Clever Hamster: Professional

LavaCon 2011 presentation links

As promised at my LavaCon sessions, here are my presentation materials. Many thanks to Jack Molisani, for having me speak, and to Nicky Bleiel, for presenting with me again!

Here are the extended article versions, in Word format:

LavaCon 2011: Double Trouble! Adding Developer Docs to Your Deliverables

LavaCon 2011: Why I left my CMS! and how I did it

November 17, 2011 in Agile, Professional, Technical Writing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

STC program: UX futures = Joy of Use

Last night at the STC Austin program, Dr. John Morkes (of Expero, which hosts Free Usability Advice) argued that the next stage in User Experience would be "Joy of Use", which follows [1] Usefulness and [2] Ease of Use. That is, the emotions experienced by use of software or sites become the powerful differentiator among otherwise comparable offerings. Reminding me of Maslo's hierarchy of needs, Morkes ranked UX needs like this, from "must have" to "nice to have":

useful > easy to use > code quality > trust/security > pretty > stimulating > fun
(Me, I'd tweak it a bit: useful > code quality > trust/security > easy to use > pretty > stimulating > fun)

Research: Studies in psychology, marketing, and education clearly nail the benefits of humor, for improving likeability, social glue, trust, cooperation, sociability, and lowering fear and stress. Adding humor did not cost extra time in the completion of tasks. MRI studies of the effects of humor show that it activates the brain's reward centers, exactly as occurs when we see a pretty face, receive money, or take drugs.

Guidelines: [1] Define fun specifically per your audience, such as Sun developers enjoying reading old predictions about technology ("The PC will never catch on.") or Mini Cooper prospects enjoying extreme customization of their virtual cars. [2] Test, test, test! [3] Most importantly, don't go for fun before the lower UX levels are met, such as the IRS did with its humorous site that still frustrated stressed-out visitors; the IRS had to abandon the entire site design.

Examples: weber.com/q , The Register, humor in graphic, buttons saying "Shhh... Secret sale!"

What about documentation? All of their work to date has made them conclude that there's not much you can do to remediate deep, heavy, intimidating manuals -- they recommend that all effort be put into embedded help (on-screen assistance of any kind), since users consistently report happiness about not having to use the Help, not having to leave the screen to get unblocked.

April 02, 2008 in Professional | Permalink | Comments (0)

SXSWi: Non-profits on the bleeding edge

Anne Gentle and I attended two popular panels devoted to the challenges facing non-profits, and there was urgent talk about how to increase this to a distinct track in future conferences. The attendees seemed evenly split between those working in non-profits and those providing technology and support to those organizations.

The Future of Volunteers: Adapt or Die!

The first panel tackled how non-profits must harness the new social web to attract and maintain volunteers and donors. From accepting inspiring user-generated content to high-tech recruiting technology in the classroom, these non-profits shared how they're adapting to today's volunteers and donors.

National Geographic: (http://mywonderfulworld.org/) This venerable organization changed its mission in response to the web. No longer seeing itself as a disseminater of geographical information so much as an advocate and educator (for natural world and cultural preservation), it now seeks to be a platform for the world community to publish, share, and vote on authored content. They run camps to educate youth in the photographic and videographic technologies needed to produce original, publication-worthy work, and they're focusing on supporting public school teachers, whose funding and bandwidth for geography and cultural studies has shrunk. They're joining forces with related organizations, such as the National Park Service, especially as government institutions are more constrained in what they can do per advocacy. They're also engaging the public with scientific initiatives, such as allowing public participation in a genome mapping project, by which people can submit cheek swabs and information to the study and receive back a mapping of their ancestral journey across the globe. Facilitating personal engagement, coupled with the emphasis on authentic storytelling about minority culture experiences, seems to be the thrust of their new focus.
March of Dimes: (http://www.everybabyhasastory.org/) Storytelling, here, too, is the breakthrough change. The March of Dimes built a special bus with two filming booths inside, which it sends around the country and parks in family-friendly places to capture stories about difficult pregnancies and infancies; the website captures even more of these stories, and the impact on engagement and involvement in their fundraising events has been tremendous.
American Cancer Society: (http://www.sharinghope.tv/) Storytelling by survivors has been just as compelling for the ACS; they have built a new portal for story sharing because of its huge impact on participation. The challenges they listed were mostly on the side of the non-profit: fragmentation in volunteer handling, inability to list all opportunities comprehensively, and the lack of a volunteer strategy on the national level. Much of new media awareness they stumbled into, such as through the wildly successful grassroots “frozen pea” (http://frozenpeafund.com/) phenomenon: http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/boobsonice/ .

