designforweb.co.uk/blog

In the United States there will be 590,349 pilots collectively flying some 28 million hours in 228,000 different aircraft this year alone, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). To navigate, those pilots use altimeters, global positioning, and good old-fashioned maps, creating an opportunity for one ecommerce merchant. Aviation maps or charts are typically four-foot-by-six-foot rectangles that take up a lot room, are hard to manipulate in a tight cockpit, and wear out easily as pilots fold and refold them flight after flight. Eric Boles, a private pilot and the founder of Skysectionals.com, saw a need and believed that pilots would for pay for smaller, easier to use maps. But bringing a product to market isn’t eas...

Professional looking pictures: Now that you have some experience listing items for sell on eBay. Let’s talk about ways you can improve those auction so they can stand out in the crowd. There are several things that you can do to help this and one of those is taking professional looking pictures. Spend some time taking a picture especially for a higher priced item. Remember when you buy online you are basically buying the picture and description of the item. So if you have to take 3 or 4 pictures to get a good, then go ahead and do that. Also when you sell and item that is slightly used or new you may try to find a manufactures picture to use instead of your own. You can also use programs such as www.photobucket.com to help you post pictures and make sure they look good. (more…)

Work Smarter. Take Control of Your Workload.

Personal time management skills are essential skills for effective people. Todays conference call will be focused on these topics:

• Time Management
• Beating Procrastination
• Effective Scheduling
• Resources and Books to read

The heart of time management is an important shift in focus to:

Concentrate on results, not on being busy

Many people spend their days in a frenzy of activity, but achieve very little, (I call this putting out Fires) because they’re not concentrating their effort on the things that matter the most. Basically if you have to put the same “fire” out more then 3 times you have a hole in your internal business structure / systems.

Great Book on understanding and important verses urgent is “First Things First” By Steven Covey and Roger Merrill. (more…)

I’ve been noodling on how best to present a coherent vision of user-centric website and web service design and think I came up with at least a basic model that will serve my purposes. It’s made up of identity, friends or contacts, services, activities and notifications.

To get concrete, let’s take The Future of Web Apps (London) site. The site’s pretty hot from a purely aesthetic perspective, but from an interactive or social point of view, it’s lacking. This is something that can be remedied, though, with a revised conceptual model and the adoption of a few forward-facing technologies (not all of which are completely baked just yet) but many of which are already becoming the de-facto foundations for decentralized social applications.

The Problem

The fundamental problem with the FOWA site, like most sites today, is that it is site-centric, rather than user-centric, and this has a profound effect on how the site is designed, the features it offers, and what people’s expectations for the site might be.

On the one hand, the site has an obligation to be informative, providing the basic event details: dates and location, schedule, speakers, how to book tickets, etc. On the other hand, and in support of the organizers’ desire to promote and improve engagement before, during and after the event, the site could do so much more to connect attendees and act as a digital scrapbook of everything that occurred during the event.

So while event sites still need to meet promotional and informational objectives, there’s no reason why they can’t also serve to facilitate socialization and aggregate the social objects and creative output that result from such gatherings.

The Opportunity

Now, don’t get me wrong. The point is not to turn every site into a social network. However, especially in this case, where socializing is a large part of the event’s appeal, there’s no reason why the FOWA site shouldn’t make it a little easier for folks to meet and connect before the event — to see who’s coming, and maybe to dog a couple of their friends into attending as well.

In order for social features to get traction, they’re going to need to provide an obvious upside without being too time-consuming or hard to use. Any friction to enjoying these social features — especially before making the upside obvious or significant — are going to inhibit their use and adoption.

Therefore, the easiest way to minimize barriers is to reuse the social connections and tools that people maintain elsewhere. As long as an external service provides a means for extracting media, data or connections, you can let other someone else focus on storing, editing and adding metadata to content, or simply facilitate adding event metadata to remote social objects. An event site, just like the event it represents, should really be a zeitgeist for a moment in time — an epoch for ideas, connections and learning.

