’s On and Explore).

The new toolbar at the top is very Mac/ Google-esque, providing the most common links throughout the entire BBC web estate. At the moment you can see the style of the toolbar changes across this site, and I expect this to become common over the coming months.

Finally, there’s the scrolling features area at the top of the site. Very iPhone-ey (no pun intended). Great on a touch screen but with a mouse it’s quite fiddly. It’s the same as the new version of Chrome, with the ‘Apps’ and the ‘Most Visited’ sliding navigation. Great on a phone, poor with a mouse.

Next year will see an explosion of touch screen PCs once Windows 8 is released. Earlier this year I considered buying a touch screen PC for home, but human hands (and especially my children’s hands) are too greasy to consider using on a flat surface. We bought a standard PC in the end and it still annoys me how many fingerprints appear on the [non-touch] screen.

I was in a meeting yesterday with a few people, one of them with an iPad. One of the guys turned to the iPad user and said “You use the letters ‘e’, ‘u’ and ‘s’ a lot, judging by the state of your screen”. The iPad user replied with “Interesting you say that, because my boss’ name is Sue”.

Back to desktop touch screens – I don’t think we’re ready for touch screen’s yet. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist – I’m faster typing and navigating with a mouse and keyboard than colleagues with an iPad.

In summary, I like the design of the new BBC homepage. It solves a huge challenge really well, by consolidating a huge site into a number of easy to use components and promoting some of them nicely. Now I need to use it with clean hands and a touch screen.

tags:

BBC, children, site review, usability,

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Why Publishers and Broadcasters need to change

Nov 11, 2011 at 8:59am

It’s been absolutely crazy busy at work for the last few weeks, mainly on the new business front. I’d like to add this is a report, not a criticism. Anyway, when it gets this busy at work I often remember Bill Gates’ book The Road Ahead where he discusses how future business will all be conducted by electronic systems exchanging data with each other.

The truth has turned out to be quite the opposite – customers want ever increasing levels of detail before signing up to a product or service.

I did get a chance last week to go to an interesting technology event run by Vizrt. The event was aimed at their large publisher and broadcaster customers – many of the broadsheets and tabloids use their system (or similar competitors) for creating content for their newspapers or TV news snippets. We were there because we work with some large publishers, integrating their systems together.

One of the speakers at the event was Morten Holst who is a Product Strategy Manager for Vizrt, and raised some interesting points which are paraphrased below.

Morten’s first point was to wake up the audience with the following video:

His point was that whilst the video is amusing – a baby who knows the iPad interface so well that she can’t use a paper magazine, and even checks her finger to see if it’s her finger that’s broken – this baby is going to be a consumer in ten years. Publishers and broadcasters need to wake up and realise their consumers are changing very quickly.

His next demonstration was a comparison of a web site 10 years ago and nowadays. I’ve used the BBC News website as an example below.

Look at the two homepages for a few seconds, and you can see many similarities. In fairness, over the ten years, not a huge amount has changed.

I’m not particularly targeting the BBC (it’s still my favourite news site). The point here is that publishing hasn’t actually changed very much in 10 years.

Now look at another entertainment industry over the last ten years. Look at the video below – if you can, try to watch it in HD.

Morten’s point here is that 10 years ago these kinds of graphics and sound effects were considered motion picture quality. Now they are considered the acceptable standard of computer games – this year’s Battlefield 3 (the video above), FIFA 12 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 are good examples.

The video games industry has recognised a number of times that it needs to push the boundaries of user interfaces, presentation and design – think of an Xbox 360, the revolutionary Wii controller, then the revolutionary Kinect controller. To put that into perspective, the Xbox and Wii were launched within the last 6 years.

His final point was about comparing printed content to digital content. If you read paper magazines, the photography is usually outstanding - full, double page and high quality. That same image will be shown as a 2 inch square on the web, and won't get a second glance.

The iPad is encouraging publisher's to think more creatively, by designing beautiful interfaces. In truth there's no reason the iPad can encourage creativity and a web browser can't. However the iPad has been disruptive enough in digital terms to make editors want to push the boundaries.

So, on to the future, Morten encouraged the audience to start pushing the boundaries, to stop doing things the same way because that’s how they’d always been done. The functionality has moved on enormously, yet the editors aren’t using the new features, yet.

tags:

BBC, Content Management Systems, Wii, XBox, content, games, kinect, subscription content, usability, website production,

1 Comment

What bricks and mortar can teach ecommerce

Jul 8, 2011 at 4:52pm

A very nice man came round to our house one night this week and interviewed Mrs H about her shopping habits online.

