Leavin’ on a jet plane? I was cruising through the applications, and found one from Trip Advisor called Local Picks (note to Trip Advisor: how about a better, more interesting name, yo). Trip Advisor is the tame version of Yelp!, and orientated around travel. Need to find a hotel? It’s there. Need to find a restaurants with a lot of reviews? It’s probably there.

That’s the cool thing about this application — it’s using already available information from it’s review database to present users with a great guide just like it’s website. I even found my favorite restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia (of course, it got a great review)!

I’m sure this is a direct ripoff from their Facebook application, but it would interesting if they tailored their application more towards the MySpace crowd; this application is a bit too adultish, and it would probably be well-served by adding a few categories, like most bizarre restaurant or most hip restaurant. It’s not very fun right now.

If they ever can get users to adopt the application, there are a ton of monetization opportunities, considering their advertising base — it currently has less than 1,000 installs. It’s probably not hip enough for MySpace, and Yelp! might do better.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 3
• Stability: 2
• Monetization Opportunities: 5

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This is a bit off topic, because it’s of the dead trees variety, but this headline came across: Newspapers, reeling from slumping ads, slash jobs.

The timing isn’t as good as hopped, considering we’re in this thing called a recession, but this happened because a lot of newspapers treated their web properties like their print properties. Sure, the web have some very real expenses — those servers don’t come cheap, and there is that pesky thing called electricity — but it’s much less expensive than paying people to run the presses, a lot less expensive than cutting down a bunch of trees, and don’t get me started on the costs of dropping off one of those newspapers at everyone’s doorstep.

So by charging more, sites like Craigslist.org and Move.com ate them alive.

I like print!

I love print!

But print, as quick as it as happened, is dead as in George Carlin dead.

Companies keep on charging us the same for a digital product as they do for a product that has manufactured (software distributors like Adobe, publishers like the Wall Street Journal). At one point or another, we’re all going to wise up, yo.

They should take a page out of the ESPN’s book. ESPN is one of the most profitable entertainment entities on the planet, and they know how to play in multiple mediums better than anyone on the planet.

ESPN.com is an amazing (and the leading sports site), ESPN the network has about 20 or so properties it seems, and the print magazine has all but killed Sports Illustrated, because they are covering the whole media package.

I pay more for their Insider product than for their magazine, because I get the magazine for free as part of their Insider service. $4.95 a month, and more often than not, I read much more of their Insider content online. They have none of the legacy costs, and they’re able to leverage much more of their content (have you tried fitting a video clip on a newspaper page?), and get a higher CPM from their advertisers.

I imagine there isn’t a single newspaper executive that has thought of any of this, especially the management over at the Tribune, a company that owns many outlets of both video and print content, yet integrate none of that.

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Use Rich Media With A Purpose

This is not a criticism — this is actually a compliment. Ted.com does an amazing job making Flash relevant with this page design, using large images are very prominent business and social leaders to create a very visual experience. Select an option on the left (say, technology), and the page reshuffles like a tag cloud to present new speakers. They could have built this using DHTML — the page still would have been fairly heavy — but it’s really aimed at an audience that already has a fat pipe to serve up this content.

Content can be ordered and sized by different faceted filters (woo hoo!), and if the visualization mode is too much for you, you can resort to a list view (how Web 1.0). You can even view the number of comments and times each was emailed to friends.

Another tip: it would be even cooler if the boxes could be dragged around and re-ordered to see certain topics large.

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I was stuck on an airplane most of Thursday evening, so I cranked up the iPod Touch to watch “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.” To this day, it astounds me how funny and usable the interface is for the guide in the movie.

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How many of us  have  conceptualize our designs  this way? How many chicken scratches and doodles actually grow up to become a real product? Here are the paper sketches that were the beginnings of Twitter from Jack Dorsey’s Flickr.

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Great article. Concise. Wish I had written it.

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Some of us work for in-house UX groups and others work for agencies. Having  been both an “innie” and an “outie,” I can vouch for the fact that I learned a lot more during my experience working for an agency. Here are the pros and cons.

The pros

The variety of projects makes the work interesting and keeps you on your toes. You never work on one project at one time. You juggle multiple. You learn the nuances of many different kinds of technology and use models.