The Building Blocks

The foundational building blocks of such a site begin with:

• identity: who is this person? Do they have an account or profile elsewhere that represents them or that they might rather use for identification?
• contacts or friends: a way of expressing or importing relationships between individuals as well as details like email, name, location or URL, to help find friends who might have already signed up
• services: sources of media like photos, videos or other content that can be imported or republished
• activities: atomic-sized descriptions of what someone’s doing or has done (commonly aggregated into so-called “lifestreams”; popularized by Facebook’s newsfeed)
• notifications: sites typically take email for notification for granted, but folks increasingly prefer to receive updates via other services, like feeds or Twitter. Given people the ability to choose how they want to be contacted will probably improve the likelihood that the recipient will appreciate hearing from you.

Identity

It can almost be taken for granted that just about everyone who comes to your site and wants to interact probably has an account or profile someplace else that they maintain (especially if your site is for an event called “The Future of Web Apps”). Indeed, all sites seem to presume an email address at minimum these days, and increasingly it’s becoming safe to assume presence on at least one of the following: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, Google or owning a personal blog somewhere. It’s certainly not universal — yet — but for the audience that does maintain a profile elsewhere, it seems a wise idea to start looking at how you can leverage it.

After all, who really needs yet another password? Why not let them sign-in to your site using credentials that they’ve established elsewhere, say at Facebook, WordPress, Blogger or Yahoo? All of these sites act as identity providers, because they support the OpenID protocol. And so when someone signs in to your site, verifying their OpenID to you, it’s no different than you sending them an account confirmation email, except there’s no need to deal with checking email or worrying about the confirmation getting marked as spam. The whole verification process takes place in the browser.

Going one better, why not also import their existing profile? Here you have several options: scraping hCards from sites like YouTube, LinkedIn or Flickr (and many, many more); requesting several basic profile attributes with SREG ; making use of the Attribute Exchange protocol.

By supporting the concept of remote identities on your site, you’re implicitly recognizing that your site is not the only one that people use — and that you want to make it as easy as possible for people to interact. Your first priority — and your customer’s — should not be to create another account and another password, but instead to consider what you’re offering, and whether it might provide them any value. Getting the account creation step out of the way means this process can happen faster and more immediately.

Contacts, Friends and Relationships

Now that you’ve discovered who someone is, wouldn’t it be useful to help someone find the people who they might already know on your site? You might be tempted to take the discredited approach of just asking for someone’s username and password for their email address book, but why take on the liability of someone else’s email password when you can now skip this uncomfortable and unpopular password anti-pattern?

Again, you have several options: scrape friends lists marked up in XFN from blogrolls, Twitter or other microformatted services; use the new Portable Contacts API with OAuth to do friend-importing; use a proprietary delegated authorization protocol to access some of the more popular address books. For an example of this done right, see the New York Times’ TimesPeople social network:

Now, it’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of importing friends should be to provide real value: to aid in sharing and connecting. A simple but very valuable way to leverage such “portable contact lists” is to show someone a list of their friends who are already planning to attend the event. Better yet is to keep a record of someone’s friends and if any of them end up registering, let both parties know of each other’s plans. This can be done by storing hashes of identifiers (i.e. do not store the actual email address itself unless the email owner has provided it to you) and matching those hashes whenever someone new signs up.

And of course, if you allow people to connect through your site, always make sure that they can take that connection offsite by supporting the Portable Contacts API (i.e. allow for export of the speakers’ public contact information)

Services

Just as more and more people maintain accounts elsewhere, more and more people use several web services to store their photos, videos, links, blog posts, tweets, wishlists and the like. Similar to how it’s convenient reuse existing user accounts, it’s equally easy and useful to import their existing content from somewhere else.

Of course you can always just specify a universal tag (say, “fowaexpo08″) and subscribe to correctly marked-up media . Even better is to facilitate the contribution of specific pieces of content — from services that might already be indicated in what’s called someone’s “discovery profile”: an XML document marked up in the XRDS-Simple format. The beauty of this format is that it is designed to be attached to someone’s OpenID URL. So at the time of OpenID account verification, you can grab someone’s public discovery profile to learn about the different services that they use. The format also specifies how to identify “authorization endpoints”, which essentially are the gatekeepers to accessing private data stored on these remote services.

