Night Apes Dream

Mobile carrier 3 Australia (known elsewhere as Hutchison Whampoa. Can’t think why that didn’t catch on) will shortly be releasing the INQ, which they are billing as "the world’s first social mobile".

It is an interesting move by 3. After being the only Australian carrier to not secure the Apple iPhone, they appear to have decided to go a completely different direction by founding INQ Mobile to develop a phone that fills a very different gap in the market. The INQ is a stripped back mobile, offering few of the smartphone features currently popular on the market. What the INQ does offer is access to Facebook, Skype, Windows Live Messenger and other internet services built into the operating system. Additionally, it comes with a very competitive price tag; rumoured to be around AU$179. Considerably less than other web phones on the market.

This move seems similar to the release of the Skype Mobile last year. Users of this handset can access 1000 minutes of Skype talk and 10,000 Skype chats per months after purchasing the handset. Like the INQ, the Skype Mobile is a pared down, cheap mobile with a distinct difference to other mobiles. I have been using the Skype Mobile for about 12 months now, and whilst I do miss features like an effective PC sync, I love having access to a web tool I use everyday on a phone that I don’t feel bad about throwing around.

I am interested what other features the INQ will include at launch, and whether any key functionality or quality was sacrificed to keep the price down. If they can fit a Twitter client onto it, I will be more than interested in picking one up. If so, watch this space for a review in the future.

Like so many others, I woke up to the horrific news of the Mumbai terror attacks last week. The gravity of the situation was made even worse by knowing that my brother was currently in Mumbai. Unable to contact him, I  turned to Twitter Search to try and gather any information about what was happening that I could. The stream of information was horrifically compelling, as updates from Mumbai residents and news organistions scrolled down the page, slowly creating a picture of the terrible events that had taken place.

After finally contacting my brother (who was fine), I continued to tune into Twitter for the rest of the day. As the day went on, I began to hear more and more comments from other Twitter users that deeply upset me. Slowly, amongst the updates from people actually in Mumbai and experiencing the event, other’s began posting links to news articles about how Twitter was spreading information faster than traditional media, discussions began about how Twitter was now the New World Order in globabal current events, and basically how awesome we all were for being ahead of the pack. I almost found it unbelievable, but before the killings had even finished in Mumbai, the focus had begun to shift from the event itself to a disgusting display of backslapping and digital high fives. I was like commenting on a news article about a massive car accident with "First".

Whilst I love Twitter, and use it continually to keep in touch with friends and meet new people, it has a long way to go before it is anything else than a rowdy schoolroom. In fact, I doubt it will ever be anything else, and that is fine because it doesn’t need to be anything else, but the tone certainly gets lowered by people with inflated egos and a deflated sense of empathy who describe events like the Mumbai attacks and the China earthquakes as "triumphs of the information age". If you ever describe events like that as a triumph, you don’t deserve to have your voice heard.

I can only hope that as these new social tools begin to mature, their users will begin to look at ways they can make a difference rather than just blowing their own horns.

I’m still not entirely sure how this happened. One minute I was giving a monthly metrics presentation to a client, the next minute the entire conversation had been derailed by LOL cats, with even the eBusiness Manager showing me how she could get LOL cats on her iPhone. Yeah, that was strange.

An hour later, this turned up in my inbox from the same client.

I’m not sure, but it must be some net nerd right of passage to receive your first personalised LOL cat. The beginning of a slippery slop towards true geekdom perhaps?

Google Analytics has recently had a bit of a facelift, and when the dust settled a number of new features had been added. Advanced Segments allows a GA user to segment visitor metrics by a number of specific, definable segments. This means it is now possible to slice user data by those visitors who complete a transcation, spend a specific period of time on the site, or visit the site a specific number of times.

What excites me most about this is how it can be used to refine a business’ KPIs. Often a client comes to us saying "We want to reduce the number of short visits to the site" or "we want to increase repeat visitation to the site". Sometimes I find myself wondering whether these are desirable goals, do we know that longer visits result in more conversions? Probably not. Using Advanced Segments, we may find out that all of those short visits actually represent users who have been to the site and are  returning to very quickly complete a task (sign up, download a brochure etc). Having this knowledge empowers us to set metrics KPIs that are much more focused on an outcome than those based on assumptions.

Now all I have to do is convince more clients to move to Google Analytics, and ditch their overpriced, under performing corporate metrics packages.

Recently, I have seen a number of sites go live that I have conducted usability testing on at various stages of their design process. What has surprised me about these sites is that many of them are completely unchanged from when they first came through the door. A number of sites had usability issues ranging from mild to absolute show stoppers, issues that were clearly seen when actual users were sat in front of the site, yet none of our recommendations had been acted upon in the (sometimes lengthy) time between testing and launch.

What is occuring here is, I think, different to Stupid User Syndrome and instead a sort of lip service to usability. Now that usability, and with it the required research and testing, has begun to become a standard part of more and more development cycles, it has essentially become a box to check for some project managers.

I can (but won’t) name a few companies I know of for whom undertaking user testing is a required KPI for their project managers.What is wrong with this? There are no requirements for them to actually implemement the recommendations that come out of the research. They are essentially undertaking the testing to say that they have done so in their performance review, not to improve their product. Doing this is like having an engineer check your building foundations and ignoring his findings; "Hey, our building’s been assessed, so we’re good", never mind that he says your building will collapse in a few years (I begun to use a car designer for this analogy, but I think we’ve all seen Fight Club).

User testing does not instantly earn you a usable product. To achieve that you need to actually invest the time and money to act on the findings of your user testing. Plan and budget from the beginnning of your project for the necessary changes to be made. Do not enter testing expecting no changes to need to be made, because then when those changes are required you will find youself without the time and budget to implement them.

Users know best how to improve your product, they are the ones who use it, that is why we undertake user testing. Users are also your most important asset, they are your customers and also, in today’s world of social networking, a part of your marketing team. So show these users the respect they deserve, build them the product that they want to use, do not pay lip service by saying you have tested the product with real users, because until you have made the final step towards acting on that testing your users will find another product somewhere else.

(Image from Uselog. Thanks to @swingdag for the link)