This was part of some research that a cross-supermarket industry body is conducting into home shopping. He wanted to find out as much about her online shopping habits as possible.

The questions were fascinating - all centred around habits which can't be tracked online. "How many supermarkets do you shop with?" "Have tried using Tesco Click and Collect?" "Have you tried the new Sainsbury iPhone App?" He asked her if she recognised a QR code (no, not the specific code... it was whether she knew it was a QR code, and yes, she did).

The man even wanted to see where in the house the computer she does her online ordering from is located. He noted that we had wireless in the house and asked if her iPhone used the WiFi network. He showed photos of Tesco in Korea who are using QR codes in a subway station to let customer order food while waiting for a train - shown in the video above.

The interview got me thinking about what I could do to improve a website if I was a supermarket chain. And it didn't strike me until I went to buy some ground coffee from the local supermarket one morning.

I went in to buy the coffee and looked at the shelf. Do I want Tesco brand or a non-Tesco brand? Fair trade or not? Strength 1,2, 3, 4 or 5? There's a special on that one over there. The one next to it has more coffee and works out cheaper though.

And that's what you can't do online. Most people shopping online, especially for groceries, know specifically what they want to buy. But people who go into shops can buy additional items on impulse. Something catches their eye and ends up in the basket or trolley.

It happens with items other than groceries as well. A customer goes into a mens clothes shop for a shirt. And they see another shirt or cufflinks or a tie and maybe end up buying all three.

This isn't a case of "related products" or "suggested products" - it's impulse buying. I don't think I've bought many things on impulse from Amazon, and Mrs H claims it never happens when buying groceries online. However when we go shopping in a "real world" supermarket, we'll always buy at least one thing we didn't set out for.

To make this happen, screen design needs to radically change from a single product per page, to a shelf-style, where a customer can see a variety. Most ecommerce sites aren't designed or built to show variety (with the exception of colours or sizes). It's the opposite to real world shops where you never see a single product style on a shelf.

tags:

creative, design, ecommerce, usability, website production,

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Why your web traffic is going to increase this summer

Jun 15, 2011 at 1:24pm

The next version of the Google Chrome browser will help speed up users' web experiences by preloading the first result in the background.

If you are able to construct good Google search terms and often find you click on the first result, the new experience is going to save you several seconds per result.

If you manage a website which usually appears as the first result on Google searches, your traffic is about to substantially increase, because each of those pre-fetches is going to register a visit and a page impression. Google will offset this by offering a plugin to Google Analytics - great if you use Google, and it will be interesting to see how the other analytics providers will handle this.

tags:

Google Chrome, analytics, google, usability, web traffic,

0 Comments

Windows 8 review

Jun 6, 2011 at 9:41am

So, the covers have started to be lifted from Windows 8. Take 5 minutes to watch the video to see a glimpse of Microsoft's new operating system.

Some immediate feedback:

"We're watching Google". Google believe the [Chrome] browser is the future, so Microsoft are looking to pull as many Internet services out of the browser into small apps.
"Touch my screen". I hate fingermarks on my screen. Walk up to someone else's screen at work today and touch their screen - you'll get a reaction as if you invaded their privacy! No one likes fingermarks on their screen. Windows 8 will be all about touch screens though. We recently bought a new PC at home and I decided not to get a touch screen because I was concerned the kids would have wrecked it within weeks. And a keyboard on the screen? A vertical keyboard? No thanks.
"It looks so beautiful until you want to do anything productive". All the screens in the video look really nice - it's like 'Windows 7 mobile meets XBox'. And then the video shows Excel and Word, which are straight back to square one.
"Multiple windows - hmmmm". I get the slider to show multiple windows, but the sad thing is that this is a world away from how people really multi-task with many smaller windows. Have a vertical slider is very inefficient with wasted space.
"Files haven't changed". Whilst Microsoft should be commended from abstracting the C: hierarchy to users folders (it started in Windows Vista and Windows 7 makes it even easier), the abstraction should continue. Why do we still care about files? The only point of a file it to email it to someone else, and Google Docs has solved this already (by sharing it from a central place).
"Why no Kinnect?". After using Kinnect over the weekend with the family, you start wondering why objects in the rest of the world need you to touch them! Kinnect (aka waving at things) is the future and a smaller one to one style interface would be much better than touch (see #2).

