Web Social Architecture

You're Invited to a Social Media / Beer Event at ZAAZ: Thursday June 18th

ZAAZ is hosting the latest in our social media events series next Thursday, June 18th, at ZAAZ hq in downtown Seattle. Join us from 6 - 9 for a panel discussion on agency / client relationships in social media. Panelists will include folks from the agency side who specialize in digital, brand, and PR; along with client-side web and community managers. Here's the announcement:

How do agencies help clients develop richer, more valuable online relationships with customers? Should agencies moderate communities on behalf of their clients? How will budgets adjust to accommodate ongoing, as opposed to project-based, work? What skillsets are best suited for in-house groups? Which agency type owns social media strategy? Should corporations create social media teams, or distribute the work across groups?

Confirmed panelists so far are:

Dave Ballantine, Director of User Experience, DNA

Ted Zahn, Creative Director, ZAAZ

Jordan Williams, Online Community Manager, REI

Marty Collins, Group Marketing Manager, Windows Social Media Team, Microsoft

Teri Citterman, President, Citterman Ink

Expect a very lively discussion around the future of agencies--I'll be moderating, so if you have thoughts about topics, please drop them in the comments below.

We'll have a Facebook event up soon, I'll update this post with the link when we do. UPDATE: Here is the link.

I hope to see you there--come say hello!

You're Invited: Social Media Event at ZAAZ Seattle July 8th

People keep asking me when we're going to host another event at the ZAAZ office's notorious Z-Bar in Seattle. Well...

 

I'm super excited about the lineup for this event, which includes industry leaders from corporate, agency, and independent circles who share passion and expertise in the human dimensions of social computing. Knowing most of these folks pretty well, I think I can guarantee an evening of thought-provoking conversation.

The format for this event will be similar to the previous one I organized, which seemed to go pretty well. We'll have short talks from each speaker followed by a panel discussion. Plus, snacks and beer.

Here's the rundown on the speakers:

Brian Fling of Flingmedia is a full-fledged mobile design geek and human Swiss Army knife. His talk, "Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond" will explore some of the social dimensions of the emerging mobile world.

My colleague Justin Marshall is behind some of the most exciting work we've done in social media. His take on social media for marketers, titled "Money, Media, and Your Mom's Peach Cobbler: Social Media Marketing Done Right," offers guidance for marketers looking to engage with customers online.

Samantha Starmer is a highly-respected thought leader in the local information architecture community. In addition to her work at REI, she co-teaches the UW Information School's Summer IA Institute. Her talk, "Single Athletic Female seeking Single Slender Male: The Marriage of Social Media and Metadata," promises to reveal the secrets of better online living through metadata.

Nancy White of Full Circle Associates has been doing online community since WAY before it was cool. Her broadly-ranging expertise includes online learning and facilitation, communities of practice, technology in the developing world, and social technology in general. Her talk is titled "Slow Community."

Wendy Chisholm is a former co-editor of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and a passionate advocate for universally-accessible design online and off. She's currently working on what promises to become "THE book" on accessibility for the emerging Web.

We're really lucky in the Seattle area to have access to such quality thinkers and experts. I hope you'll join us, and if you do plan to attend, drop me a note at ryant (at) zaaz dot com so I can get a rough headcount.

The Facebook event is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=66791410200.

I hope to see you there!

ZAAZ Needs UX People: Associate Director of User Experience, and More

We just posted a job opening for an Associate Director of User Experience to manage the UX side of our Microsoft accounts. This is a great chance for a top-level UX mind to lead in a fun, creative, leading-edge environment.

We also are looking for UX folks at every level, from entry to senior. If you know folks with the UX passion who pass the road trip test, send them our way.

You can see all the job descriptions here.

The Big Leap: New Mactopia Site Integrates Community

Yesterday we launched a major client site that has a couple important community features. Hopefully the level of complexity involved isn't apparent on the site itself, but I'm proud of the work, because we did some complicated stuff.

