Trumblog

I found out last week that I have become something of a web design stick in the mud.  It was because of my friend Eddie Perez’’s review of JimCarrey.com.  Fittingly the design and user experience of the site is as unique as the actor and as Eddie puts it,

The site was clearly designed to give visitors a chance to unearth the content through exploration. Cinematic transitions between pages, coupled with great use of sound effects and eerie background music make it seem as if you’re not just discovering the content on the site, but also the mind of Jim Carrey as well.

That same day I met a woman who’s website home page was a mosaic of randomly generated set of YouTube videos that expand when rolled over.  For both sites I reacted violently against the design.  I didn’t want to work so hard to discover I wanted the content that I was looking for and I wanted to find it easily and accessibly. My God, I thought, I’ve become Jakob Nielsen!

What made me such a curmudgeon? Maybe it’s the hours that I’ve spent in usability testing.  Maybe it was the fights about the logic behind cues for wayfinding in website navigation, work that led me to consider writing a book about best practices?  Maybe it’s that I lived though the early years of web design where an image of an office served as the metaphor for the navigation of a corporate website?  Maybe I’m just old, but I like standard, left navigation, no bells and whistles web design.  I don’t want to explore, I don’t want unique experience.  I want to find things quickly and easily so that I can move on. Maybe it’s ADD?

Even the bottom navigation of Jim Carry’s site was not enough.  I needed the nav easily accessed, spelled out and easy to understand.  Maybe I have too many toolbars on my browser? I want what is the target of each link to be  obvious  and I want to get there fast.  I’ve become a stick in the mud when it comes to that stuff.  I am set in my ways and cringe at navigation that is spaced across the page beside little logos or pictures and clearly not governed by CSS.  I know what I like and what I don’t and I’m not going to change.

Now, you damn kids, get off my yard!

Update: Yesterday Conor Brady shot another spitball at my love of highly usable web design and navigation in his post Web Design Has Changed Since 2000, Why Haven’t Evaluation Standards? Argh, back in my day….

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And How To Find The Facebook Event Page

Last week on Lifehacker I stumbled upon a handy tip from Sean Bonner on  how to export your Facebook events into your Google calendar.

1. In Facebook, go to your EVENTS page.
2. At the top of that page click EXPORT EVENTS
3. You’ll get a pop up window with a URL, copy it.
4. In Google Cal, on the bottom left you’ll see ‘Other Calendars’ and below that a link to ADD. Click ADD
5. One of the new options you’ll be presented with is ADD BY URL, select that
6. Paste the URL from Facebook where it asks for it.
7. Fin

It’s really easy.  Unbelievably easy until you try and find the Facebook Events page.  It turns out that there are many Facebook Events pages and not all of them have an export link.  I assumed that the Events page in question is the one accessible from the Events tab on my Profile page,

but when you go to that page there is no export link to be found.

So then I tried the page for one of the events themselves.  Perhaps along with the event details there would be the “export events” link that I was searching for.  I knew that this made little sense, but since some elements of the Event page is personalized for me when I view it maybe the link would be there.  It turns out that I was half correct.  On the Event page there is an export link, but it is for exporting that individual event as an iCalendar file that you can then import into your calendar.  That was helpful, but I didn’t want to have to do this import export dance for every Facebook event.  I was looking for a promised solution that would import all of my Facebook events forever and that I would only have to do once.

Finally, a couple days after I had given up on finding the link, I figured that maybe the hack was outdated and the functionality was lost in an earlier Facebook layout update, I noticed the events box in my Home page right hand column. I clicked “See All” and lo and behold another Events page revealed itself to me. That’s right, a second Events page and on this one, in the upper right corner there was a link to “Export Events”.

I clicked it and it opened the pop up window that I was in search of.  I copied the link, pasted into Google Calendar and the hack worked perfectly.

UPDATE: This post was written before the latest Facebook layout was rolled out.  The new layout appears to have removed the export events link.  This issue has been reported to Facebook and as soon as I am aware of a fix I will update this post with that information.

I’m writing this for two reasons.  The first is so that if anyone else can’t find the right Events Page on Facebook to run this little hack hopefully this post will guide them there.  The other is to say “Hey Facebook, I know that you are rolling out some layout changes this week.  I’m not sure that changes to the Events pages are one of them or not, but Facebook you have a usability issue here.  If it’s resolved next week, thank you.  If it isn’t then heads up you have a usability issues with your Events page. First, you have two of them, which is not a good thing when it comes to website usability.  Second, they have different features on each page. And finally, a handy bit of functionality is missing from the Events page that you’d think would be the most personalized.   I’d be much obliged if you could clean this up.  Thanks.”

