Unorthodox

Let’s see, right before my boss and Tsavo CEO Mike Jones decided to go to MySpace, I moved out of my apartment.  I had been living in Santa Monica for about 8 months and the commute from the bay area as well as the high rent started to get to me and my wallet.  Packed it up, found a renter to take care of the rest of my lease and even sold every bit of my furniture to the new guy.  His check bounced but that’s beside the point and he’s since paid (via paypal).  After I moved out of the apartment I checked into a hotel down the street from Tsavo and that night my eye burned from the glow of the hotel alarm clock.  It was iritis - again!!  Iritis is is a form of anterior uveitis and refers to the inflammation of the iris of the eye.

Since it’s painful to look at the sun, I decided to drive to the bay area in the middle of the night so that I could see my eye doc.  Yes, they have eye care in LA but I knew this doc would give me the treatment that it needed.  My eye actually started to feel better that day so I decided to fly back to LA the next morning. When I returned the big boss man told me about MySpace and it didn’t surprise me much.  He seemed like the logical choice for either CEO or COO.  The interesting thing was that my team had just witnessed me moving out of my apartment, interviewing candidates to fill in for me while I was going to be spending more time in the bay area and then the rumors of MJ.  After flying home the news had hit TechCrunch as a rumor on Saturday night and then as a confirmed story the next day.  After some initial shock from my team, they thought I was also going to MySpace for sure - most likely because I bailed on my Tsavo apartment and Mike and I worked at AOL.

For now, I’m at Tsavo and loving it.

On the day before my iritis hit, I took this shot at the beach

Update: my right eye still has a mild form of iritus and I have to drop steroids into it every hour that I’m awake until Monday.  It is getting better though!

(swiss skydiving ad in an elevator)

(mtv switch awareness ad from a canal in amsterdam)

(flea and tick spray ad in a jakarta shopping center)

Recently I spoke with Robert Richman about some branding conundrums at Tsavo.  Here’s a brief version of our chat about rebranding opensourcefood to Nibbledish.

(via brandbucket) 

Recently I had a chat with Robert Richman about my experience with naming web products.  They just posted part 1 of 3 here.  BrandBucket also has some interesting domains available that reasonably price - definitely worth a look if you’re looking to name a product.

The Domino’s Pizza tracker UI is really nice.  Not only does it provide feedback that your pie is being made but it gives you a glimpse into the steps of their process, the name of the person driving to your house and some idea of delivery time.  Can you guess what pizza place this is?  You might be surprised. 

(via MSNBC)

Notes from Web 2.0 Expo #w2e
Bob Buch, BD for Digg on Best Practices for implementing Digg within your content

5 ingredients for better integration within publishing content.

1. Flour
Sharing. If you love something, set it free

2. Sugar
Integration.  Don’t try to do everything yourself.  Use Facebook’s platform for things like profile photos, authentiacion, etc.

3.  Eggs
People who know what these mean: ROFLCopter (rolling on the floor laughing - legs spinnng like a helecopter blade), LMAO, PWND and Noob 
4. Butter
Platform.  One to One is now one to many

5. Chocolate chips
Authenticity.  Stay true to your core competency

Successful Social Sites
· Facebook: 175+ million active registered users, Avg use has 120 friends 
· Twitter: 7 million registered users (early ‘09), 8 million monthly uniques

·  Digg: 35 million monthly uniques, 4.2 million registered users, 20K stories submitted daily, 80 million exit links monthly.  Best stories will send between 200-250K just reaching homepage will get you minimum 20K visits

Pay it Forward
HP stories on Digg will send 20-200K visits
Each share on FB gets seen by 40+ friends

Notes on Digg
Displaying every social site (not a good thing to do) - a good example is Wired (on what to do) - Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon and reddit (owned by Conde Naste)

CollegeHumor displays a Digg centric experience when traffic comes in from Digg.  Know where the users are coming from and give them a customized experience.

Stats:  New button on Wired.com and has the Digg count and a little content and they saw there clicks on Digg go from 500: to a million

FB Connect
- Reg up 30-100%
- Engagement up 15-80%
- Traffic stories published to newsfeed avg 40 friends and 0.8 - 2 clicks
- A great way to have auth on your site - profile pix, no emails to verify, etc..

