On Friday, I went to Sports Medicine at Chelsea to get a second opinion on my shoulder. Apart from Dr. Clifford Stark being an excellent, patient and thorough doctor (harder to find these day’s than one would like) who managed to determine what is ailing me (a bad case of tendonitis of my biceps tendon), his office was outfitted with this neat tablet for filling out all of that initial information you need to provide a new doctor upon your first visit.
Compared to the usual poorly-designed forms you’re asked to fill out, this was a breeze and apart from one slightly confusing screen, the usability was great.
Nice to see technology used to improve what is often a painful and inefficient process. NOw to see if he can do something for my crunchy knees…
How can the same company get some things so right and others so utterly wrong?
Check out this completely unacceptable process of letting me download Firmware 2.0 (+30 mins), install and restore the iPhone (another 15 mins) and then after restart it asks me to connect to iTunes to finalize the process and I get this!
So now I have no phone, no contacts, calendar, etc. and I can’t leave the house until Apple fixes their servers?!
Perhaps a more elegant solution would have been to not let people start the process unless they could guarantee they could handle it?
Btw, the Apple Discussion forums are appropriately ablaze.
Certainly doesn’t make me want to rush down to SoHo and plunk down another $500. Come’on Apple!
Update: Now I get hung up with a -4 error. Since the error descriptions are so helpful I just have to hope we’re working or way back to zero, Apple.
Update: Come join our 9838 Flickr Group!
I’ve been a fan of what Coudal Partners has been doing for a long time and I felt that their last foray into products, Field Notes, was particularly well-executed.
Last week I came across their most recent promotion, Blind Faith:
How cool is that? I think it’s super cool.
Somewhat surprisingly, I dropped this mystery thing into my cart and hopped right over to PayPal to pay for whatever it is without much deliberation. Objectively speaking, $41 dollars is a lot to spend/trade for what is essentially the equivalent of Monty Hall’s “what’s in this box,” but I did it anyway.
Reflecting on my eagerness in the 3 days since I think it was motivated as much by my trust in this particular company as it was in the fact that it’s just a fascinating approach to marketing and selling something. It’s something that I just wanted to experience first-hand – I imagine opening the package whenever it arrives will be unlike any consumer experience I’ve recently had.
In the meantime, I also want to avoid reading anyone else’s account of the experience the same way I avert my eyes from Lost Mysteries in my RSS reader if I haven’t watched that week’s episode yet.
Now that’s well-manufactured excitement.
I’m hoping it shows up this week. Let’s just hope I don’t end up with a “limited-edition” Coudal goat:
By the way, if you like game theory and probability, make sure you read up on The Monty Hall problem.
Last week a new link appeared in the sidebar on my Twitter profile page that read “Share your story.” It looked like this:
The wording was such that I was intrigued to see what kind of story they were looking for, so I clicked and came here:
A simple web form asking for simple information but the way its been set up (“YOUR” story) makes it feel much more interesting and personal that a traditional usage survey. I also feel that the wording shows how well ev, biz and jack know their audience and know what they would respond to. It seems to have worked got so many responses, they took it down only a few days after it went up. Stay tuned for the results.
This is a great example of matching your process to your audience in order to get the best possible results. Also, they’ve made it where they are by keeping things simple and this survey was no different. Sure they won’t have hard numbers to chart against each other but I can guarantee you that from a product development perspective, they will have information that is infinitely more valuable than “How strongly do you agree with the following statement…” – type surveys.
Leave it to the Japanese to take something as mundane as the barcode and make an artform out of it.
Update: Check out this post filled with awesome barcodes that safoocat sent me via Flickr.
This reminded me of those super cool Japanese manhole covers from a while back:
These are great examples of how anything (even something as municipally boring as a manhole) can be made into something interesting with a little attention to design. Don’t be lazy.
Read more about the barcodes here and the manholes here.
Get Satisfaction is an awesome site devoted to providing a platform for companies, as well as the people who use their products, to provide (and share) support for their products. It’s a top notch approach to customer service that does a great job at leveraging current technology as well as current social community behavioral trends to build an ecosystem of support that builds upon itself.