Specific advice:

Go micro: “micro-volunteering”, “micro-donations”: Allow people to make very small commitments of time and money, repeated on a regular basis.
Analytics: Advised to change approach to web analytics: downplay page views and emphasize the time spent on the pages and the resulting engagement you can document.
Facebook: Advised to build causes, widgets, badges, applications, and let your base do the rest.
SecondLife: Advised to do the work on weekends if necessary, until you can show success via metrics and establish the project.

Pimp My Non Profit - Real Non-Profits Kicking Ass with Online Technology

The follow-up panel shared stories of how non-profit groups have had huge impact on- and offline by using the latest web technologies - for pennies on the dollar. Participants:

World Learning: (http://worldlearning.org/)
Tech Soup: (http://techsoup.org/)
Beth's Blog: (http://beth.typepad.com/) - specifically, how she used technology to win Parade Magazine's “America's Giving Challenge”, fundraising for impoverished Cambodian children
Schipul: (http://www.schipul.com/)
Common Knowledge: (http://www.commonknowledge.org)

Successes and sites:

http://ilovemountains.org/ : interactive tool to show impact of your own power company on mountain-top removal and take follow-up action
http://processing.org/: open-source platform to program images, animation, and interactions
IFAW.org, http://www.animalrescueblog.org/ : user-uploaded content; advocacy + donation + community
Brooklyn Museum: free podcasting of lectures, repurposing of content, FaceBook application to share slideshows of artwork collection
http://maplight.org/ : rolls up data from multiple other organizations and lets users visually drill down on campaign spending, special interest money, and legislative impact.
Why student blogs failed at WorldLearning.org: the students didn't know each other before venturing out, they were too busy to blog, and internet connections were often too slow, even in developed areas.
Networking success 3 R's: Relationship-building + Rewards + Reciprocity
http://austinprobono.org/ : Helping businesses and organizations hook up
http://hub.witness.org/ : User-uploaded videos related to human rights crises, organized by region and issue
Just published: Mobilizing Generation 2.0

March 11, 2008 in Professional | Permalink | Comments (0)

SXSWi: Age of Engage, how our websites must change

The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture, by Denise Shiffman

Marketing is hugely impacted by how the web landscape has changed: the static web has become a real-time, interactive web that's social and user-powered. Marketers must distribute messages but then let go, allowing others to manipulate, add to, and pass them along. To engage, we must fundamentally change our messaging: it's more than merely adding blogs, podcasts, and social networking. Age of Engage covers both marketing and product planning.

Advice from her presentation:

Build street credibility at all costs: write whitepapers and e-books that have very useful content, and make them free and easy to download, so they can spread virally.
Create free quizzes and on-line tools to motivate users to find themselves wanting and seek change (yours).
Create a living datasource, community-built, that will keep them coming back.
Offer your users a visionary voice; give them genuine peeks into what's coming next.
Capture hearts with style as well as emotions (think Apple).
Consider how controversy can generate buzz (http://comcastmustdie.com/).
Use tools such as http://www.hubspot.com/ to evaluate your site (enter your URL as well as a competitor's, to grade your site).
Viral spread seems to work best for content that is very new, very funny, or very relevant.

March 11, 2008 in Professional | Permalink | Comments (0)

SXSWi: Facebook's technology future

Sarah Lacy interviewed Facebook’s young founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the keynote on Sunday. Started as a college networking tool, the site (valued at $15 billion!) is now used by over 60 million users of all ages, with over 50% using the site every day. With the new Facebook Platform, the site is transforming into a new entity, one in which third-party developers will create a torrent of applications and utilities to serve their own communities and advance their own agendas (such as the Brooklyn Museum's app that lets patrons showcase its art collection on their pages). Facebook's goal is to support super-efficient communication and connection, with semi-public/semi-private information that members post in trust; key in the strategy churn now is how best to monetize it, particularly when their 3-year contract with Microsoft expires.

Zuckerberg admitted that having a single threshold for spam-flagging apps actually worsens the overall experience of “spamminess”, as everyone races to the limit allowed. The critical challenge for the Facebook Platform is how to balance the competing needs for easiness, safety, and personal information control. Numerous complaints came from the floor about the current inadequacies of searching, tagging, and information shielding.

My sense of the Facebook discussion is that the platform – rather than driving the users – is barely keeping up with the demands being put upon it. Users know only too well what shortcuts they want in personal networking, based on years of making do with disconnected software and datasources, of keeping their networks up to date with their photos, news, and information. Now that the tools are matured sufficiently to make virtual networking possible, the pent-up demand of the extroverted majority is driving change to a blur. If not Facebook, it will be something like it, I'm convinced. Pandora's box is opened.

March 11, 2008 in Professional | Permalink | Comments (0)