Jared Spool on the Lives of Links

Jared Spool

The Lives of Links

#linklives

• trigger words: 
• the things that cause users to click
• we need words to describe our tools
• trigger words is an example of that. 
• we’ve been studying how people use the web since 1995
• we had this theory in 1995: that people who know how to use the web would be better at doing things on the web.
• we got people with different levels of experience
• we set them down in front of web sites and had them do things
• it turn out that people’s experience didn’t matter, but what did matter was design of the web site.
• (will: this is different than something like using a tool like a circular saw, in which experience is important.)
• Predicting Failures of Scent
• Use of the Back Button
• Pogo-sticking
• Using search
• We have thousands of clickstreams
• we look for patterns.
• we have two piles: those for people who succeeded, and those who failed.
• Backbuttons predict failure:
• For the clickstreams where people use the backbutton once: only 18% are successful.
• For the clickstreams where people use the backbutton twice: less than 2% are successful.
• Pogo-sticking also predicts failure
• Jumping up and down through the site hierarchy
• People who pogo-stick are only 11% successful
• Search predicts failure
• (except on Amazon)
• When people do search, they type in trigger words
• Search Pro tip:
• Your search logs are filled with trigger words
• Ideally you want the logs to include the page the user was searching from
• So put the trigger words as links on the page that users were searching from
• 7-Eleven Milk Experiment
• Compelled Shopping: Buying Apparel
• Give the prospective customer $1,000 to buy the clothes they want.
• “Ideal site”: the customer should spend $1,000
• Gap: $660
• Lands’ End: $465
• Macy’s: $156
• Newport News: $63
• Number of clicks to get to final purchase
• The Gap: 11.9
• Lands’ End: 15.7
• Macy’s: 51
• Newport News: 51
• Examples of shopping sites: some sites force you to click through to the individual products to get details. No way to compare, no way to see data on individual products. It forces pogo-sticking.
• Good example: Crutchfield. Shows more data. It’s exactly the differentiated data you want.
• Bad examples: No data.
• More bad examples: Meaningless data “technology you trust”
• More bad examples: Showing the same bullet points for everything: “No annual fee.” “0% interest”. Also useless in comparison.
• Most useless words in web design:
• click here
• learn more
• click here to learn more
• Good Design is Invisible
• It’s like air-conditioning in a room: you don’t notice it, unless it’s bad or it’s not working well.
• Links secretly live to look good.
• But they still have to look like links.
• We used to think that links are supposed to be blue and underlined. Thankfully, we’ve moved back this.
• In some cases, we can find it out. The page has a clear visual language.
• In other cases, we can’t tell without waving our mouse all over.
• Look Good: You have to establish a consistent visual language.
• Links have to do what you expect. 
• Example of dictionary.com: it’s hard to find the content. 
• The page is full of links and advertisements. You want the user to stay.
• Other examples: in the middle of articles, there are links to go elsewhere. 
• to related articles
• to unrelated articles
• but why?
• let the person finish the article
• Taco Bell Advertising Lawsuit example: 
• good article, but...
• link to everything the tribune has ever written about alabama in the middle of the text
• link to crossword puzzle and sudoku in the middle of the page
• advertisements to sue people or to advertise on the page
• It’s all junk: it’s not really relevant or related. 
• Flyouts:
• Other sites hide the links
• you have to put the cursor over stuff to find the links.
• People want to see the links. That’s why they are using the web.
• Flyouts are fun to code, but they aren’t fun for the user.
• Do What The User Expects
• Deliver users to their desired objective
• Emit the right scent
• Look good, while still looking like a link
• Do what the user expects

Casting Off The Desktop Shackles by Jason Grigsby

Jason Grigsby spoke at Hewlett-Packard today on Mobile, in a talk called Casting Off The Desktop Shackles. Here are my notes:

Casting Off The Desktop Shackles

Jason Grigsby 

@grigs | cloudfour.com

slides: http://bit.ly/desktop-shackles

• Basics
• Don’t skip core functionality.
• Example: there’s no way to add RSS feeds into certain RSS readers
• URLs should go to content, not mobile home
• really poor implementations of separate sites
• Why go to the desktop web?
• The NYT does this... gives you the mobile site, unless you know to change the url. Even though they have a great mobile site.
• People will do anything on mobile if they have the need
• complex tasks
• write long emails
• Our vision of mobile context is often wrong
• We think that all mobile cases are people walking down the street
• Actual
• 80% during misc downtime
• 76% while waiting in lines
• 62% while watching TV
• 69% for point of sale research
• 39% use on the toilet (61% are lying)
• We can’t know the mobile context
• We can’t know where they are, or what they are doing.
• Mobile is the 7th mass media
• printing press
• radio
• recordings
• tv
• internet
• ...
• mobile
• 8 unique abilities of mobile
• 1) incredible personal (not shared, even with spouses)
• 2) always carried (within arms reach, slept with, etc.)
• 3) always on
• 4) builtin payment channel (itunes or google wallet, or using carrier billing to buy groceries)
• 5) available at moment of creative impulse
• the best camera is the one you have with you
• the best notetaking app is the one you have with you
• 6) accurate measurement
• a phone is likely to be 1 person
• groundtruth has logs from most carriers, will give you analytics for sites compared to competitors
• one ID always (as opposed to many different browsers/cookies on desktop browsers)
• 7) social context
• your phone knows where you are, who you are supposed to meet, and when. It can do really powerful things with that knowledge: automatically detect you are going to be late to an appointment, txt the person you're meeting, and pop open directions to the location.
• 8) augmented reality
• ability to hold up your phone and see augmented information in real time.
• mobile is the most borg-like technology we’ve ever seen
• in 2005, more phones with cameras were sold than all the digital cameras up until that point.
• garmin ruled the GPS market, and now they are a drop in the bucket.
• mp3 players went by the wayside
• lesson: If you are making a product that has some kind of mobile use case and/or sensor, you have to think about what happens if phones adopt that sensor. Where would that leave you?
• Check out John Allsopp, Dao of Web Design
• “When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, ‘ritual’, and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off...”
• What are we borrowing from the previous internet - the desktop internet - and what do we need to get rid of?
• Why do we need to look at phones to get directions? One vibration to turn left, two to turn right.
• Old saying: Asia is two years ahead of Europe, and Europe is two years ahead of the U.S.
• Digital Divide
• In Asia and Africa
• ~20% of ecommerce / mobile banking occuring through the web
• compared to 2.5% in the U.S.
• Blacks and Latinos ~60% likely to use phones for internet connectivity, compared to ~40% for whites. For most, it is their only access to the internet.
• So anything that is going to be done online(applying for jobs, banking, purchasing) must be possible via mobile
• Used for purposes we wouldn’t imagine here...
• cellscope: a microscope attached to an old nokia phone used to MMS send bloodwork photos to cities for analysis when working in remote villages.
• farmers using mobile access to figure out where to get the best prices for their goods.
• textually.org: stories about people interacting with mobile tech
• mobileactive.org: supports people doing this kind of stuff
• StatCounter Global Stats: Mobile vs. Desktop in Nigeria
• Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here...It’s going to change the world.” -- Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay
• If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere
• 25% of internet users in the U.S. access it only via mobile
• (and it goes way up from there... 70% in Egypt.)
• Polar Rose. Bought by Apple.
• Recognizr app: Uses facial recognition and then displays social network information for that person.
• Google Goggles can do the same thing, but Google has decided not to release it yet for fear of the backlash.
• Luke Wroblewski’s First Person User Experience Presentation at http://www.likew.com/presos/preso.asp?21
• Dozens of sensors in a phone. What can be done with them all? We’ve only scratched the surface.
• Is mobile a new mass media?
• (Yes)
• Is mobile web part of that new mass media?
• Mobile web is a bit of a half-breed - it is part mobile medium and part internet medium so it inherits traits from both. -- Tim Kadlec
• This is discouraging.
• This would make me hang up my HTML and go learn objective C.
• Tim Kadlec also said that mobile phones are the closest thing we have to those futurist science fiction always-on-always-there devices that do everything.
• Mobile Apps Must Die
• Upcoming zombie apocalypse of devices
• android is in everything.
• price of everything is coming down.
• Lots of just-in-time interactions. Getting a restaurant menu, get bus locations, unlocking a car: You dont want to install an app for every possible thing to do. The only thing that can scale this way is web technology.
• Questions
• Security and the lack thereof: enabler or disabler?
• Every app is at some point jailbroken and cracked and put there out on the web.
• You can never trust the client, whether it is javascript validation, or a mobile app. Relying on server security.
• Do you see mobile replacing a lot of print? 
• It’s inevitable that a large percentage of things that are printed won’t be printed in the future.
• I buy everything on the iPad. I don’t want books anymore.
• I get the newspaper because I believe in supporting local news coverage. But if I could pay for it electronically, I would.
• No medium has replaced any other medium. There will always be things that are printed.
• I’m as mobile as you get, and I still have two printers in my house