Apart from just being a really crisply designed site overall, they do a few things exceptionally well. The one I wanted to call out here was the way they address what is plaguing a lot of us these days – social network fatigue and the cold start problem. They’ve found a very elegant way to allow their new users to use a social profile they might already have to serve as the foundation of their Get Satisfaction profile.
For more on the company, here’s a snippet from their About section. I highly recommend you check them out next time how find yourself in need of help with a product, or better yet, if you’re particularly passionate about something that others might need help with.
Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. You’re free to ask, free to answer, and free to start a new conversation. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate: companies, employees, customers — anyone with an opinion, an answer, or something to say.
A colleague at work recently pointed me to Newsvine‘s concept of “vineacity.” For them, “vineacity” is a quantifiable measure of your behavior on and relationship to, the Newsvine community.
That behavior boils down to 6 key metrics that get represented as branches on a, you guessed it, vine. These vine icons, concisely denoting varying degrees of accomplishment, serve as reputation badges for the users, making it very easy to get a quick sense of how devoted any user is to the Newsvine community.
The information that they are tracking are the ones that most successful communities rely on: Courtesy, Longevity, Fruitfullness, Connectedness, Random Act of Vineness and Lifetime Achievement. (please see above for what each entails)
I like that the first two “levels” relatively easy to get, the middle two require diligent participation and care and the top two are practically aspirational and will inspire the truly dedicated to keep striving.
I’ve always loved this sort of thing – building a clever system that allows for different classes of users to emerge and rewarding the most dedicated of the bunch. Also, I think the gamer in me has always been a sucker for the visual representation of those classes, which I think Newsvine’s done a great job with.
On another note, while I have a few friends who are passionate about Newsvine, I’ve never been able to get totally jazzed up about the service itself, despite trying to a few times. Perhaps that makes it a good candidate for a future episode of How Do You Use It. (previously featured: FriendFeed)
Remember those super slick mockups from a while back for what a Starbucks + iPhone integration might look like? Well, follow this link and check out what they might look like in action – its a nice peek into what a well-executed retail app on a phone might look like.
Big bonus points for a little Semacode integration at checkout:
iPhone + Starbucks – GENOCO by Phil Lu
Not long after my post about Socialthing, I got a comment from one of the developers:
Alex, you’re very right that more will come out of it. Subscribing to all of your friends’ RSS feeds can be completely overwhelming. A service like ours allows a user to see everything on all of their networks without being overwhelming, and beyond that, some services like Facebook don’t have RSS feeds for their photos and things like that.
Now, speaking to what else we’re going to do there’s a whole lot on the roadmap but quite a few things here in just the next few weeks. Personal profiles is one, for sure…beyond that, one thing we’re really excited about is Friend Discovery, basically a feature that compares your social graphs and figures out where you’re “missing connections” …IE you’re friends with someone on Facebook but not on Flickr…we know that and we can provide you an easy way to connect those back up. We’ll also have easy ways for you to interact with the data – replying to Twitter posts, commenting on Flickr photos, Digging stories from our interface, etc.
The idea is that we become your digital life manager…a series of tools that makes it easy to keep up with and interact with what’s going on in your entire social network from one place.
Hope you enjoy the beta…anyone else that wants an invite, shoot me an email to beta@socialthing.com and mention you came from EverydayUX.
Thanks!
This is a great example one of my favorite side effects of having the opportunity to design products during this convergence of various technologies and ideas – RSS, “Web 2.0″, transparent development process, tight feedback loop between creators and users, etc. – have completely changed the process (and pace) of building a product.
The fact that I can sign up for a beta late one night, write a quick blog post about the experience and by the time I wake up the next morning there’s a comment from the creator of the application a) layout out the direction of the product and b) offering invitations for others to join up. How excellent is that?!
Anyway, if you want to check out Socialthing (and I think you should), send an email to beta@socialthing.com and tell them EverydayUX sent you!
