As part of the Rosenfeld Media UX Workshops Fall 2011 Tour, I’ll be leading a full-day workshop – Interviewing Users: Spinning Data into Gold.
You can choose up to 3 workshops, including ones from Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug. Early registration (with a decent discount) ends September 9.
Bonus: the event will held at the amazing Seattle Central Library!
I hope to see you there!
I’ll be presenting a full-day workshop on Immersive Field Research Techniques at User Interface 16
this November in Boston.
Registration gives you
Right now they are offering 100 registrations at a sneak-preview price of $1349. They are (as of this posting) down to 79 sneak-spots, after that it goes up $300.
I hope to see you there!
An Uh, Er, Um Essay: In praise of verbal stumbles [Slate] – I love it when something I think of as inarguable, indisputable – like this one: it’s bad to say “um” in speech, especially when public speaking – is outed as a recent invention and/or sham. Also, this is a huge relief.
“Uh” and “um” don’t deserve eradication; there’s no good reason to uproot them. People have been pausing and filling their pauses with a neutral vowel (or sometimes with an actual word) for as long as we’ve had language, which is about 100,000 years. If listeners are so naturally repelled by “uhs” and “ums,” you’d think those sounds would have been eliminated long before now. The opposite is true: Filled pauses appear in all of the world’s languages, and the anti-ummers have no way to explain, if they’re so ugly, what “euh” in French, or “äh” and “ähm” in German, or “eto” and “ano” in Japanese are doing in human language at all. In the history of oratory and public speaking, the notion that good speaking requires umlessness is actually a fairly recent, and very American, invention. It didn’t emerge as a cultural standard until the early 20th century, when the phonograph and radio suddenly held up to speakers’ ears all the quirks and warbles that, before then, had flitted by. Another development was the codification of public speaking as an academic subject. Counting “ums” and noting perfect fluency gave teachers something to score.
Park guests instantly share photos on Facebook [Springwise]. – This direct-to-Facebook publishing service does well by first addressing a real need: the difficulty waterpark visitors have toting electronics around the sodden environs. It also points to how key Facebook has become as a repository for photos. Might as well just eliminate a bunch of steps and put the images of you and your soaked friends right where they’re gonna end up anyway! Back in the olden days they might have provided kiosks to print the photos out upon exit, or even sent them to guests’ emails. This blurb doesn’t address it, but having fallen victim to the RFID-driven pricing schemes of waterparks myself, I would bet they are charging handsomely for this service. If so, through adding value, Great Wolf has figured out how to make guests pay for to provide the park with an authentic social-advertising engine.
At the Great Wolf Lodge chain of waterpark resorts, visitors can use RFID-enabled wristbands to transmit photos to Facebook over the course of their stay. Guests at Great Wolf Lodge resorts already use RFID wristbands as room keys and in-house charge accounts. Now, beginning at the chain’s property in Grand Mound, Washington, its new Great Wolf Connect service allows guests to register their wristbands at a dedicated kiosk and link them directly to their Facebook account as well. Then, when they stop to pose for a photo at any of the park’s five camera-equipped “Paw Posts,” guests simply scan their wristband and their photo can be automatically posted to their Facebook wall.
The Mystery Worshipper [Ship of Fools] – Part market research technique, part Yelp, here’s a niche example of online reviews. The headlines are gently self-effacing, with a post-modern take on reviewer umbrage, say “Cleaning lady plays iPod at Santiago el Mayor, Zaragoza.”
Since ancient times (ok, 1998), Ship of Fools has been sending Mystery Worshippers to churches worldwide. Travelling incognito, they ask those questions which go to the heart of church life: How long was the sermon? How hard the pew? How cold was the coffee? How warm the welcome?
The only clue they have been there at all is the Mystery Worshipper calling card, dropped discreetly into the collection plate.
The “Flashed Face Effect” Makes Normal People Look Monstrous – GOOD.is – This demonstration shows pretty dramatically that direct focus creates dramatic distortions in our perceptions of peripheral objects. Specifically here, faces. For me, the faces turned into Second Life-type avatars. The video here proves this optic effect beyond a doubt; the psychological implications are even more interesting. This effect is why it is so important for us to go back to the recordings or transcripts of our interviews to reshift that focus. In the interview itself we are so fully focused on our unfamiliar surroundings and the project objectives and questions, and on responding to body-language, and on all the crazy things that can happen in someone’s home like crazed husbands and bugs, that a lot of interesting stuff in the periphery can easily be lost or misunderstood.
