Nobody drops the ball on purpose ? usability on enterprise social networks

Recently I?ve started being far more up-front with colleagues about progress on tasks. It?s not that I ever set out to communicate badly, or ? gasp! ? let tasks slip by, it just happens sometimes. New tasks and conversations come into my head and some of the older ones fall out of mind.

So what?s changed?

At my company we use an internal web-based Collaborative Platform to manage our day-to-day consulting business. One of the features is ?meetings and actions?. All internal meetings have action lists which are captured on the platform alongside owners, due dates and escalation routes. It?s not ground breaking, there are many such standalone online web services but the integration with the rest of our platform means it links into people, projects, etc. very easily.

We recently rolled out a new iteration with an enterprise social layer and a vastly improved UI. The design intention was to grease the wheels of collaboration across the organisation. This meant it was natural to place rich user profiles, networks, discussion threads and groups prominently on the landing page. It doesn?t leave much room for anything else.

How should the screen real estate be used?

Deciding what to build on prime real estate is an age old problem. It?s no different for a system designer sitting in front of the blank sketch pad on day one of the project. In every design, there are a number of competing priorities but the decision making process can be framed with two considerations in mind:

  • What features are the users telling us they access most regularly?
  • What features do the system owners want users to access most regularly?

Ideally, there is direct overlap between the two but that is not always the case. Amazon wants us to buy, buy, buy whereas we might just want to use the site for ?search inside this book?. There?s no doubt that Amazon believes the feature will sell more books but there?s nothing stopping us from using the feature to read a few pages and move on elsewhere.

Getting to the heart of the matter

Bearing in mind the considerations noted, the design team did a round of transactional analysis to determine what functions users are most likely to require ready access to. They polled users, looked at transaction logs and observed people using the then current design. They blended this analysis with the design intentions of the overall system (?better working together?).

Informed by this insight, user journeys were revisited and to-do lists have moved from being a poorly sized pane on a crowded landing page to being a third of the landing page, prominently in front of users every time they open the platform.

I now see my tasks every time I look at the platform. And because it is our centralised management platform for lots of things, I look at it a lot. Dozens of times every day. So I am subconsciously reminded of open tasks dozens of times every day. I am more likely to click into the tasks and make quick updates as I progress work on them. This means my colleagues are better informed as things progress, are more likely to be able to align their work to my work and collectively we are in a position to get more done in less time. That?s got to be good.

I was reflecting on this

I am a regular user of lots of web services as well as the platform itself. There can be no claim it was unfamiliarity with the features that meant I wasn?t keeping tasks up-to-date. I work as hard as I used to, so it?s unlikely to be laziness. I am a vocal advocate of using collaboration tools, so it?s unlikely to be attitudinal.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I was thinking too much about it. There?s no deep and dark secret which required uncovering ? I was just being blind to basic human nature: the easier designers make something, the more likely it is to be used.

If there are transactions that are important to day-to-day business, or to drive engagement in the enterprise social context, they should be moved above the fold on page number 1.

Amazon?s one-click ordering. Facebook, Twitter & Yammer?s ?share box? at the top of the page. It?s all the same principle. These are sophisticated web services where designers have identified the single-most important transaction and made that transaction the one most likely to be regularly accessed by users.

I?d like to believe that I knew this but I fear I had boxed the knowledge in the category of ?consumer software?. I had never applied it to enterprise software. Going forward I think I?ll give more consideration to the ?raison d?etre transaction? of any system and ensuring that access to the transaction is central to the usability of the system.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/05/30/nobody-drops-the-ball-on-purpose-usability-on-enterprise-social-networks/

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Blog - Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends To 150

Back in early 90s, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying the social groups of various kinds of primates. Before long, he noticed something odd.

Primates tend to maintain social contact with a limited number of individuals within their group. But here's the thing: primates with bigger brains tended to have a bigger circle of friends. Dunbar reasoned that this was because the number of individuals a primate could track was limited by brain volume.

Then he did something interesting. He plotted brain size against number of contacts and extrapolated to see how many friends a human ought to be able to handle. The number turned out to be about 150.

