L+E Links // 5.21.07

Jakob 2.0 
Jacob Nielsen single-handedly takes on the 2.0 movement saying:
"they should get the basics right first"
(I agree, most sites including 2.0 ones don't get the basics right)
...and goes on to say:
"Most people want to get in and get out"
(I disagree and wonder if Nielsen uses social media Web apps at all)

Read the related BBC article and also take a look at Navigators, Explorers and Engaged Participants. (image below)

London Calling
PSFK is having another conference--this time in London.  Here are the speakers:

Niku Banaie, Naked Communications

Mike Butcher, TBites

Russell Davies, Open Intelligence Agency

Regine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin Books

Karen Fraser, Ethical Index

Santiago Gowland, Unilever

John Grant, BrandTarot

Tamara Giltsoff, OZOlab brand

Jessica Greenwood, Contagious Magazine

Hugh MacLeod, GapingVoid

Beeker Northam, Bloom

Steven Overman, Lowe Worldwide

George Parker, Madscam

Simon Sinek, Sinek Partners

Stan Stalnaker, Hub

Iain Tait, Poke

Diana Verde Nieto, Clownfish

Amelia Torode, VCCP

Timo Veikkola, Nokia

Johnny Vulkan, Anomaly

Faris Yakob, Naked Communications


The Community According to Mack
Mack Collier of the Viral Garden provides a nice community roundup of various marketing bloggers.

Comments

[Raimo van der Klein]

Love the hat of the explorer.. ;-)

[Cam Beck]

David - Whether Nielsen uses social media or not is somewhat beside the point. I wonder if he's actually tested any. Surely he must have, right?

On the other hand, as Lewis Green pointed out in a recent post over at MPDF, "heavy" 2.0 users represent only 8% of people online. That's not much, so his statement about what "most people" do seems to have legs. What we should do about it, though, and at what point? Before or after the basics are taken care of, or should it be in conjunction with everything else?

I think the latter. The easier it is to use social media, and the more useful it is, the more it will be used, and the more relevant it will ultimately be.

In many respects, heuristic testing of a social media site is difficult, because you have to devise user tasks that reflect real-world situations, and you can't just fake social media. You can't tell them to care about the community, which is actually what drives the success of social media.

At best, you can either recruit existing users (who have already found their way around the flaws and thus have difficulty imagining what it is like to not know what their workarounds are), or take a task-based approach to progressive communication. You don't want to test features ("Add an event to a calendar to announce..."), but rather give them the scenario and ask them if and how they would communicate to the community. There are often multiple paths to communicate the same thing, so we often have to get past our notion of what the "right" and "wrong" ways to do it are. One way might work just as well as the other.

[DA]

Cam,

If Jakob is testing lots of social media apps with the "get in get out fast" litmus test, then he hasn't adapted his toolkit quite enough and in my opinion he may want to evolve it.

I totally understand testing against tasks (how easy is it to upload a photo?)But the browsing experiences on many social apps like Facebook or mybloglog are about investigation and exploring as opposed to "get in get out fast'. That's a metric better suited for commerce and service transactions such as online banking etc.

So that was my main point of disagreement. I do agree that most site experiences in general need usability help and 2.0 stuff maybe even more so. But regardless if someone is participating or not, to me the "get in get out" factor becomes is still valid, but only one factor in a set of multiple factors.

[Cam Beck]

"If Jakob is testing lots of social media apps with the "get in get out fast" litmus test, then he hasn't adapted his toolkit quite enough and in my opinion he may want to evolve it."

I agree... I'm just not certain from the article if he was speaking specifically about social media apps, or if he was talking about the Web as a whole. I got the impression that statement was about the Web as a whole. I'd be interested in seeing if he comes out with a social media usability best practices like he did with ecommerce...

My impression of Nielsen is that he doesn't see the value in it, but I've not read anything of his specifically that would incontrovertibly confirm it.

[Lauchlan Mackinnon]

When he said "Most people want to get in and get out" he was talking about the users . . . I think there's an element of truth in this. On my site, about 60% of the hits are people arriving from Google searches, and they are typically interested in the thing they are searching for. They might click on the category link for the thing(s) they are interested in to explore a little further, but I think a minority would spend extensive time browsing the site.

Also, you could check what the "bounce rate" (the number of people who leave after visiting one page) is for your site. Unless you have a very low bounce rate and feel that your bounce rate is typical for most blog sites, then I think he may have a point . . .