Facebook import let’s people set up Diggs where every time someone Diggs, it appears on their profile.  Powerful syndication opportunity.

Digg Widget - top stories on Digg.  Partners can integrate these most Digged widgets and they see more use and traffic than their own most popular widgets.

· Telegraph newspaper in the UK (largest in UK) is implementing social media/Digg in the correct way.
· The Onion: They saw their traffic go from 25K a month to 600K a month using the Digg buttons and widgets

How MacGyver would do design research - notes from Web 2.0 Expo
speaking: M. Jackson Wilkinson

Not hearing anything new yet but some good baseline reminders of things like..

· Use your feedback loop
· Talk to people that talk to customers
· Only research the things you need to know about
· Talk to fewer people

Now talking about ID and the power of sketching and paper prototypes.  Now discussing the benefit of quickly creating prototypes over investing time into high fidelity concepts - since early prototypes often have lots to iron out, better to keep it rough versus investing in deep development.  Easier to make quick changes and adapt the concept to the higher order user needs.  Quick, rough, assume you’re going to fail and don’t resist changes at the early design phase.  Again, nothing earth shattering, but very good reminders.

Alternative Designs
The speaker is talking about how it’s important to have alternative designs for your clients.  

Expertise
ID’s are poor at leveraging their expertise - power of the mullet.  MacGyver always knows what to do with his tools (whoa) - ID’s need to be confident like MacGyver.

Design Thinking
Trial and error, iterate, the best ways to get from point A to B - but not very efficient.  So you try shortcuts, like design theory - helps get closer tot he solution before you have to do the work - research from other disciplines - from cognitive psychology, social theory - find good solutions for your problem.  These are not wholesale solutions but can suggest how you solve your problem.  Social Identity Theory is how people perceive you - this becomes problematic when it comes to social networks.  The challenge is you want to project a different persona and social networks are dealing with this through groups.

Design Principles
Cognitive load - eg, showing a UI for renaming files which looks like SAP’s expense tool or better yet, the control panel from the Space Shuttle.  Users freak out because the cognitive load is so high.  Users panic when they see lots of UI that represents learning and ‘work.’  Now showing contrast with a Mac wizard that walks you through the process step by step.  Good for a novice user.  In short simplify.

Loss Aversion
People are more likely to take action when they have something to lose rather than something to gain.  Do the to learn versus do this or you’ll lose $100.  Users are more likely to take action when they think they’ll lose something.  You’re going to lose your work - don’t you want to sign up so you don’t lose?  Netvibes did this - save this page or you’ll lose your progress.

Design Patterns
Solutions many others have had to particular design problem on the past.  EG on Digg, vote to promote pattern - want users to surface things at the top, like reddit, digg, etc.  Auto complete is another one - see it on the Yahoo Design Library - type in the text field, provides drop down and provide suggestions tht make sense.  Warning - these are solutions to other problems and might not address some little difference you have with your design problem.

Patterns reinforced with solid research
Yahoo!
welie
(need other good examples - please comment!) 

Heuristics
Became unpopular because they’re not research based.  In short, here’s a list of things that you have collective wisdom around that are wrong with your soft/webware before you invest a ton in user research.  While not popular with hardcore researchers, an efficient way to start solving problems because sometimes the problems are obvious.

Analytics in the context of research
Good to point out where there might be a problem not so good at telling you what’s causing the problem.  He didn’t go deep here but did address via a question. 

Now you have the power of the mullet.

These are just my notes so please get the full preso here:

jackson@jounce.net
http://speakerrate.com/whafro
@whafro

arc90 has developed a clever way to clean up web pages in order to make it easier to consume content.  With a simple customizing tool, you can specify your reading preferences with characteristics like style (newspaper, novel, ebook or terminal), size and margin.  Your settings are saved to a bookmarklet that upon click will remove everything on any web page except the article, photos and anything else that is relates to the article.

(before)

(after)

There are similar services popping up like TinyRead and a nifty app called PrintWhatYouLike that allows you to format web content for printing.

Try it: Drag the link below to your browser’s bookmark bar then click the bookmark to see Readability in action.