Since then, various studies have actually measured the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with. These all show that Dunbar was just about spot on (although there is a fair spread in the results).

What's more, this number appears to have been constant throughout human history--from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books.

But in the last decade or so, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect. Twitter, for example, vastly increases the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others. It's not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others.

So it's easy to imagine that social networking technology finally allows humans to surpass the Dunbar number.

Not so say Bruno Goncalves and buddies at Indiana University. They studied the network of links created by 3 million Twitter users over 4 years. These tweeters sent each a whopping 380 million tweets.

But how to define friendship on Twitter. Goncalves and co say it's not enough simply to follow or be followed by somebody for there to be a strong link.

Instead, there has to be a conversation, an exchange of tweets. And these conversation have to be regular to be a sign of a significant social bond, so occasional contacts don't count.

Goncalves and pals used these rules to reconstruct the social network of all 3 million tweeters and studied how these networks evolve.

It turns out that when people start tweeting, their number of friends increases until they become overwhelmed. Beyond that saturation point, the conversations with less important contacts start to become less frequent and the tweeters begin to concentrate on the people they have the strongest links with.

So what is the saturation point? Or, in other words, how many people can tweeters maintain contact with before they get overwhelmed? The answer is between 100 and 200, just as Dunbar predicts.

"This fifinding suggests that even though modern social networks help us to log all the people with whom we meet and interact, they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations," say Goncalves and co.

The bottom line is this: social networking allows us to vastly increase the number of individual we can connect with. But it does nothing to change our capability to socialise. However hard we try, we cannot maintain close links with more than about 150 buddies.

And if Dunbar is correct, that's the way it'll stay until somebody finds a way to increase human brain size.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170: Validation of Dunbar's Number In Twitter Conversations


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The 3D podcast with Nvidia

The 3D podcast with Nvidia

Posted on 29th May 2011 at 10:48 by Podcast with 3 comments

As the final part of our 3D week, Clive, Joe and James sit down to discuss 3D with Nvidia's PR manager for Northern Europe, Ben Berraondo.

The team pose Ben a range of questions about everything from why people should be using 3D to whether or not it?s just a gimmick and what we can expect to see from 3D in the future. We also discuss what?s holding 3D back from catching on in the mainstream.

Ben also takes the time to actually explain how game developers go about adding 3D to their games and what Nvidia does to help them and make sure their implementation is tip top. It was also interesting to hear about how 3D technology isn?t just about gaming, but can also be used to help people who have problems with their vision.

The debate about how long we'll have to wait for glasses-free 3D also raises its head, with Ben predicting that it?ll be a good five or seven years before you?ll be able to ditch your special glasses.

As ever, the bit-tech podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Samsung Galaxy II passes one million units sold in Korea

Samsung?s Galaxy S II Android smartphone has topped one million sales in Korea in its first month on sale, reaching the milestone in less than half the time its predecessor reached the same mark, Samsung has said.

The Galaxy S II launched Samsung?s home country in April, achieving 100,000 sales in just three days, only to double it in eight. Electronista reports that the handsets surpassed half a million units shipped in two weeks, before topping the one million mark within a month. The original model took 70 days to reach the same figure.

Apple?s iPhone 4 achieved 300,000 preorders in the country but the success of the handsets launch was restricted by the number of operators on which it launched. Samsung, being a Korean company, was not impacted by such matters; in fact the company reportedly punished Korean operator KT for launching the iPhone by holiding back on marketing support for its Omnia line.

Sales of the Galaxy S II are set to pick up as the company launches different variants of the device to European and North American markets.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/05/30/samsung-galaxy-ii-passes-one-million-units-sold-in-korea/

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Samsung Galaxy II passes one million units sold in Korea

Samsung?s Galaxy S II Android smartphone has topped one million sales in Korea in its first month on sale, reaching the milestone in less than half the time its predecessor reached the same mark, Samsung has said.

The Galaxy S II launched Samsung?s home country in April, achieving 100,000 sales in just three days, only to double it in eight. Electronista reports that the handsets surpassed half a million units shipped in two weeks, before topping the one million mark within a month. The original model took 70 days to reach the same figure.

