Below is all of my content that has been tagged with the term research. Browsing it should be very exciting for you. Enjoy.
I'm M. Jackson Wilkinson, a technologist, designer, speaker, educator, and writer in San Francisco. I recently moved from Washington, DC to work as a Senior Product Designer at LinkedIn, and am happy to take your feedback. I'm from Philadelphia, went to Bowdoin College in Maine, root for the Phillies, and love to sing.
As with all Nielsen publications, take this with a bit of salt, but it’s certainly worth a thorough read.
In case you haven’t heard about it, ChatRoulette basically randomly pairs you with someone else in a video chat. It’s attracted a lot of attention, a lot of curiosity, and its fair Interwebs-share of weirdos.
Danah’s piece is basically what I wish I’d written:
And so I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird. And this deserves a Le Sigh Royale.
The best way to protect your kids from weird situations is to let them learn how to get out of them themselves. Sure, there are weirdos on ChatRoulette, but there’s an interesting opportunity for social growth too.
A very thorough guide to the new styleguide the BBC is using online, covering not only the results, but a bit of the process too. Jealous? I am.
Phil Gyford:
For some time I’ve been meaning to test my small collection of PDA/smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was quickest. The iPhone’s software keyboard? The Newton’s handwriting recognition? Palm’s Graffiti? With the possible imminent arrival of a tablet from Apple that will save the world, it seemed a good time to get round to the test.
There’s been an ongoing spat against Malcolm Gladwell by the scientific community:
To try my hand at Gladwell’s technique: Conventional wisdom suggests that if getting Gladwell’s level of popular traction means sacrificing aspects of both science and journalism, it might be better to have no Malcolm Gladwells at all.
Gladwell is great at communicating fairly complicated issues to normal people by simplifying, and it’s led to an incredible level of popularity for him. In the course of doing that, sometimes things can be over-simplified, much to the chagrin of the archetype scientist.
We often have the same issues on the web. The web is a complicated place, and there are lots of moving pieces, most which a given client has no chance of understanding. So clients often understand and rely on the simplest of rules, many of which simply aren’t sturdy enough to rely on. See Jakob Nielsen.
From CXPartners:
We can offer three design tips to ensure content below the fold is seen.
Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.
Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling - this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.
Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars - the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.
The best thing about product design is its inherent contradiction. The best products think of everything, but at the same time, they’re focused on exactly one thing. If you can wrangle that, you’re almost there.
Some of the numbers are finally reasonably high (54% use the internet on a typical day, for instance), but others seem a bit lower than expected. Just remember that the question asked if someone did each of these on a typical day, so many could have thought “buying a product” atypical of a day, but typical of a week or month.
PsyBlog looks at ten studies that bear out rules of thumb for predicting group behavior. One is that that gossip is inevitable and, on the whole, quite accurate:
Simmons (1985) analysed workplace communication and found that about 80% of the time people are talking about work and a surprising 80% of the information was accurate. Other studies have come up with a similar figure, suggesting that while details are inevitably lost along the way, the grapevine is mostly accurate.
Others include how leaders emerge from groups of conformists, people take their assigned roles seriously, and how groups become closer as they become more exclusive.
Great article on Seed Magazine about the shortcomings of many of the data visualization methods we often see these days:
Some of the most confusing new visualizations are the popular network diagrams, which are intended to show connections between nodes and invite inferences about the forces that govern the connections. Numerous groups have produced maps of social networks, internet traffic, and other complicated phenomena, but the impression one gets is merely of connectivity, rather than of any of the patterns the visualization purports to convey. Few obey the principles of perception-informed design or Edward Tufte’s rules for graphical integrity, which state that graphics should make viewers think about the subject matter, not design.
As is often said, great design should be invisible. Crazy infographics may be cool, but they often don’t really make things more understandable than a more simplistic approach
Jim Ray posits that the new AIR-based New York Times Reader app is destined for failure because it seems too much like a newspaper for its own good.
The premise is that the Times Reader mimics a newspaper because that’s what they’ve heard customers want in their research:
But those are technical problems, the real sin of Times Reader is that it’s attempting to give readers what they say they want instead of what they actually need. Henry Ford is said to have quipped that if he asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. The Times has said that they’ve listened to readers and have delivered a newspaper-like reading experience on their computers, but it isn’t what they need to be building. Face it, if any New York Times’ reader could tell the Times what they needed, instead of what they wanted, they’d be running the company.
Classic case of misusing user research
It’s an old standard that body copy should have a line length shorter than 75 characters per line. But on the web, the acceptable number is higher. From a post I did today at Viget, I cited research that demonstrated that users can easily handle 95 characters per line or higher:
What is the new standard? Tough to say, but 100cpl seems to be within the range of feasibility. There may be a good opportunity for some new and more thorough research in this area that could offer some valuable new insight.
I suspect this is due to print being a largely-vertical medium, and the web (especially since widescreen became prevalent) is more and more horizontal.
Great post on LessWrong that has several great points. Among them:
There’s some evidence that the usual method of interacting with people involves something sorta like emulating them within our own brain. We think about how we would react, adjust for the other person’s differences, and then assume the other person would react that way. This method of interaction is very tempting, and it always feels like it ought to work.
But when statistics tell you that the method that would work on you doesn’t work on anyone else, then continuing to follow that gut feeling is a Typical Psyche Fallacy. You’ve got to be a good rationalist, reject your gut feeling, and follow the data.
He discusses specifically that some people are unable to “imagine.” That is, unable to experience qualia based on verbal descriptions. If that’s true (and it seems reasonable based on the evidence), it has rather profound impacts on storytelling.
Babies’ minds aren’t just voids, waiting to gain capabilities. Instead, recent research is showing more and more that they are in fact well-designed to do what they need to do best: learn and discover.
“Adults can follow directions and focus, and that’s great,” says John Colombo, a psychologist at the University of Kansas. “But children, it turns out, are much better at picking up on all the extraneous stuff that’s going on… . And this makes sense: If you don’t know how the world works, then how do you know what to focus on? You should try to take everything in.”
CMU has compiled a dataset of 1 billion web pages and made it available to researchers via UPSNet (aka four 1.5TB SATA disks + shipping). At $790 + shipping, it’s a bit of a steal.
The real dream would be some organization (Amazon?) making this dataset accessible electronically, but I imagine the processing power to work on a 1-billion-page dataset would be fairly pricey. Maybe the 50-million-page sample (only $240) would provide a legit sample and be a little bit lighter on the CPU load.
IDEO is working with BUG Labs on a fairly quick exploration of a redesign for their popular hardware prototyping tool. It’s always cool to get to see the work IDEO does.
The most interesting thing about this is that they’re blogging about their deliverables publicly as the process is underway. I’ve been hoping to land a project that would benefit from this kind of public exposure, getting feedback from real users throughout the course of the process.
I think that feedback could very successfully augment or replace many aspects of a big user research process, with a potential to do so with a much smaller budget and time commitment.