• You sharpen your ability to think strategically in your design approach as well as selling your ideas. Since you are presenting your work to new stakeholders on a regular basis, you must justify design decisions with usability goals, business objectives, and/or metric indicators. Everything you put out there has to be polished and your best work. It’s like being a new employee every couple week and you have to prove yourself to a new set of bosses.
• You learn to work and adapt with many different organizations and teams. Every organization has a different working style and organizational structure. That affects communication and approvals. This requires that you are quick on your feet, since you’ll be constantly drilled by clients. Even when they love what you do, they still drill you.
• You become a walking encyclopedia of the best on the web. Because of the variety of projects  you are exposed to, regular research and analysis are part of the  job, even when you are not on the job.
• Shorter time lines  means quicker decisions and  launches. After working at an agency, I get impatient at how slow decisions are made and how long it takes in-house groups to develop.

The cons

• Lots of pressure to always deliver the best work. When large companies pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they expect you to bring your A game and think outside the box every time, so the pressure is intense.
• A shorter time line and finite budget creates pressure to be extremely efficient. Agencies make their money by being billable, therefore most of your time should be billable. There’s little down time to try out different ideas. Also, when companies hire an agency, they need it done yesterday, so you’re expected to be super creative at breakneck speed.
• Pay is not as good as working for a large corporation with an in-house group. I no longer work for an agency, because now I can charge more working for myself. However, I think the experience is valuable. I’m so glad that I did it. Best learning experience I ever had.

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She’s is a Business Analyst/User Experience Consultant in San Diego, CA. Ha has worked for Hasbro, NPR Music, Fisher Price, KCRW Media Player which received an Honorable Mentions from the Webby for Best Practices. Ha has also designed games and Business Process Applications.

Welcome aboard! If anyone else wants to contribute, let me know at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

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I don’t really much like Starbucks: I think there are too many of them, and I usually get sick off of their coffee drinks. However, I think My Starbucks Idea is a phenomenal implementation of an social voting and networking, Digg-like — using your customers to generate ideas on how to your company.

You can submit ideas, and other users can vote and comment on the ideas. From that, the ideas are submitted to Starbucks management. On the blog, the management actually asks for feedback on how to implement the idea, and if the idea is good and gets a great rating, the management gives credit to the users (what they should be doing is sending them at least a Starbucks for some kind of reward system).

More importantly, it allows Starbucks to evangelize to their customers, and build a devout customer base. There’s nothing better than empowering your customers to do your advertising for you.

Some of the suggested ideas are better recycling options, healthier food suggestions, and how to get people to refill their starbucks cards to save the environment.

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Want to save the world? You can do it one friend at a time with an application called Causes. You can join an already established cause, or start your own. Helping get friends to join the cause raises its ranking within all of the causes, and the ranking system that shows not only what you have done, but what others have done within the last day, week, month and all time.

More importantly, you can donate to a cause, and the application shows how much money has been donated to particular causes, and add content via videos and comments about that cause. You can also edit the content that is contained within your user profile, and encourage your friends to donate. Because of this, some of the causes have already raised thousands of dollars.

The usability of this application is the best I have seen so far out of the applications — the amount of detail in the application for this outstrips applications by some of the professional companies that are part of the MySpace platform. The only knock against it was the first time I visited the application, it was broken from stability issues.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 3
• Monetization Opportunities: 4

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If it’s an absolute requirement, it should be spelled out in plain language

So some of you have probably been following my misadventures with United Airlines. After a few calls, they were awesome at correcting a airline ticket where I didn’t include the full name of the passenger (she has an Anglicized name that also appears with her Chinese name on her passport), and I didn’t find out until later that I needed to include the full name.

Not to throw just United Airlines under the bus (pun intended), but most of the other sites didn’t point out the the following requirement: that whatever name was listed, it should be exactly the name on any identification. This isn’t necessarily the airlines’ fault — all of the airlines are following guidelines set forth after 9/11.

The issue for some of the sites is that this requirement isn’t obvious enough: if someone like me, who never reads the text on a site, misses this, I can’t imagine how many others have fallen prey. And with the frustration over customer service and airlines in general, passing the buck of the travel sites with the airline companies has become almost sport.

Here are a few screen shots from my favorite airlines:

Southwest Airlines

No indication.

American Airlines

Does indicate, but in legalspeak.

Delta Airlines

No indication, but does have an indication that you can refund the flight if there are changes within 24 hours of booking further down the page.

Orbitz

Perfect. Someone at the other sites needs to copy this exactly. An additional improvement would be to add a link to the polices for changing flights. They should have additional text that reads something to the effect “even in the event of a mispelling.”

Other Travel Sites

Expedia does cover this under the rules and restrictions, and on the screen where you have to enter a traveler, but not next to the text entry area (and the rule is actually covered up by a popup window. Travelocity is much like Orbitz, where the explaination text is right next to entering the name.