Apple?s iPhone 4 achieved 300,000 preorders in the country but the success of the handsets launch was restricted by the number of operators on which it launched. Samsung, being a Korean company, was not impacted by such matters; in fact the company reportedly punished Korean operator KT for launching the iPhone by holiding back on marketing support for its Omnia line.

Sales of the Galaxy S II are set to pick up as the company launches different variants of the device to European and North American markets.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/05/30/samsung-galaxy-ii-passes-one-million-units-sold-in-korea/

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The Chinese are spending 43% less time watching TV and 45% more time surfing the net

According to a study, the Chinese are shifting to a new way of consuming media, spending less time on the television and more on the Internet.

CTR China?s Media Audience Research & Report reveals that the television is still the top choice for media consumption with 72.8%, while computer and Internet is trailing close with 62.8%. What?s interesting is the huge shift that happened between 2009 and 2010, where time spent watching TV has decreased by 42.5% while the time spent using the Internet has increased by 44.8%.

The research also shows that all respondents use at least two different channels to access information, with the combination of TV and Internet as the most common.

The inevitable trend for media would be a convergence between the different channels to better adapt to the development of a multi-level, multi-dimensional socio-cultural consumer space. Although TV advertising is still predominant in China, analysts predict that money spent on online marketing can soon catch up and surpass the budget for TV marketing.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/05/30/the-chinese-are-spending-43-less-time-watching-tv-and-45-more-time-surfing-the-net/

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A Blood Test for Depression

Doctors may soon have a more objective way to diagnose and treat depression: a blood test that provides a score between one and nine, with higher scores correlating with an increased probability of a patient having major depressive disorder.

Developed by Ridge Diagnostics, based in San Diego, the test measures changes in 10 biomarkers in the blood and feeds the results into an algorithm that assesses four different body systems to compute the final score.

While advanced blood tests and imaging scans can reveal many diseases at their earliest stages, diagnosing neuropsychiatric disorders typically requires an expert to assess how many subjective symptoms a patient exhibits. As a result, many patients are misdiagnosed or never diagnosed. In 2005, Harvard researchers published a study that indicated that more than 20 million people in the United States suffer from mood disorders, but only about 50 percent have been diagnosed and are being treated.

Doctors have been searching for an objective, biological test for depression "ever since the beginning of clinical psychiatry, 50 or 60 years ago," says George Papakostas, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of Treatment-Resistant Depression Studies at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Scientists have tried various approaches, including genetic tests, tests that measure hormone stress responses, or brain imaging. They've measured possible imbalances in neurotransmitters such as serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, and even measured vocal cues. "There are some signals," Papakostas says."The problem thus far is that if you looked at a single element, a single marker or disease area, the signal was weak."

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The Witcher 2 patch 1.1 removes DRM, boosts framerate

CD Projekt has released the first patch for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings today, delivering new content and fixing game-breaking performance issues. According to various user reports, the DRM mechanism that ships with retail versions of the game drastically reduces frame rates and loading times. One user quoted by TorrentFreak claims the SecuROM-riddled copy of Witcher 2 takes 32 seconds longer to launch, 8 seconds longer to save, and runs nearly twice as slow.

That only occurs in physical copies of the game sold through stores such as Amazon. Digital copies sold through Steam version rely on Steamworks while GOG's version is completely DRM-free -- and such is the case for retail copies with today's update. By removing the copy protection, patch 1.1 reportedly improves the game's framerate by up to 30%. It also contains the first free DLC called "Troll Trouble," adds an inverted mouse option and more. The full release notes are below.

CD Projekt's Adam Badowski said DRM schemes mostly hurt paying customers. "Our approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version. This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services," he said. The developer was primarily concerned about preventing The Witcher 2 from being pirated before its release, so the DRM has already served its purpose.