However the OS does look lovely. It's like a 'Windows 7 meets XBox' interface (and both are good). I'm just concerned they're fine on a 5" screen or when you sit 5" away from it. Sitting a foot away from it at a desk for 8 hours a day requires a different style of UI.

tags:

Google Chrome, Kinnect, Microsoft, Windows 8, XBox, application review, usability,

3 Comments

Internet World

May 12, 2011 at 10:03am

I spent today at Internet World. In the morning I met a number of vendors who we currently work with (such as Sitecore and Telligent) and ex-colleagues from my IMG days (such as Ismail at Webcredible). In the afternoon I went to a number of presentations from Blue State Digital, Attensity, Hilton and Dixons.

The presentations were far more information than previous years. All the presenters seemed more willing than previous years to impart key information - such as uptime statistics, very specific keyword analysis on social media listening (which included some negative publicity on a key client) and so on. This isn't a complaint whatsoever - its a welcome observation.

Key points from the presentations:

Blue State Digital

BSD (owned by WPP, and they work with one of our clients) ran Obama's digital campaign (13m subscribers, raised $600m donations from 3.2m donors, generated 1 million User Generated Photos of which many were used in campaign videos).
A lot of thought about "seizing key moments" e.g. when Sarah Palin attacked Obama in speeches they sent plain emails responding immediately to her comments. BH: Sounds great - but how do you stop crying wolf for everything that might happen to a brand?
Every piece of content needs to drive a next step action (for example share, submit, click for the next step, comment) and as a proof of practising what they preached, I noticed that even the PowerPoint had questions not bullets
BSD recommend to their client not to mass newsletters. Instead, personalise them and target them
The key takeaway was on a ladder of participation, was to create one and measure it for clients. E.g. What's the total number of consumers a brand reaches? What is the web traffic? How many email sends are there? How many emails are opened? How many Facebook fans on their page? How many people contribute in the on portal community?, and so on.

Attensity

Key take away was their methodology: Listen, Analyse, Relate, Act
Conversations happen over multiple channels, not just social media and not just web. For instance they have a travel client and they "listen" to Travelocity and Hotels.com. To put this into context, most social media listening tools focus on Twitter, Facebook and some blog networks.

Hilton

Surinder Phuller was excellent. Social media is about being open and transparent, and she got this more than most of the other social media speakers and other social experts that I've met in the last few months.
Her presentation was about using video content on social networks to improve sales
Their themes/ "targetted methodology" (you had to see it to understand) was to brand content, destinations, and specific hotels
It is an opportunity to sell ancillary services such as the spa or restaurant which historically has been very difficult within some hotel locations.
They sent Flip video cameras to all the hotels and asked local hotel staff to shoot them and upload them - not professional production teams
At first they sent the Flip cameras out and got poor quality videos back, e.g. "Here's my ballroom, isn't it lovely?"
She then worked on content plans with the hotels, training local staff with 12 month content plans with the above themes, such as asking staff at the Hilton Park Lane on their opinion of the Royal wedding
After the content plan the content improved to information about the local area and personal thoughts from staff members
The general aim was to get the hotel staff and their personalities into the videos, so you know that when you're going to stay at a particular Hilton, you know the individual staff before you get there

Dixons

Excellent presentation from Chris Howell, their IT Director
The presentation was all about customer experience - measuring it; acting on it; not hiding from the facts when the site has poor performance
Chris learned at Tesco what it means to be customer focussed, and his presentation was all about taking that to other companies
Chris raised an excellent point which is that the quote "Jack of all trades, master at none" is actually only half the quote. The full quote is "Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one". Definitely the topic of a future blog post!

If you have some time on Wednesday, it's worth popping down to Earls Court Two and hopefully the presentations will be as insightful as Tuesday's. Please let me know what you thought of the exhibition via the comments below or on Twitter (@bradbox).

tags:

Exhibitions, Hotels, Sitecore, User Generated Content, business, content, email, management training, social media, usability,

0 Comments

How we browse the web

May 9, 2011 at 10:12am

The FT have started using a good implementation of a tag cloud on some of their blogs. E.g., if you go to the FT Alphaville blog, look on the right hand side under 'Tags' - and the most commonly used tags appear larger than other text. It's quite useful for browsing and looks quite nice. The FT uses WP-Cumulus to do the tag cloud, which is a free plugin.

However the nicest implementation (which admittedly, is of comments not tags) I've seen is on The Economist. Go to their 'Comments Homepage' and you can see how all the comments posted on to the website relate to each other. Very nice, and pretty guaranteed to find something in there of interest.

Navigation such as tag clouds, or The Enonomist's 'comment cloud', or the BBC's Most Read (again, look on the right hand column of most BBC News articles) lists are an excellent method to promote a longer visit on a website and more pages per visit.