Meet the new Mactopia, the web home of MacBU, the Microsoft group that creates software for the Mac:

This site is a great example of a business moving from a broadcast to a participatory model on the web. The old site had little more than a web email form supporting customer interaction: Click Submit to send your message into oblivion. Today the new site includes numerous access points for customer interaction, all serving core user requirements, dynamically layered throughout the site, algorithmically filtered, and aligned with the brand.

Two new areas of the site support direct interaction among customers and between customers and the company:

• The existing NNTP technical support groups are now mirrored on the site itself, in a web-based forums interface that adds features to make them easier to use. They synch in both directions, and discussion threads are now searchable along with other support content.
• The popular Mac Mojo blog, formerly hosted on MSDN, is fully integrated with the new site, and the best content from the blog is dynamically integrated with product pages, providing a way for people considering a purchase to look under the hood, ask questions, and get to know the people and thinking behind the products.

To integrate these areas of the site in a meaningful way, we had a number of challenges to solve:

• The existing NNTP groups were working. We had to keep from breaking them.
• The MVP community, crucial contributors of technical support and general help for Mac Office users, strongly prefers to interact with the NNTP groups through a newsreader interface--which is an inappropriate interface for the users they're there to help.
• Support Forums created by the community and Help content published by the company serve the same user need: Get a solution to a problem. The two kinds of content needed to be differentiated, so authorship is clear. But there's no way to know whether a given question has the best answer in one place or the other.
• While the Support Forums and Help content are both searchable, there's no way to rank search results by relevance across the two areas, and the databases being searched return differently-structured data.
• Integrating the blog with the main site means many people who aren't familiar with blog conventions will encounter it. We needed to present the most broadly interesting content, along with the standard newest content, front and center.

This list is really just the tip of the iceberg, and I think it's interesting because these are challenges typical to any large project that involves integration of community content. We had to make compromises every step of the way. Only time will tell, but I think the site architecture will support great quality over the long term--thanks in large part to the passion and smarts of the fine folks at the MacBU.

MacBU took a huge step here by opening the site to user participation. They'll face huge challenges over the next year as they adjust to a brave new world of customer relationships online. A lot will depend on their ability to stay responsive in the face of a huge volume of questions and requests (the old site's monthly traffic was already in seven digits). They'll face tough questions about how to moderate borderline posts. Their commitment to transparency will be tested. They'll be unfairly treated.

All this adds up to a big opportunity. So pay attention. This is a ride almost everybody's in line for.

Fame! Fun! Free Snacks! Call for Speakers for Seattle UX Event

Last month, ZAAZ hosted an event at our Seattle office for the local user experience community with a group of four speakers. Lee Lefever of CommonCraft spoke on online community, Paul Ingram of Ingramlabs spoke on "inventrepreneurship," Jason Carmel of ZAAZ and Wishradar spoke on optimization, and Emma Rose of the University of Washington spoke on design ethnography. You can read my wrap-up here.

The event was a ton of fun. Each speaker gave a 15-minute talk, and we ended with a panel discussion and audience Q & A. The level of participation was really exciting. We had great audience questions, and the feeling was low-key and casual. The format is meant to encourage socializing (as is the beer).

We'd like make the event a regular series, and to do that we need you. If you've got a topic you'd like to talk on, drop me a note (ryant at zaaz dot com) and let's discuss it. This is a great chance to polish up the public speaking skills in a low-pressure, fun environment.

I'll figure out the schedule once we have speakers lined up and can juggle everyone's calendar. We're thinking sometime between now and the holidays.

Interested? Get in touch!

A New Blog on Accessibility from a Wisened Expert

Wendy Chisholm is an accessibility expert based in Seattle whom I've known for about a year. She co-edited the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, among other projects.

At long last, she's launched her blog, and I think it will be become a great resource for everyone interested in accessibility, human factors, web standards, and standards-based web services. And everyone who works in the interactive space should be interested in that stuff.

Here's a bit about Wendy's history prior to her work with the W3C:

[Wendy] got her start in accessibility during her undergraduate work in Computer Science and Psychology at Elmhurst College. As a statistics tutor for a student who was blind, she used a variety of media to create tactile teaching tools: legos, pins and paper, sand, and other materials. She also worked at an after school respite program for people with autism and coached them to 3 silver medals in their regional Special Olympics.