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Where I work at, to say we do a lot of MOSS implementations is asking the question, “Does the pope have a big hat?” Of course, the question is yes, and one of the struggles that we have is structuring the Information Architecture of the site correctly. This is a fairly important issue because moving document libraries around after the information architecture is designed can present all kind of issues, especially for business users that are just barely learning the basics of SharePoint and don’t understand the difference between a list and a document library.

One of the biggest conclusions we came to is that the site map doesn’t necessarily reflect how the information architecture should be structured, and are actually designing to two site maps — one for the information architecture, and other for what the ned user sees. Complicating this is how Microsoft defines information architecture within SharePoint, and how the rest of us think about information architecture.

What to do?

Let your governance be the guide, and have an open communication channel with the SharePoint developer. From this conversation, we came to a few realizations:

• All information wants to be free (and sometimes in the same place). Some organizations need all documents in the same store vs. separate document libraries. That’s fine, so maybe filtering that document store based on personalization is the best approach. If more collaboration is needed, it’s probably a good idea to develop a workflow that promotes from a local document library to the document center.
• Sometimes designing to an organization chart isn’t a bad idea. Departments are still departments, and when they want to use MOSS, maybe they should think in silos (I almost can’t believe I’m saying this). Many times demanding that a full inventory of the site just isn’t possible because the site will evolve over time, so the best solution is to give them a design pattern to follow for the information architecture, and separate the departments enough so one department’s mistakes can’t affect other organizations within the company. When given a SharePoint deployment, some users are going to run with scissors, and you don’t want to have mass casualties because of poor information architecture.
• There might be several levels of navigations, but the user doesn’t have to see them. We’re working on an implementation where there a hierarchy of four levels within the department, however a grand total of 20 users will see all departments within the four levels. So we are designing a mostly flat navigation structure that still has all the levels intact, but the other 6,000 users don’t see the levels — they only see the navigation they have access to under governance policies. In other terms, design to the 80 or 90 percent, not to the 10 to 20 percent.
• It’s best to have completely separate project or publishing sites if they involve users that are from several different departments. This is basically designed around the ideas of audiences that are around projects, and that might be across several departments. A creative solution is designing a site that contains departments and projects in two different site collections, and treating projects more like team sites with some publishing capabilities. That allows different members from different departments to be associated with projects, and no projects to be associated with a single department.

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From Sheilah Etheridge:

• Consulting outside their area of expertise.
• Believing that as a consultant they are also a coach.
• Believing they know more without ever hearing the client.
• Believing their client is nodding because they understand, and wanting to appease the client instead of helping the client.

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From Copyblogger:

• Why Do I Really Need This?
• Why Should I Choose You?
• Why Should I Decide Now?

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Remember The Vault? It was the Web 1.0 version of a message board for reviewing companies. It seemed cool at the time — wow, look at all the messages talking about not-so-stellar management. But like all sites, it’s pretty much a shadow of it’s former self, mainly because it wasn’t very sticky.

Enter GlassDoor, the new entry into the “review your company” sweepstakes. It has a bunch of me too features, but the site is much easier to use (sooner or later they’ll have to add advertising), and there are a bunch of contextual searches.

The most intriguing feature is the salary ranges for each company. Boy, that’s going to make some companies uneasy.

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What if you are a really big company, have a good idea, and the implementation is so poor that no one wants to use it? This is what you get when you have an application like Simply Hired. The concept is simple — based on the zip code in your profile, it shows you five jobs that are matches.

The problem is that you really can’t do much with it — it lists only five jobs, there’s no search functionality, and there’s no indication of how to change the zip code or even what the search is based off of. It does launch to a search region, but it would be even better that someone could actually start a search within an application. And there is so little branding with this application you don’t know what it’s for after installing it.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability: 2
• Fun Factor: 1
• Stability: 4
• Monetization Opportunities: 5

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Where’s The Search Box?

Hulu‘s a pretty good site — lots of video from companies that want some kind of control over the content, which is much more than YouTube is giving them. The site’s is version 1.0, so the interface feels a bit clunky. Most importantly, where’s the search box?

I made the screen capture small without a highlight for the primary reason that if you are on a content-heavy site, that search box better be easy to find. Like Google easy to find. Like YouTube easy to find. Like News.com easy to find.

Can you find it?

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Microsoft is testing a prototype of a social network built on SharePoint, and again, it won’t be the first. We’ve done a few (Paul Mitchell Connect, a few companies I can’t name of I’d have to shoot you ;) ), and SharePoint’s governance model lends itself very well to maintain such a network. Some of the issues of legality and privacy are actually limited within a corporate social network.

Looking forward to more companies going social!

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