The web started with a browsing navigation style. There wasn't a huge amount of content, so users meandered around the web looking for interesting content. Next came searchable navigation style. Google recognised the explosive amount of content on the web, and we started using Google to search for our data nuggets - deep diving into sites for our specific information, and then moving to the next site. We've now moved back to browsing. We use Facebook Activity feeds to burn five spare minutes, or our Twitter feeds to spend 15 minutes looking for recommendations from those that we're following.

Groupon have capitalised on this - sending out broadcasts to say "Hey, this product is 80% cheaper - why not buy one?" Within two years we'll be back to a search based browsing experience, which will be fine because Google or Bing (Microsoft) will own Twitter by then.

tags:

BBC, FT, Facebook, Microsoft, browser, google, trends, twitter, usability,

0 Comments

Facebook A/B testing and barriers to entry

Apr 4, 2011 at 10:03am

Facebookt-shirt-ilikethis_1_114354_white-royal-blue-print_l1

Photo from 8ball.

I'm regularly being asked about the conversion stats for User Generated Content and the barriers to entry/what prevents users from uploading content.

Here's an amazing article from Facebook which discusses A/B testing and their barriers to entry.

The highlights:

Out of 100 people that try to upload a photo to Facebook:
89% reach the starting point - the photo uploader.
58% select the photos they want to upload.
57% actually press the upload button.
54% succeed in uploading photos in one shot.
70% of people eventually succeed by the end of the day.
The last time Mosseri gave the talk, only 48% of people succeeded in uploading photos in one shot.
There is incredible anxiety for users in updating their status:
Out of users that enter three or more characters into the status update box, 17% don't post anything at all.
"That's one in six people who attempt to post something but don't," said Mosseri. "That's pretty crazy."
There are "way more people using Facebook on feature phones than smartphones," but those using smartphones are "way more engaged."

tags:

Facebook, User Generated Content, stats, usability,

0 Comments

Amazing technology in the living room

Jan 21, 2011 at 1:59pm

Last weekend we bought an Xbox Kinect at home. I have a personality trait whereby I get really excited about technology only for it to rapidly degrade after a few days. So I decided not to write this review any sooner for fear of it being written with a bit too much passion and not enough objectivity.

A week after plugging in the Kinect controller, I can report that's it's still AMAZING. The technology still feels futuristic. Picking up an iPhone with it's two year old pinching and stretch controls feels ancient. Using a mouse or a keyboard feels archaic.

Gesturing is the way forward.

The kids (ranging from 4 to 9 years old) love it and find it intuitive. Adults find it intuitive, although I've yet to see an adult that doesn't sit (or for that matter, stand) with their jaws open finding it difficult to appreciate that the television is responding to body movements.

Many reviewers compare the Kinect to the Wii, because they are the two consoles where players need to be active or stand up to play most games. The comparison is ridiculous. The graphics and playability on the Xbox Kinect games are as polished, clear and fast as the rest of the Xbox titles compared to the Wii which feels like it's still using the graphics chips from an 1980s Atari console.

However the part that most of our visitors like the most about the Kinect is being able to control the main Xbox menu, by sweeping icons to the left and right and selecting them on the screen just like in Minority Report.

To select a menu, the user puts your left arm at 45 degrees down becomes second nature in much the same way as a right mouse click on a PC felt odd a decade ago but is now automatic.

If a different user stands up Kinect will recognise them if they have a profile on the box using face recognition.

Microsoft have got the Kinect completely right. Installing it on my old Xbox (the original white one) was painfree. I've never opened a manual for it. The kids got it. Adults get it. Gestures are the way of the future.

I also bought a new family PC for the home as well after the last one died. For a while, we considered getting a Dell with a touch screen for two reasons. One is that it looks nice without complex wires, and the second is that its a large touch screen. However I've never seen the point of a touch screen on a PC - why do you want to press the X to close a window and get a fingerprint on the screen when it's quicker and cleaner to press Alt+F4 (and you still think the 45 degree arm salute is unobvious?!) or move and then press the mouse.

I don't get PCs with touch screens, but if you could gesture with your hand to quickly close a window, or click your fingers to open a favourite application, that is the future.

The Kinect is an amazing piece of technology, and the fact it costs about £150 and sits in your living room is testament to consumer power forcing companies to create such viable mass consumer devices. I just can't wait until I'm controlling everything in the house with gestures.

tags:

Microsoft, PC, Wii, XBox, children, kinect, technology, usability,

2 Comments

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