Although the company may have a relaxed DRM policy, it doesn't plan to let pirates off scot-free. CD Projekt declared war against illegal file-sharers last November, collaborating with legal and tech firms to employ the "pay or else" tactics popularized by the US Copyright Group and small-time filmmakers. People caught downloading The Witcher 2 illegally might receive a letter demanding a settlement fee or run the risk of being sued, according to CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43989-the-witcher-2-patch-11-removes-drm-boosts-framerate.html

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The 3D podcast with Nvidia

The 3D podcast with Nvidia

Posted on 29th May 2011 at 10:48 by Podcast with 3 comments

As the final part of our 3D week, Clive, Joe and James sit down to discuss 3D with Nvidia's PR manager for Northern Europe, Ben Berraondo.

The team pose Ben a range of questions about everything from why people should be using 3D to whether or not it?s just a gimmick and what we can expect to see from 3D in the future. We also discuss what?s holding 3D back from catching on in the mainstream.

Ben also takes the time to actually explain how game developers go about adding 3D to their games and what Nvidia does to help them and make sure their implementation is tip top. It was also interesting to hear about how 3D technology isn?t just about gaming, but can also be used to help people who have problems with their vision.

The debate about how long we'll have to wait for glasses-free 3D also raises its head, with Ben predicting that it?ll be a good five or seven years before you?ll be able to ditch your special glasses.

As ever, the bit-tech podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/d_jPttQ3dZ0/

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Weekend tech reading: RadioShack calls for DIY community's input

Speak your mind and help RadioShack suck less We can all agree that RadioShack isn?t exactly the DIY mecca it once was. What used to be a haven for amateur radio operators, tinkerers, and builders alike has devolved into a stripmall mainstay full of cell phones and overpriced junk. RadioShack knows that they have fallen out of your good graces, and since you are the demographic that put them on the map, they are appealing to the DIY community for input. Hack a Day

Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone A rough estimate of the number of HTC Android devices shipped is 30 million. If HTC paid $5 per unit to Microsoft, that adds up to $150 million Android revenues for Microsoft. Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million Windows Phone licenses (though not devices.) Estimating that the license fee is $15/WP phone, that makes Windows Phone revenues to date $30 million. Asymco

Computer de-evolution: Features that lost the evolutionary war Today's computers offer processing power, speed, storage, Internet connectivity, display size and quality, and other capabilities that few even dreamed of ten or more years ago, certainly not at prices affordable for any developer or even consumer. But there are some things they don't do that the old, slow, often command-line-intead-of-GUI-oriented applications did. ITworld

Make your mark by stopping hackers In reality, hacking is easy once you know what you're doing. Defending is hard. If you want to truly impress the world, develop systems and applications that will be used by a lot of people while being resistant to easy hacking. Anyone can knock down a garage. But build one that can't be taken down by a blockhead swinging a heavy sledgehammer, and you've done something. PCWorld

CEO Ballmer has support of Bill Gates, Microsoft board Microsoft?s Steve Ballmer appears to have the support of the company?s board of directors, despite the call from one major investor that the CEO should be fired. Greenlight Capital Inc. President David Einhorn causes a major stir by calling for Ballmer?s replacement, saying he is dragging down the company?s performance. TechFlash

Sony won't make massive investment in PS4 Sony's PS3 was pretty slow out of the gate with its $599 price tag, but Sony had little choice in terms of pricing due to the heavy costs surrounding Blu-ray and the Cell processor. The R&D and manufacturing took its toll on the company's bottom line and only now is the PlayStation division finally reaping some profits. IndustryGamers

Inner Moon as wet as Earth Contrary to popular belief, the early moon could have been as wet as Earth's mantle, new analysis from an Apollo lunar sample shows. The discovery stems from sophisticated analysis of tiny bits of ancient magma sealed inside solid crystals. The so-called "melt inclusions" are no bigger than the width of a human hair. Discovery

Contrast ratio (or how every TV manufacturer lies to you) Contrast ratio is the most important aspect of a TV's performance. More than any other single metric, a set's contrast ratio will be the most noticeable difference between two TVs. That is, if you could juxtapose them. Which you can't. Or if you could compare their claimed specs. Which you can't. CNET

Depixelizing pixel art We describe a novel algorithm for extracting a resolution-independent vector representation from pixel art images, which enables magnifying the results by an arbitrary amount without image degradation. Imgur

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43991-weekend-tech-reading-radioshack-calls-for-diy-communitys-input.html

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