I was told about JamBase by a friend of mine as a place to find out what shows are around the area. The site is great, they seem to have everything I would want to go and see.

That isn't the cool part.

I clicked deeper into the site and found out that they have an API available for developers. Two grad students from the University of Wisconsin have integrated this API with iTunes so that any artists within your library are matched up with JamBase to determine if any of those bands will be coming through your town. It is called iConcertCal, and it hardly misses anybody that plays in something bigger than a garage. Check it out.

Recently, a client asked us to put together a list of high level “dos” and “don’ts” for usability testing. It has taken us several years to get good at usability testing – so this list of tips is not meant to replace an expert facilitator, it’s simply meant to provide a bit more insight.

1. Remind the subject that you are not testing them, that you are testing the website.
2. Don’t lead. If the subject doesn’t understand a question, try to ask it differently without giving the answer away. This is particularly important when testing “labels” or the site’s navigation options.
3. Be friendly and approachable, to diffuse some of the anxiety and tension experienced by the subject, but don’t overdo it or you will end up swaying the results in the other direction. The goal is to neutralize the artificial setting.
4. If an answer to a question seems vague or if the subject seems unsure, take the opportunity to probe by asking follow up questions.
5. Ask subjects to “think outloud” when they are trying to execute a task.
6. Be patient. Silence is ok at first (for five to ten seconds), then ask the subject to “think out loud”.
7. When a user asks you a question, don’t just answer it. Think about what they might be really asking and don’t give them the answer to the test question. If you are able to provide an answer to their question without answering the test question, answering their question is harmless. Most of the time, you can redirect by answering their question with another question. For example, a participant could ask, “Do I find “xyz” by clicking on “abc”? The best answer to this type of questions is, “What would you expect to find after clicking on "abc"?”
8. Some of the usability questions are testing the labels being used by the site’s navigation. In these cases, let users tell you what they expect to find behind a certain click before allowing them to click on the link.
9. Be consistent and encouraging as you transition from one task to another – regardless of whether they performed the task successfully or not. Use the following transitions: Great, let me ask you another question; Ok, let me ask you another question; Good, let me ask you another question. Never be overly negative or overly positive, just keep it moving with some encouragement.
10. When the subject gets stuck on a question or task, you have rephrased the question in a non-leading fashion, and you feel ample time has lapsed, simply drop the question and move forward. Example: Ok, let me ask you this other question.

Happy hunting!

Labels: usability, usabilty testing, user experience

The Independent, a London based newspaper recently published “Beautiful people earn 12% more than Ugly Bettys”

The article basically said a scientific study concluded that pretty people make more money than moderately attractive people than ugly people. Why? Because the prettier you are, the more “cooperative” or “team oriented” you “seem.”

I can’t believe these findings! Seriously, has anyone ever taken a good look at Bill Gates? How about Martha Stewart? Rosy O’Donnell? The genius and one of my idols, Warren Buffet? I am not just disagreeing with these findings because I am ugly and, therefore, doomed – it just seems way too fantastic to believe. On the other hand, we are all monkeys and many of our values are way puzzling.

So, if you want to improve your chances of making more money without having to learn anything new, be good at what you do, have an amazing work ethic, or get plastic surgery, follow the next five pointers from our wise friends over at the Journal of Economic Psychology, University of California (California has got to be only place where something like this could have originated):

1 Package yourself: clothes will not help you perform but will help how your performance is perceived

2 Emphasise features: be confident about your looks and build a strong image

3 Have a trademark: think Bono's shades or Sir Robin Day's bow ties. Stand out from the crowd

4 Focus on "soft power": use your values, style and point of view to attract others to you. Stand tall, and never slouch

5 Hone your speech: the ability to sell yourself and your ideas is critical

Wow.

Labels: organizational behavior

Women’s magazines are so obviously facile and patronizing that many women turn to other, supposedly "better" magazines—the New Yorker, Harper’s (hell, even the Atlantic, even when it’s so boring you can barely stand to read the damn thing).

But then came WIRED. Which, as a respectable nerd girl, I always thought I should like—except that in the late nineties, it was full of the same black-pants-clad, cell-phone-toting jerks I had to deal with at work, and sifting through that dreck to get to the occasional nugget of tech-wisdom just wasn’t worth it.

Nonetheless, I thought there was something wrong with me. Boys dug WIRED. Tech people dug WIRED. And it seemed kind of gender-neutral, or something. I was clearly out of step, no matter how much the damn magazine irritated me.

WIRED landed on my desk again about a year ago, after I started at idfive, and so I decided to give it a fair second look. I figured most of the gadget porn was meant for boys anyway, so I skipped the monotonous articles about add-ons to console games, laudatory tidbits about 8-bit graphics, and the-cell-phone-you-can’t-live-without, trying to get directly to the “real content”.

It took me six months or so to admit that the “real content” didn’t actually exist. Every article was shallow, refused to present a contrary point of view, ignored the real lede, and was evidently written by a bunch of gerbils running a maze devised by the editors. After all, I was being fair, so it didn’t matter that reading the same issue 7 times yielded no more content than the first skim-through: I should like WIRED, I would like it!

Turns out that WIRED has the same rah-rah, advertiser-y boosterism that turned me off magazines in the first place—because, actually, all magazines ignore the Chinese wall: that sacred boundary between editorial and advertising which newspapers so pride themselves on.

Yet WIRED is smug in a way that women’s magazines aren't: WIRED pretends to wink at the Wall, while it ignores it; it pretends to objective “journalism”, even while it whores journalism (even by magazine standards); the magazine pretends to be all the things which we thought they were because they have good “branding”—but can’t fulfill on any of it.

Look, any advertising person can tell you this: Talk to a magazine ad rep for ten minutes and you’ll realize that the entire issue’s up for sale—the editorial, the space, the advertorial, for the most part. Even as august an institution as the Atlantic sells (and I use that word to be politic) its columnists to its advertisers. Whether the columnists bite or not is a different story, but it’s not for lack of trying on the part of the ad department. It’s ever thus, because the advertisers pay the bills; I actually don’t have much of a problem with all the off-the-record interactions between the advertisers and the editorial department. This is business, after all. But let's not all play nicey-nice and pretend it doesn't happen--those columnists, dear reader, may or may not be your friends.

What’s disturbing about a publication like WIRED is that it holds a privileged place in what I think is a very important discourse about the intersection between society and rapidly-changing technology, but the magazine is so unabashedly cynical that it does it tongue-in-cheek twice: once, laughing at the advertisers, and a second time, laughing at us suckers who don’t seek to question its implicit assumptions, its lazy journalism, and its relationships with the people who pay its bills. Like the smug CIO who refuses to fix your computer, WIRED laughs behind your back while it pretends you’re in on the joke; it creates a culture that makes all of us engaged in the business of technology suffer, while pretending to glorify it; and it picks our pockets while it pretends to deliver dubious insight. In fact, WIRED is a product of its age: the dot-com mentality hasn’t gone away, at least within its pages.