Category Archives: Social Media and UX

Social media and UX links and thoughts

Analytics is not the answer

Posted on by

A CEO I know has finally come round to the idea that endlessly changing things and adding new features is not the way forward – Hazaar! He now thinks that analytics will provide all the answers. As the company hops from the frying pan of whimsical change into the hellish fire of stats I have been arguing for user testing to be thrown into the mix. This is an uphill struggle.

The CEO threw up the idea of analytics identifying the cancer that we can chop out. I suggested that, pushing the analogy further, if analytics was the x-ray that identified the cancer then user testing is equivalent of talking to the patient.

It will be interesting to see if this patient survives.

UX note: Display default review as 5 stars

Posted on by

Example of play.com displaying default review as 5 stars

Example of play.com displaying default review as 5 stars. Even products with no reviews look like they are great!


Most shopping or review sites set the review to 0 or hide the start rating until enough reviews have been made. By showing 5 stars and asking people to review they have given people, quickly scanning the page, the idea that this item is great. This seems underhand, but I bet it is effective.

Read the dice to prove that you are human

Posted on by

I came across this variation in the way you can test if the person interacting with your software is flesh rather than machine.

The standard Captcha mechanism is those distorted letter you often see. The idea is have something that humans can easily read and computers find very difficult.

BTW The term “CAPTCHA” was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford (all of Carnegie Mellon University). It is an acronym based on the word “capture” and standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart… from Wikipedia.

Cursor images

Posted on by

Images of the pointer cursor and the pointing hand (Macintosh). They are png files ready to use. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had to create these images, so here they are ready to grab in my handy dandy blog.

cursor
pointer cursor - white glove

Casual Games notes

Posted on by

From Casual_Games_SIG/Whitepaper

Players mostly women 35+
Spend 9 hours a week on pick up and drop games
successful casual games must:
* Seem accessible to players with varying levels of familiarity and dexterity with computer controls;
* Engage players who may not be familiar with various game genres
* Attract players by offering easy-to-learn games that are inviting and generally non-violent;
* Interact with players who are accustomed to user interface conventions from the traditional retail market.

Top Genres

Web game genres vary as widely as every other game platform. And like other platforms, genre popularity varies between age and gender groups.

Action / Arcade, Sports, Strategy, Role-Playing Games (RPG) all tend to skew to a younger and more male audience.

Board / Card, Casino, Puzzle, Action Puzzle, Word typically command an older but gender equal player base.

Certain Puzzle and Action Puzzle titles have mostly female audiences. All of the above genres can be created as multiplayer, but today this is typically only seen with Card/Board, Word, and Casino games.

Game Genre Examples
Puzzle Magic Match, (Oberon Media/Codeminion)

Mystery Case Files: Huntsville, (Big Fish Games) Tropix, (GameHouse/Robot Super Brain)
Mah Jong Mah Jong Adventures, (Skunk Studios)

Mahjong Escape – Ancient China, (Playtime) Mah Jong Quest, http://www.iwin.com (iWin)
Word Games Big Kahuna Words, (Reflexive)

Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters, (Adveractive/Playtonium) Super Wild Wild Words, (GameHouse)
Casual-Action Cake Mania, (Sandlot Games)

Diner Dash, (PlayFirst/ gameLab) Feeding Frenzy 2, (PopCap)|
Card & Board Ancient TriPeaks, (Toy Box Games)

Hotel Solitaire, http://www.zylom.com (Zylom) Sudoku, (GameDesire)

User testing games example documents

Posted on by

Well the title says it really. I have published some examples of the user test documents and templates we used to test a massive project a few years ago.

Being a fan of the Steve Krug school of testing, often and quick and dirty, as opposed to never getting around to user testing at all because it’s too expensive. The examples are for the development of Signs of Life a gorgeous monster of an interactive drama that I Exec produced a few years ago.
Supernatural games

Playing elaborate games

Posted on by

“Strange to think…most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a piece of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

Axure 5.6 outputs to google docs

Posted on by

‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ No need to buy/install Microsoft Office to export specification docs – from Axure. Just generate them, then upload them to Google Docs and you have them ready to share. This works fine with version 5.6 of Axure on a Macintosh, so please let me know if this is the same for PC.

The sausage is a cunning bird- childrens rhyme

Posted on by

“The sausage is a cunning bird
With feathers long and wavy;
It swims about the frying pan
And makes its nest in gravy”

Found this gem while reading a very good book ‘The lore and language of schoolchildren’ by Iona and Peter Opie. A study of the songs and rhymes children sing and how they spread and change. Fascinating how old rhymes stay mostly in tact over decades, but children often believe that they (or someone they know) invited it.

Playing games can save the planet

Posted on by

Inspiring ideas from TED: Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
[ted id=799]
Great to see this as it chimes nicely with a project we’re developing, that, in it’s own modest way aims to use game and competition elements mechanisms to change behavior and hopefully get people to re-discover the joys of local things, for local people.