Media Space: Profiles

My first self-introduction into the Media Space about half a year ago failed miserably: it took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to get to my profile and upload a picture. Things have changed a little bit since that time, however this problem wasn’t fixed.

Let’s see what would it take to upload a new picture to replace the profile icon.

The process of updating (or even accessing) a profile seems to be fairly complicated, making the interface less intuitive. Things are not just where you expect them to be… Subsequently, a small rearrange would fix the problem:

Disclaimer: Although this change seems to be pretty minor, its implementation might require some major changes in how the entire system works. In my opinion, a platform like Media Space should be profile-oriented, not task-oriented like it appears to be now.

 

Use case

Step 1: User logs in.

Step 2:  User clicks on the “(My) Profile”

Step 3:  User selects “Edit Profile”

Step 4:  User clicks on the “Edit profile icon”

Step 5:  User uploads and crops picture

Step 6:  User clicks “Save” button

Is Bing a new Big Bang in search market?

After its launch earlier this year, Bing has been continuously taking the percentage of the search market share away from its main competitors including Google. It took just few weeks to replace Yahoo as number two. I would be really interesting to know what makes people use it?

First of all, it’s natural curiosity and great marketing efforts behind it. However, in our digital era nothing kills bad product faster than good marketing. Apparently, Microsoft has something else under their belt to make first-time users stick with Bing. My research will reveal, what exactly it is. Better, simpler, and more intuitive interface? New algorithms behind their search? Equipping new Windows 7 and older versions of IE with Bing as a default search engine? My assumptions would be yes, yes, and yes…

However, the question of usability would be the most relevant for this particular case study. I’ve never used Bing before, so my usability tests and further research would have to reveal a couple of really important things:

1. Simplicity. Can you make search even simpler than Google does? Is it what the users want? Maybe they want something else? What is it? How does Bing’s interface address those needs?

2. Intuitive interface. How is it designed? What are possible tasks the end users would want to accomplish? How well is Bing’s design thought through for the completion of these tasks? What could be done to make it better?

3. Innovative  solutions. What’s new? What makes Bing different? What’s better and what’s worse?

My goal for the next several weeks is to use Bing for all of my search needs and find out what are the main factors that make it (un)successful.

iPhone: Poor usability vs. coolness?

According to multiple online and offline user reviews, iPhone seems to be almost perfect from the usability standpoint. I’ve been using it for a little while, and have to mention that it’s really hard to find some usability imperfections in it.

It’s pretty obvious that Apple engineers had to sacrifice a part of iPhone’s usability to its coolness and performance. The iPhone has a couple of minor to moderate disadvantages, but most of the users are pretty happy with their device.

The first and the biggest usability challenge is definitely a touch-screen keyboard that has tiny buttons and covers a significant portion of a screen. The problem of tiny buttons is not new and almost all the phones I’ve used have it. It’s pretty much impossible to create a large enough keyboard that could be used without any constraints without the increasing a device size.

New concept for an improved classroom/learning experience

#MCDMinteractive Week 3 H/A

Reputation systems. Practical application

I’ve heard some rumors around new Social Mediaspace here at MCDM program. I assume that the creation of some kind of a collaboration platform would be a necessary part of this project. I know that there is a group of people working on it. That’s pretty much all I know about it.

For some reason, not too many people talk about it on Flip the Media blog (which is a little bit surprising). Thus, I’m going to fill this gap…

Yammer. Twitter for a walled garden

Last year Yammer won the TechCrunch50 prize for most innovative startup. It seemed to be promising because of its very viable subscription model that was intended to simplify interaction among peers within a “closed garden” environment. Unfortunately, I don’t have any examples of Yammer successfully entering corporate environments (that doesn’t necessarily mean those don’t exist) due to natural corporations’ unwillingness to give up their potentially proprietary data to third party managed services, especially free ones.

Google’s users organizing the Web

With the enormous volume of information available on the Internet the question of who would organize all of this data used to be a tough one. Websites like del.isio.us and Stumbleupon provided great tools for people to do that, giving the answer on the question above.

However, even with the millions of users using the tags to teach the machine their audience have been significantly smaller then the number of Google users. Finally the biggest search engine does its greatest step ever to engage the groundswell into organizing the Internet.

Best CTR ever…

Google ad serving solution was praised to be the most successful advertising model in the age of Internet. Google Adwords made online advertising available for everybody, despite of the budget. It’s easy to use and it’s really working. However, not too much people ask himself or herself the question how do these Google algorithms serving sponsored results work. It doesn’t really matter for most of the users, until system malfunctions.

It’s usually really hard to observe the performance of each click if you get thousands of impressions every day. Weird things started to happen when I consolidated my Google Adwords budgets and started spending money more wisely, watching each click and continuously monitoring the performance of my online campaigns. I’ve got one case, which made me think about ad serving system malfunction few weeks back.

Google Adword’s Longtail

Google consistently proves his “permanently Beta” vision of its own products. This week brought some exciting news about Quality Score improvements and other “minor” changes in Google Adwords.

One of this changes caught my eye today…

Keywords are no longer marked ‘inactive for search‘ – all keywords are set to be active because they are evaluated for every relevant query. Sounds like Google Adwords solution finally gets more friendly to the narrowest niche markets.

I assume these keywords will be cheap, because there is no dense competition for them. Nevertheless, Google decides to go this direction “in order to provide users with more relevant results”. On the other hand, it looks like an attempt to extend the variety of keywords, because some of them have already reached really high keyword difficulty level.

It would be really interesting to observe which way will this incentive go. I think we will see first results within few next months.