By combining OpenID, XRDS-Simple, Portable Contacts and OAuth, you can enable someone to reuse an existing account, discover their list of friends, request authorization to access this list, and then, if granted, suggest people already on the site with whom they can connect or invite to participate. What used to be a cumbersome and dangerous process is now smooth, straight-forward and secure, and applies to more than just accessing your friends.

Activities

Now that we have identity and friends accounted for, and know what services someone uses, it becomes fairly easy to start to expose, on your site, the activities that someone performs related to the event. In its simplest form, when someone registers to attend the event, you can create an activity for them, both in their personal stream but also as a feed that they can bring elsewhere; when someone connects to a friend, just like on Facebook, you can expose that; when someone imports a photo or video, you can offer a thumbnail; when someone tweets about the event (say, using the hashtag), you can quote them… and so on.

The point of activities is not to show off everything that someone does, but to highlight relevant activities as a means of social discovery.

There is much work still to be done on the basic format for activity streams, but the most basic activity takes the form of actor verb social object. If you publish activity streams on your site, it is suggested that you consider using the hAtom microformat to start, and then mark up the various components using the respective classes: actor, verb, object. At least until something better comes along.

In the meantime, for an event site, activities could be useful for exposing interest in sessions, or helping attendees to let speakers know that they’re looking forward to hearing them or even for spreading new information about the event in bite-sized chunks (i.e. new speakers, etc).

Notifications

The last thing to consider is how to handle notifications. While email still reigns supreme, syndicated content and services like Twitter have become alternative viable means for staying in touch.

There are lots of options here, from instant messaging over XMPP to SMS to Twitter to posting activities of your own. The important thing is to recognize that email isn’t the only means to stay in touch any more — and for some, might not even be the most preferable method of contact. The interest to drive people back to your site must be balanced against the obligation to provide useful communication.

Web services are increasing the types of notifications they offer, and provide fairly granular control over how they contact their members. Mixin is one example to consider:

Another is Brightkite:

Thinking about your opt-in notifications strategy ahead of time — by coordinating efforts among your team to reduce duplication and increase value — will likely improve your read and conversion rates, and keep your attendees satisfied and informed.

Conclusion

Putting this all together, we start to see that a more formal conception of the components of user-centric web services is becoming clear. A user-centered web service prioritizes the situation of the individual and his or her use of the service, rather than the objectives of the service. This means: making logins easier and passwords fewer, the ability to interact with known friends without having to add them all over again, surfacing activities as a mechanism of discovery, and using several means of notification based on convenience. Indeed, this approach is necessary for continuing to innovate, create and offer new web services. Luckily, as this article demonstrates, a number of open and non-proprietary technologies like OpenID, OAuth, XRDS-Simple, Portable Contacts, and microformats exist that will make this approach not only feasible but simple and less costly to implement.

The conference or event site example used here is just the obvious case of a user-centered web service that would benefit from recognizing the broader context in which their users exist on the web. Hopefully through greater promotion and adoption of the technologies and concepts outlined above, we will start to see a new wave of highly valuable, useful and low-effort user-centric event sites blossom that provide high value through low-cost interactions for users and developers alike.

Trigger marketing is the next step for the critical ecommerce function of automated email communications. While traditional automated emails follow newsletter sign-ups and orders, trigger marketing sends emails for other events such as particular search patterns, customer birthdays, holidays, or related products. “No matter what the ecommerce niche or industry, we all do too many jobs and we all need to get more relevant to when we touch into the lives of our consumer,” says Dylan Boyd, vice president of sales and strategy for eROI, an email marketing and interactive agency in Portland, Ore. “That’s what trigger email is all about.” Venders Are Working to Make Trigger Marketing Easier There are multitudes of email-marketing service an...

Interview with former student, Doug K., who has made over $100,000 in the last 6 months with his business.

At brick-and-mortar retailers, shoppers can stroll the isles, handle items, speak to clerks, and receive well placed merchandising messages. It’s not that easy for ecommerce merchants. They must find new and inventive ways to engage and convert customers; using well written and persuasive content, great photographs, related product links, and cross-selling tools. In this ever-advancing cycle of innovation, merchandising with video might be the next bottom-line booster. “There is a clear trend that a lot more [online] retailers are incorporating video into their user experience…and we know that video works,” said Kevin Ertell, senior vice president of ecommerce at Borders Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich. With the support of its 1,100 retail store...

