« October 2005 | Main | December 2005 »

November 04, 2005

Follow up on 2 Chinese Students...

I just read on "BoingBoing.net" that the two Chinese students that made the silly video in their dorm room have now been asked by Motorola China to endorse their new cell phones. I can't verify Boing Boing to be an accurate source of information... but I will tell you that around my office, we were all talking about this video when we saw it and I did (popping my collar now) tell everyone that I would not be surprised if they got some sort of commercial deal out of this stunt.

And to think that the poor guy behind them in the video probably thought he was going to get ahead in life because he was doing his physics homework....

Posted by Andrew Spencer at 03:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Who's in charge?

The Presidents of the United States of America, have released a music video that was shot on cell phones. I thought it was an interesting connection to the movement towards "user controlled" content, on the Web. There's a big race in interactive marketing between people that feel that the Web is moving towards personalizing everything to people's tastes, or whether it's moving more towards being this great, vast resource of public knowledge and information sharing. The good news is that it will probably continue to do both.

Examples, every other day Google seems to launch a new and amazing feature. And every time I go to see the new feature, it always feels like it shouldn't be so impressive, and yet it is. Take Google Video for example. Google has created a place to archive videos on the Web. Why is that novel? There seem to be a million other places to upload, store and share videos.... but they don't have the power of Google. What is the power of Google you ask? Ask the Chinese Students who threw up a video of them messing around to pop music and found themselves all over American TV for doing it. Google is so wide-spread that they can impact the entire Web, even when they seem to just be doing a "Google-version" of something someone else has done. Simple and smart. That's just google.

So, it would seem that the "making the Web more of a vast, resource" people are winning over the "make the Web as personalized a tool as possible" people... but then you look at sites like Flickr who are offering a place to upload, store and share your photographs, but have incorporated a "tagging" system that allows you to set the categories that your photos fit into. So instead of going to Google, who have built a complex indexing and searching system for other people's content based on popular keywords and a whole bunch of mathematical genius, you go to Flickr and you search for a photo of "Seattle" and you get anything from a shot of Seattle's skyline to a picture of someone's hotel room during their last business trip to Seattle. And you can add your own "tag" to it, so if you see a photo and think "No, I wouldn't think Seattle when I see that photo, I'd think 'Sleazy Hotel'" you can add that to the photograph and that photo will show up if someone searches "Sleazy Hotel" or "Seattle" ... so the more people that use it and add "tags" the more complex and interesting the connections will be.

Another site that is putting this idea into practice is Del.icio.us which is being called a "Social Bookmarking System", so instead of tagging photographs, you store all of your internet bookmarks in Delicious (which allows you to access them from any computer) and then share your bookmarks with people that you give permission to (your "friends list"). Again the idea here is that by opening up the way you think and organize your information and sharing that with others, you will begin to make connections that you might not have ordinarily made...

- Sites you would not have seen before
- Learn more about the people in your network (more business connections, personal connections, etc...)
- Make it easier to find things in the future

So... I guess "massive personalization" is giving "massive organization" a run for its money...

Which one will win? Well, I think they are on a crash course. At some point you'll be able to have instant access to just about any piece of information in the world, and the interface you use to get to this information will be drawing from all of your personal connections, the RSS feeds you subscribe to, really amazing search engines and a whole set of AI that filters out links and connections that are not going to be useful to you...

It's cool to see how it's all converging... and even cooler to see that the artists are embracing it as much as the capitalists. I read a great article about MTV2's "Video Mods" (mod = modified) where people are taking video game characters and manipulating them with their computers to appear like they are perfoming in music videos. (Think of Super Mario lip synching to a Kanye West song, where the stage and the whole environment is actually the video game visual). They were talking in the article (I think it was Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine, that or the San Francisco Chronicle... don't remember) about how they got the idea at MTV and how they loved it because it also challenges the young generation - the ones who can do anything with a computer - to combine two things they really love... video games and music videos, into a whole new art form called "Machinima" (check out Machinima.com for somemore Video Mods).

Just some recent things I've seen that have intrigued me and continue my belief that we're only beginning to understand the power of the Internet.

Posted by Andrew Spencer at 02:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 01, 2005

Creating User Journeys...

Just reading this fantastic article (link down below) on Boxes and Arrows about thinking about "User Journeys" when developin Web sites, especially at the information architecture stage.

Web people these day of the user more and more about the experience of the user. Web sites are becoming less of an online brochure and more of a completely new way to tell your story to all of the different people that need to know about you.

In my work, I often help my clients build profiles of their target audience, focusing our efforts on developing an understanding of who these people are, why they are coming to your site and how they prefer to "consume" information. These profiles are more about the users of the site as people. Once we have these profiles, we spend time behind the scenes thinking about whether or not we have the right information available to them on the site and think about how best to deliver that information based on "who they are."

The idea of the "user journey" shifts that focus away from "who they are" and more to "what they need to do" on the site and pays attention to how matching their needs on the site to your needs as a business can help identify opportunities to really strengthen your site. (Such as eliminating unnecessary content and/or presenting existing content in ways that will be more compelling and useful).

The user journey tells more of a story of the person and their ultimate goal in visiting your site. So instead of "Bob the 25 year old investment banker who has an iPod and frequents Starbucks 3.4 times a week" it's Bob the Banker that wants to book a plane flight to see his girlfriend... that's his need. Through planning Bob's journey through the site you might hypothesize that Bob already books tickets online all the time and is just shopping for a better price, or that Bob already has his airfare and is looking for a hotel deal. In which case, you can develop your information architecture and your site's content, features and functionality to address those different types of scenarios.

A very good thing to think about if you're looking at ways to keep people on your site. Think not about who they are, but what they need to do on your site. How that changes as they move from page to page... and then try to map the order of information in ways that help people get to a point where they are getting what they need and you're getting what you need.

Bob needs to book a ticket to see his girlfriend.
You need to sell more tickets online to cut down on your overhead...

What does his iPod, his alma mater, or his salary range have to do with that?

Link below:
Boxes and Arrows: An introduction to user journeys

Posted by Andrew Spencer at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack