Falling Off A Blog

It's the content, stupid

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger isn't the first person to make this point , but it's worth repeating and it's something that I feel strongly about.

Google are in the business of helping their users find great, authoratative and credible content on any given topic and I’m increasingly convinced that the more you spend time building sites that have that content the more highly you’ll be ranked in Google.

Sure, you need to know some good basic Search Engine Optimization principles because it will help your blog reach it’s potential - but don’t obsess about it.

Blogging with ScribeFire

This is my first attempt to blog using the ScribeFire plug-in for Firefox.

I just tried to upload an image, but couldn't work out how to size it properly.

Good vs great design - Cameron Moll

Cameron Moll, the first speaker after lunch at dConstruct, is currently Interaction Design Manager at the headquarters of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City.

A trick question: What takes longer, heating water in a microwave for 1minute 10 seconds or heating water in a microwave for 1 minute 11 seconds?

Answer: heating water for 1 minute 10 seconds (Dur - i said it was a trick question). Why? Because getting a microwave to run for 1 min 11 seconds involves hitting the same button (1) 3 times, whereas making it run for 1 min 10 seconds involves hitting 2 different buttons (1 and 0) - finding the extra button typically takes a user more than 1 second.

Waterfall bad, washing machine good - Leisa Reichelt

Leisa Reiselt was the final speaker before lunch - she blogs at disambiguity.com.

At the end of a rather mundane presentation on the advantages of agile development over the waterfall approach, Leisa raised a challenge: how can we combine the principles of agile development with those of user-centred design? The short development cycles or sprints in agile development don't leave much time to involve real users in the process.

Leisa's suggestion is to combine development work with testing, user feedback and research in each sprint, and to lengthen sprints to make this practical. So, in a given sprint the developers would be working on the next changes in functionality, while at the same time the user design people would be getting user feedback on the development work done in the last sprint. Simultaneously part of the team would be doing research to help define what needed to be done in future sprints.

Seems like an interesting idea - certainly worth taking to the next stage and trying it out.

The Experience is the Product - Peter Merholz

Next up is Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path.

• "Products are people too." People interact with products in the same sort of ways that they interact with people. They associate a personality with them, they give them a character - they get angry with them. So if we want to build products that are cool, we need to understand what makes people cool. For example, they know who they are - not trying to be something they're not.
• You need an "experience vision" - what you are going to enable people to do, what the experience is going to be like. Like the original Kodak camera vision: "You press the button, we do the rest".

The dawning of the age of experience - Jared Spool

Jared Spool, from User Interface Engineering, is first up at the dConstruct conference. Here are some highlights:

• The power of user experience: 85% of new subscribers to the Netflix online DVD rental service say they signed up because an existing subscriber badgered them about the service. And 93% of eisting subscribers say they evangelise Netflix to friends and family. Netflix, which didn't exist 7 years ago, is now 3x bigger than Blockbuster in DVD rentals in the US.
• "For those of you who haven't heard of Sharepoint, Sharepoint is an amazing way to destroy a business. Building an intranet using Sharepoint is like having a friend take you to a lumber yard and tell you 'everything you need to build your house is here - get going'".
• "Good experience design is invisible. It's like air conditioning - when its working well you don't notice it"
• Successful experience design is multidisciplinary - that means BOTH that you need a team of people each of whom have specific skills, and also that individual members of the team often need to have multiple skills.

dConstruct

Today I'm in Brighton, at the dConstruct conference organised by ClearLeft. Ahead of me is a whole day discussing how to build the next generation of web experiences.