For executives like Braden Hoeppner, director of web sales for optical store Coastalcontacts.com, today’s web widgets are a fast and easy way to improve customer service and create interest. Thanks to the widget behind Coastalcontacts.com’s “Tell a friend” link, “we got more features than we would have initially introduced ourselves,” Hoeppner said, “and we were able to do it a lot more quickly.” Instead of going to an email page, Coastal Contact’s link opens a pop-up box called Social Notes, created by a San Francisco-based marketing-communications company, PopularMedia, Inc. The free Social Notes widget lets users email the page to a friend; post the page to their Facebook, MySpace or Bebo user profile; post it to one of several popu...

It is said that you are more likely to leave your wallet behind than your cellphone when leaving the house. Most people are within 15 feet of their phone at any time, even when they are sleeping. One person in seven has been dumped by phone and the incidence of firing by phone is growing.

The phone is so omnipresent it is becoming set to take over as the task-oriented access point for the Web, while the PC, the TV, and other large screen access points will continue to be the choice for video streaming, browsing, and other activities involving heavy graphics or complicated interfaces. It is unlikely that the phone will take over as the online word processor any time soon.

Moving functionality onto the phone: spending

If you are more likely to have your phone with you than your purse, it starts to make sense for the phone to take over some of the functions that you need all the time. It is no surprise that payment is moving on to the phone.

Take your credit card, for example. What is a credit card, really, but a bunch of information held in a form that is awkward to replicate? In effect, it’s an account number combined with an ID. Any modern cellphone has more storage capacity than a hundred credit cards require, so why not move it onto the phone and have it with you the whole time?

However, managing your finances on your phone with a full-scale accounting application might not be convenient; you would really need a bigger screen than is really comfortable to carry around with you. So we have our first driver towards convergence right here. Moving a credit card to the phone and administrating your finances across a variety of web channels not only makes sense, but there are a lot of other advantages to it which we will discuss later.

Traveling

First let’s look at how another card with a magnetic strip has evolved. The humble tube ticket used to be the standard way of getting about in London; now 80% or more of eligible journeys are made using contactless Oyster cards. Contactless cards are quicker and more convenient than putting a card into a slot. So if we are going to move the credit card onto the phone then let it be as a contactless card. And if we have a contactless card, it might as well be our Oyster card as well. That way the Oyster can be “topped up” from the account attached to the credit card and save us a bit more bother. In the world of developing technology, convenience should be king. It is no surprise to find that the Oyster card is administrated over a web interface, so perhaps we should integrate that with our accounting package so that we can see our debits coming out of the bank account, and then drill down into the journeys.

Just making the phone into a ticket is limiting its usefulness, though. If you are connected to the network, the phone could know where you are and alert you just before you reached your stop. This would be handy for those people who tend to fall asleep and go straight past their stop. Also, it could spot if you are going the wrong way (oops, wrong platform and wrong train!). Clearly this could also work if we spread the ticket to cover “over-ground” rail and bus. It could do these tasks already, but it needs to know where you are going. If our application were tied to your calendar, then it would already know where you are going. If you had not put the trip into the calendar, then the phone could check while buying your ticket. It could even set an “out of office” autoreply on your email, add a calendar entry in to let people know where you are, and add the trip to your expenses claim form. Directing you to the right platform, the right train and then letting you know in time to gather your things together before you got there would be easy, too. Even more useful, for those unfamiliar with the tube system, would be help to find your way around the labyrinthine tunnels.

Identification

While we are at it, are there any other contactless cards we could add to our phone? Well, here at dunnhumby there is our security pass. Now, a phone can’t replace all the functionality of my pass because having a photo visible is clearly an important security element. The phone could do the door-opening part of its work, though. I’m less likely to be left behind than the standard pass, so let’s look at how it could work if I remembered my phone but forgot my standard pass.