You can read her full bio on the W3C site.

Wendy is on a mission. Grab her RSS feed and pay attention. Not only is she a true expert in her area, but she's also a great writer. Enjoy:

http://wendychisholm.blogspot.com/

A New Twist on Social Media from Microsoft: Art of Office

UPDATE at bottom.

Yesterday's launch of Art of Office from Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (the group that creates software for Macs) was a great milestone for me. We started working on the project back in December of 2006, so naturally I've been chomping at the bit to see what happens when we launch.

The site attempts several very interesting things at once:

• It's meant to stretch the perception that Office is purely a productivity tool and extend users' sense of what can be done in Office beyond mundane "work" chores, a nice gesture toward the Office for Mac's creativity-inclined target audience and an interesting extension of Office's brand position.
• It creates a valuable resource for Office for Mac users: a document library they can pull from and use, remix, etc. (Everything's licensed for attributed reuse under a Creative Commons license.)
• It builds community around a shared value (creativity) while adding real, tangible, practical value (reusable documents).

We tested the early concepts for this site in the usability lab at ZAAZ, and we got some great initial reactions just to the home page. Lots of participants raised eyebrows in skepticism at the idea of "art" presented in connection with Microsoft Office. We worked hard to present some awesome work in a compelling framework, and ultimately found people very willing to suspend their initial disbelief. Check out the hot Flash work in the upper portion of the main landing pages.

Most people ended up feeling like the art / Office concept is pretty cool. And participants quickly realized they could contribute (we placed the proverbial BIG, YELLOW UPLOAD BUTTON right on the home page). What really excited test participants, though, was the realization that they could download and reuse the documents on the site. This is the real power of the site, the value offering Zeus Jones calls "marketing as a service."

Another piece of this that I think is interesting is that Art of Office enters the document-focused social space with something a little bit different than most of what exists already. For example, check out the following illustration from Rashmi Sinha, one of the minds behind the brilliant Slideshare:

What excites me here is that I think Art of Office introduces several new axes to this landscape: one is "content in document" to "document as content," another is "collaborative" to "single author," and yet another is "view documents" to "share documents." Art of Office manages to live in a number of different places along all these continuums--where individual participants can do the activity that suits them at different times.

Microsoft Watch had nice things to say. I'd love to hear what you think as well, and I can't wait to get a sense of the reaction that matters most--the reaction of participants.

UPDATE: Art of Office hit the front page of del.icio.us today, and is being noticed widely across the Web. And as I predicted earlier, the haters are out in force in comment threads. When the generalized anti-Microsoft fury subsides, what will happen?

UX Event Follow-Up

The talks last night were so much better than I'd expected. And I can say now, I expected them to be really good. Lots of great conversation afterward, too. I was really inspired by the quality of the people in the room.

I loved Lee's comments about the design of dance clubs with movable walls. Online communities need to scale similarly, to create an initial feeling of coziness so nobody has to be "the guy dancing all alone out in the middle of the floor," and eventually to scale up as the party gets bigger, without ever feeling either crowded or empty. Lots of ways to translate this concept into virtual space. And Lee scared the dickens out of at least one new community moderator with his stories of tp shortages and loose parrots.

Emma was the only one of the speakers I didn't know beforehand. She came very highly recommended by a respected colleague of mine, so I knew she'd be interesting--but I was delighted with the unique perspective she brought, having one foot in academia and the other in consulting. Challenged by a participant with a strong research background about the degree of representation in her sample, she responded with a great statement that the purpose of design ethnography is to produce insights that lead to design innovation, rather than to produce defensible, generalized conclusions about whole population segments. This is a great lesson for everyone involved in user research, and it's a great way of expressing the difference between user centered design research and market research (a question I have to field all the time, until now with less aplomb than Emma).

Jason Carmel shared a brilliant introduction to web site optimization, and contextualized it with UCD perfectly. And holy kittens, the guy is seriously hilarious. Hilarious, that is to say, while delivering serious information.

