#TVnext: a social listening recap
Between an in-person audience of over 300 people, and 8,700 unique viewers on Ustream, yesterday's second-annual #TVnext summit caused a stir in the social sphere- and our consumer insights team was busy tracking the conversations happening throughout the day.
Real-Time Social Listening: Top-line Results
The #TVnext summit garnered about 2,000 total tweets, which resulted in approximately 20 million social impressions. Hourly Twitter...
Les Yammerables
Yammering at work is not a waste of time, concludes The Economist. What is a waste of time, though, is calculating how much time is being wasted on social networks. And with that, we bring you a list of ten things we yammered over the past week or so in a post whose title rhymes with Les Miserables.We were fascinated about all things iPad, of course:iPad should bring comics into next dimension.A financial adviser is only as good as his technology. And disruptive and countercultural technologies cut across different industries. Continue reading »
The Opportunity for Brands on Foursquare
It’s as if Yelp, Twitter, and Facebook “got together” and somehow had a baby – and they named it Foursquare. In our ever increasing hyper sharing of status updates society, Foursquare has been said by some to be the breakout hit of 2010.The premise is simple (and, admittedly, Continue reading »
Visualizing Daily Activities With Media Wheel
For a media planning project, we needed to find a simple way to illustrate how people in a particular segment engage with different media. After some experimentation, we came up with this "media wheel" chart that summarizes 216 data points from a media spreadsheet. It shows (Good Read: Designing Gestural Interfaces
Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer helps elaborate on this presentation “Tap is the New Click” at the 2009 IIT Design Conference. The book provides guidance on designing touch screens and motion-sensitive controllers, because these interfaces must be approached differently then keyboard-based applications.Experiences with well-designed touch screens are derived from...
Good Read: The Art of Sketching Experiences
In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton advocates that sketching should become part of the design process early on.The sketches Buxton discusses are not perfectly crafted masterpieces – that is, they are messy with cross-outs and multicolored lines darting all over the page. Buxton reassures readers that you don’t have to be a designer to sketch. Everyone can get...
User Experience Techniques: Laddering, Triading, Neuromarketing
Last Thursday, Hill Holliday hosted the "User Experience Techniques: Inspiring Users to Identify What They Didn't Know They Needed" event organized by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (and tweeted in real-time).Michael Hawley, VP of experience design at Mad*Pow, kicked off the session and introduced a few techniques for getting valuable information from users. He suggests using “triading”, a technique whereby the moderator asks the participant...
The Future of UX: Focus on Upfront Research
Last week, Bill Gribbons, the director of Bentley University's grad program in Human Factors in Information Design, gave a talk about the future of the user experience [UX] field. The way he sees it, we are going to put a strong focus on quantitative results in order to compliment the value we find through qualitative research.He also says the focus in UX design is going to...
How Real-Time Analytics Data Enable Fast Response
When real-time is in play, flexibility is key. For our new site, we're trying out some new analytics tools to get real-time feedback: clicky and crazyegg. Those plus the benefit of real-time search results from Twitter allow us to respond to user feedback, whether intentional or not, as it happens. Our web framework - Ruby on Rails - plus our deployment framework - Capistrano - give us the flexibility to take that information and mobilize a response almost instantly.Here's one change we just made based on real-time post-launch analytics: turn blog excerpts on...
What Eye Tracking Can (and Can’t) Tell You
Earlier this year, we have opened an eye tracking facility that has since become a useful analysis tool to assess what users are looking at and in turn, provide validation on what does and doesn’t work for certain types of media we create. Eye tracking is becoming an integral part of our overall usability testing process, not only for digital projects where the methodology has been traditionally used, but across the entire media spectrum.If eye tracking is new to you, it is a research process to measure a participant’s eye position and...