If you’re like most people, you’ll notice that the women you thought had hideous deformities while looking at the center of the screen are actually completely normal looking. Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia are calling this the “flashed face effect.” How it works is that your brain focuses in on the main differences in each juxtaposition, thereby augmenting that difference to grotesque proportions. “If someone has a large jaw, it looks almost ogre-like,” write the scientists. “If they have an especially large forehead, then it looks particularly bulbous.” The researchers say they don’t yet know why the effect occurs, but they’re attempting to find out now. In the meantime, hard as it may be, remember not to always trust your brain and eyes.
Speaking of crazed husbands and bugs, and surprises in the field, we’ve written of them before: What To Expect When You’re Not Expecting It.
I’ve posted a bunch of pictures Flickr from our recent trip to Florence and Lucca, to speak at Frontiers of Interaction. Here’s some of my faves:
Also, see slides from my workshop Successful Collaboration – Keep Your Clients Happy.
– Absurdist reaction to Google+. I love how slightly changing names/words and bluntly feeding back common behavior on social networks conjures such a sinister vision of the social landscape, while at the same time belittling the battle. It’s bringing on flashes of A Clockwork Orange.
I know it’s confusing. But this is their competitor to Facebook basically. Except you can list your friends. That’s the circles. But it’s easier to remember if you call them holes. Like I could have a friend hole and an acquaintance hole and a K-hole. And they give you a list of friends and you stuff them in the hole, like Silence of the Lambs, except you are sending them images and text messages and hanging out with them on video chats…Anyway, the new thing from the Gootch makes it really easy to sort people into the holes, which is good, because this lets you divide people into clusters and lie to each group in different ways, which makes it easier to preserve the fictions that make up our polite racist society. And it looks pretty sweet and works well so far, which probably means that there will be a huge battle-in-earnest between the Gootch and the Books, between Circles and Friends.
The Unemployed Worker’s New Friend: Outsourcers [WSJ] – As consumers are exposed to automation, bots, telemarketer scripts, recommendation engines, semi-personalized banner ads, and other intermediaries, is it any wonder that they will begin to harness those tools for their own ends? And perhaps tolerate misfires on their own behalf? The exploration of what can’t be outsourced continues.
For a $10 monthly fee ($40 for the first month) an automated service called MyJobHunter.com sent out more than 500 job applications in five months on Mr. Moomjean’s behalf. Within a day after a job opening hit the Web, the service scanned it for certain keywords. In Mr. Moomjean’s case, the words included “sales” and “retail.” If the listing was a match, the service would fire off a résumé to the employer without so much as showing it to the applicant. MyJobHunter is unique in its reliance on software. Customers of JobConcierge.com pay $30 a week to have their job applications sent out by workers based across the U.S. and abroad.
At JobSerf.com, candidates pay up to $98 a week for one of a team of workers in Visakhapatnam, India, to find openings and apply for jobs. Many of JobSerf’s workers join the company because their English is too rudimentary for them to work in a call center, says CEO Jay Martin. So language difficulties do crop up. When JobSerf six years ago first tested its service with a few U.S. executive clients, its Indian workers applied on their behalf to a number of adult-entertainment companies.
The shotgun approach to applications has other drawbacks: When recruiters call candidates about a job, they often don’t realize that it is something they have applied for. A district manager for a Krispy Kreme doughnut franchise was taken aback when she called Mr. Moomjean about his application only to learn he had no idea what she was calling about. “He didn’t know who I was or where I got his application,” recalled Melissa Surby-Curtin, the franchise group’s district manager. “I thought ‘Oh, this isn’t a good start.'”
In a span of 240 hours over three months last summer, JobSerf’s staff applied to 711 jobs on behalf of IT manager Colin Campbell, 34, of Cincinnati. Mr. Campbell said he got dozens of calls from potential employers. But he didn’t get his current job that way; he got it through a personal connection. On a single day last summer, Greg Moffitt, 47, of Houston, sent out more than 100 applications via MyJobHunter. An irritated recruiter, who got his résumé three times, eventually called to ask him to stop.
Could the Cindy Sherman of Monkeys Accidentally Revolutionize Copyright Law for Artists? [Art Info]
– Questions about process, artifact and IP are complicated once the animal kingdom gets involved. Is putting the means in the monkey’s able hands enough to translate to ownership? BTW – it’s worth clicking through to see the monkey’s expressions!
While working in an Indonesian national park, British nature photographer David Slater had his camera purloined by a clever macaque monkey who took several self-portraits, apparently fascinated by her own reflection in the lens… Copyright is generally held by the person who takes the picture, and since the author was in this case the monkey – Slater explicitly stated that he had no hand in creating the image – Techdirt wondered by what basis Caters could have acquired the copyright… Only humans get copyright, whether in Indonesia, the United Kingdom, or the United States. “In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship,” says a quote by the U.S. Copyright Office. “Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human.” All of this leads to big questions for the world of contemporary art, where works generated by “mechanical processes” and “random selection” are established parts of the vocabulary.