Paul Ingram's "Invetrepreneurship" talk challenged us to step up to the plate with our ideas. Paul is himself a human Swiss Army knife, and I think the real, implicit challenge in his approach is to blur the lines between disciplines, especially between design and development.

Some great conversation followed in the panel q & a. In particular folks wondered whether social networks would adapt over time as their constituents aged or whether age segments would migrate from one demographic-focused social network to another. Obviously, today's 80 year old is different from the 80 year old of 20 years from now--how will social networks evolve as today's heavy users age and new generations emerge?

We'll certainly be hosting additional events in the future--probably quarterly. If you're interested in presenting, send me your topoic ideas and we'll keep the ball rolling.

Thanks again to everyone who attended and participated, and thanks especially to our speakers.

Seattle User Experience Event: "Tinker, Tailor, Maker, Sailor: New Perspectives on UX and the Web"

 

We're hosting an event in a couple weeks bringing together some of Seattle's many interesting Web thinkers for a series of short talks followed by a panel discussion.

Lee Lefever of Commoncraft, the Troubadour of Web 2.0, will reprise his well-received Refresh Seattle talk, "Your Online Community Is a Party Waiting to Happen," in which all the ingredients, including some you might not have thought about, come together.

Paul Ingram of Ingramlabs, creator of To-Don't and other unannounced web applications (don't even ask, I'm under Friend-D-A), will hold forth on "Inventrepreneurship," his concept on how to make ideas real, and how to make real ideas into working businesses.

Emma Rose of the University of Washington will share some of her experience simultaneously researching two important Web frontiers--in-context use of mobile phones in developing countries--in "Design Ethnography: The Art of 'Deep Hanging Out'."

Finally, the Johnny Carson of web optimization--ZAAZ's own Jason Carmel, will explain the "Effective Use of Kittens: Site Optimization and User Experience." Jason's side project, Wish Radar, is a shining example of the usability benefits of ongoing site optimization.

The event is free and open to all UXer's, designers, user researchers, HCI geeks, usability fans, and cat-lovers. Dogmatists, prepare for an allergic reaction!

The vitals:

• August 14th, 5:30-8:30pm.
• ZAAZ Headquarters, 414 Olive Way, Seattle 98101, 5th Floor
• The event is free, but space is limited! Please RSVP to me, so we can get a sense of how many to expect and plan properly.

UX and User Research / Usability Job Openings at ZAAZ

I posted the job description for our User Experience Architect opening last month. We're still looking for the right person, and we now also have an opening for a junior person in that role.

Additionally, we're looking for a User Experience Researcher. Find out more, including how to apply, at zaaz.com.

 

User Experience Researcher

We are currently seeking a User Experience Researcher to uncover and communicate user interface issues and end-user preferences by applying a wide range of user-centered design methodologies. The ideal candidate will have previous consulting experience with a track record of delivering compelling research findings and recommendations on-time and on-budget.

Responsibilities

• Meet with clients and potential clients to propose usability studies, surveys, field research and other user research methods.
• Lead usability studies, including their design, planning execution.
• Analyze usability findings which include the creation of video highlights.
• Prepare and present usability reports to clients. Deliver findings that ensure the usability and effectiveness of interfaces for their intended users.
• Lead survey projects, including designing the appropriate survey, analyzing the results and presenting findings.
• Advocate for users while understanding the business goals of clients.
• Deliver research on time and within budget constraints.

Qualifications

• Formal education in usability engineering or equivalent hands-on experience to demonstrate an understanding of usability theory, methods, and practice.
• Several years of experience designing and conducting usability studies, preferably as a consultant.
• Several years experience designing surveys and analyzing results, with a solid understanding of statistical methods.
• Experience in user interface design for websites, software, and/or web-based applications.
• A strong business sense and the ability to work on multiple projects at one time.
• Proven ability to design and communicate potential solutions to user interface problems.
• Working knowledge of video editing techniques.
• Excellent presentation, oral communication, and writing skills.