If I left my pass behind I could swipe my phone at a kiosk at reception. The kiosk could then print out a photo of me, from my badge record, to hang around my neck. Clearly I need to show that I really am me, so I would be asked for a password and a few other details before being given the temporary pass. Now the kiosk could ask for those details, but so could the phone. The phone is, after all, a computer.

We could also look at putting a biometric check on the phone. These are available on laptops, so why not phones? It isn’t 100% secure, but it is better than we have now. Now the phone has an advantage over the kiosk as a place to check my biometric data, because it is somewhere I am more comfortable with the verification information being stored. It also prevents data redundancy, as I only need to have my personal details in one place rather than several. If we are doing security checks with the phone then we want to ensure that loss of the phone does not let it out into the world. What we really need to do is to make this another joint application, with the phone accessing a secure hybrid online interface and backup system on the Web. Clearly this will need the best security we can find, but if it has that then we can start tying the security aspects up with that credit card we were talking about earlier.

Security

So now we have a phone/web application that knows how to identify you and can be used in a quick and easy way to give you access to money, travel and work. This is clearly of value, so what happens if you lose it? Well first, it is a phone so you may be able to locate it: you could call it, or get it to use GPS to tell you where it is. But what if it was stolen? You can can easily cancel it through the phone network. But not only that, your new replacement phone can make itself into a clone of your old one as soon as you have verified your identity. So your new phone/card wallet is safer than the old credit cards you used before, immune to shoulder surfing, and tied into the way you run your accounts. With a credit card someone can clone it and access your account, but a phone can change the code it uses with each transaction so even a thief could intercept the code they couldn’t use it.

Given that our phone knows who we are it could also act as a key. Not just at work, but for our homes, too. You could control access to your house remotely to let people in; your house is connected to the phone network after all. If you were organising a party you could make access to your house part of the invitation email as you pick people out of your contacts on your home PC. They would be able to access their email from their phones, effectively making their own phones into “keys” to get in. You could set up visitor phones to have access once for a limited slot (that party invite perhaps), or regularly on certain days (the cleaner) or on a permanent basis (the boyfriend). You could then remove the permission straight away (during an argument in a restaurant, say) and not worry that they will come busting in later (I Will Survive might never have been written if it had been that easy to change your lock!)

Shopping

Mixing phone access with web applications can help enable spending, traveling, working and security; perhaps it can do more than that. It is already tied into the way you budget, so why not set it up so purchases over $20 require a fingerprint? As we put verification on the phone instead of the kiosk it is easy, and it won’t slow things down as you are holding the phone to wave it near the checkout anyway. If it’s a big purchase, say $100, you could set it up to ask for a PIN number too. It’s your phone so you can set the limits to amounts you are comfortable with. All of this adds security, but could also help you stick to a budget.

Let’s go further than that. Why not decide what weight we are happy to carry in a single shopping trip, and say that if you purchase anything over 10kg you will be willing to pay $5 for delivery. Pickers gather a basket for you at your local store, so if it is heavy why not put the basket we have gathered into the same process? Your phone can exchange contact details and pay at the same time. That is all very well if you are buying everything in one store, and we could do it even with an ordinary credit card and epos (electronic point of sale) access to preferences. What happens if you build up to 10kg across a few shops? If your phone keeps track of your purchases it could ask, when you go over the weight limit in one trip, whether you want the latest purchase delivered. Perhaps, as a slightly more costly service, the picker in store could take the basket you picked from all the different shops and get them all delivered? This could combine with your online mapping application to remind you to get delivery when you are in the stores that do delivery, even if that means popping into a nearby store. It would also tie up to your overall shopping trip and maybe your packing list too. Going on holiday? Make the application remind you when you are near any items you need to buy before you go.

If we are putting cards into our application then including contactless loyalty cards clearly makes sense. What are the advantages? Well, the first is that if your loyalty card and your payment mechanism are on the same phone then you can begin to get credit for all those small purchases that were not worth getting your card out for before. Pulling out your phone to pay is even less work than getting your money out of your wallet, particularly if you don’t have to count the money, just wave the phone. Again convenience is king, and adding convenience is actually providing customers with value.

In order to get at the other advantages of the loyalty card being on the phone we should, perhaps, touch briefly on what a loyalty card is:

• A way for a retailer to say “Thank you for shopping here, do come again”
• A way for you to tell the retailer which offers will interest you so as to keep the offers you are sent relevant
• A way for the retailer to understand shopping habits so that they can become the type of shop that you, their customer, wants

In any interaction between a retailer and a customer, both parties must benefit. If this is not the case then the interaction will not happen. When you buy a loaf of bread the retailer gets your money and you get to eat; both sides benefit. The same is true for a loyalty card. By becoming the place you want to shop the retailer becomes more profitable and both parties benefit. In the way I have described the phone developing I have been talking about the benefits to the phone’s owner. Some of them are overwhelming, and will mean that market forces make them happen, but that will not necessarily make them as convenient as I have described. The bank that puts their credit card onto our phones first has an advantage and people will start to switch to them. This, in turn, will pressure all banks to move their credit cards onto our phones.

This won’t work if there is just convenience to the customer without a clear commercial beneficiary. I mentioned the possibility of your phone keeping track of what you bought and arranging for the shopping to be delivered, if necessary. If a shopping trip stays within a single shop then that shop benefits, but if a trip takes the shopper through multiple shops only the customer benefits from the phone doing this work. Equally, where is the advantage to the product manufacturer in making the weights of its products available to millions of phones? Likewise, if credit cards are being added to the phone, who is going to provide the platform that lets you add them in and remove them when it becomes necessary to, for example, change your credit card provider?

So, who’s going to do all of this work?

Perhaps it would make sense to create a deal similar to that for loyalty cards: customers provide some information about themselves in exchange for having the platform to add and subtract cards and to set limits, alarms, and alerts. Given that loyalty cards are doing some of this kind of work already, it might make sense to extend an on-phone card to include the platform itself. This would allow much closer integration between phone and online applications without the causing the phone to be costing too much in bandwidth. One possible benefit to the loyalty scheme might be the advantage of having control over the branding as settings are changed and alerts read. Given that the platform will require maintenance, and will run within a possession we have already shown is integral to everyday life, there is a need for it to be of the level of quality that only comes at a considerable cost. As customers, we could offer a willingness to receive non-intrusive targeted offers and advertising within the platform interface and additional information about ourselves for targeting those offers in return for the loyalty card company providing the platform. Neither one of these seems too high a cost for the value such a platform would provide for us.

This sort of deal with a loyalty card could have a significant advantage over phone manufacturers producing a home-grown solution: consistency. If convenience is king, then usability is the throne it sits upon. If something is not usable it is not really convenient. Usability comes from things working the way you expect them to without having to think. Given the rate at which we change from one phone to another, following fashions, we do not want to have to learn a new interface every time. We particularly do not want to risk having the way our credit card is protected changing continually. If your favourite loyalty card were the platform it could come with you. It will be a brand to rely upon to back up your phone and not accidentally delete your settings, your identification and half of your life.

Conclusion

Nearly all of the functions to be integrated that I mention here are either in use on phones in other countries or are already in development. For example, contactless capability, referred to as NFC (Near Field Communication) looks like it will be standard for most new UK phones in about 18 months or so; in Japan it is already how everyone uses their phones. This kind of convergence and integration has not really happened yet, but is clearly on the horizon.

So what is the future of web apps? They will tell us who we are, where we are, what we can spend and what we can spend it on. In effect, they can become the ultimate view nannies, always remembering the fact that the user will have set up the guidelines themselves.

The only question is not how far can the future development of web applications take us, but how far do we want it to go?

I went on a hike this weekend and it was a lot of fun—until the next day when I began to feel as if I had participated in something more like a death march. My leg muscles were so sore, it was tough to trek through the grocery store in search of ibuprofen. In honor of my pain (it’s my own fault—too much time at the desk), I’ve chosen Icewraps.net as the recipient of this month’s SEO Report Card. The website, designed with icy blue tones, offers "ice packs and heating pads [to] treat your leg pain, elbow joint pain, hip pain, knee pain, foot pain or arthritis pain!" Great keyword placement there, though heating pads don’t seem to be congruent with ice wraps. That's not necessarily an SEO issue, though, so let’s take a look at...