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It’s Saturday, where I usually post something a little lighter or off topic. Depending on how you feel about Jon Stewart this may or may not be light, but it is on topic.

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This week I came across a picture of the Niketown in Tokyo’s Harajuku district, designed by architect Masamichi Katayama and his team at Wonderwall and couldn’t help but notice it’s similarity to the new Cambridge public library designed by William Rawn Associates of Boston, with Ann Beha Architects, also of Boston that opened this fall.  You be the judge.

Nike Town in Tokyo's Harajuku district

Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Photo Credits: Nike Harajuku by naoyafujii.  Cambridge Public Library by Mazarine

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Years ago we lauded a departing director of the digital department with having implemented a wireless network thereby “faciliting web surfing during pointless meetings.” It was a joke, but of course it was true. Thanks to him that company and the companies that it subsequently morphed into had a culture of laptop open meetings.

In contrast, Jack Morton’s corporate culture is to have “topless” meetings, meaning no laptops unless requiredto support the meeting, run a PowerPoint, take notes on, etc. There is rampant BlackBerry and iPhone checking, we are human after all. When I started here it took some time for me to adjust to this difference. I brought my laptop to my first meeting or two and I was shocked that people actually locked their laptops to their desks (I’d never before been separated from my laptop at work long enough for it to be stolen).

I’m not sure which is a better system, or even if there is a better one. On the one hand I can’t multitask at a long meeting, but people also don’t have to repeat themselves because someone was covertly checking Facebook. I think that meetings are shorter without laptops, but the causality may be in the other direction. An existing culture of short meetings may have made laptops less of a temptation.

What made me think about this was a sister agency using one of our conference rooms for the last two days. The table was full of laptops, an incongruous site here at Jack Morton. Would it look normal at your office? What about your corporate culture drives topless meetings or makes them impossible? If you could change would you? Let me know in the comments.

Photo Credit: Speaker Selection Process – 1 by nep

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The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project came out with a report yesterday on Social Media and Young Adults and immediately I began to see articles and Tweets about how Teens don’t blog or use Twitter. As the father of a teen I can tell you that if there is one thing that is true of this age group it is that there is no one thing true about all of them (that goes for every other age group as well).  Also, as someone who has fought regularly about the online activity of Americans over 60, I can tell you that headlines from a quick reading of Pew data are often simplistic and give a false sense of understanding.  If you really dig into the Pew Research data and compare it against other studies about American blogging and twittering a different analysis can be found which is that there is a large, thriving teen blog and twitter community.

First, let’s look at the data from Pew. Their survey showed that 73% of 12-17 year olds are avid social networkers. It also showed that only 14% of teens blog (down from 28% two years ago) and just 8% of teens tweet. I don’t dispute any of that data and nor should you.  Social networks are clearly an enormous part of a teen’s online activity.  Teen blogging is down and they communicate via text much more than with Twitter. What I do have issue with is the analysis of what the Pew Research data means.

Now let’s put this in perspective.  How many adults blog?  Pew surveys since 2005 have consistently shown that “roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.”  In other words teens are more likely to blog than adults.  How about Twitter?  The data is a little different there.  Back in October Pew stated in their report Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009 that “19% of internet users now say they use Twitter.”  Thus teens are only 5% less likely to tweet than the population at large.

How about the raw numbers?  According to the U.S. Census Bureau data from 2008 there are approximately 32,331,433 Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 (US Census data is actually for people between 10 and 19, this data is based on averaging the population of each age and then determining the total between 12 and 18). Using Pew’s data that 93% of teens are online that gives us an online teen population of 30,068,233. Using Pew’s data on teen bloggers and twitterers then we can determine that there are approximately 4,209,553 teen bloggers and 2,405,459 twittering teens.  Those are numbers that are large enough not to be ignored.

So teens blog and tweet in similar percentages to the American online population in general and that adds up to some pretty significant numbers.  If you believe the buzz that teens don’t blog or tweet then you leave that space and that market of over 4 million teens to those of us who crunch a few numbers and figure out what is really going on with teens, blogging and Twitter.  You have been warned.

Photo by NJLA: New Jersey Library Association

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When Seesmic and Ping.fm merged last month they promised a new version of the application with Ping.fm features included.  Yesterday I checked in on how they were doing and lo and behold  a new version of Seesmic was released last month.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that unfortunately it does not include the cross network posting of Ping.fm.

The new release, version 1.2.19, does bring Seesmic closer to the amazing set of features in ÜberTwitter’s most recent release, but still falls short of the features and ease of use that make ÜberTwitter my favorite Twitter client for the BlackBerry.  None of Seesmic’s features are ground breaking so I won’t describe them.  The following chart will let you know all you need about why ÜberTwitter remains my choice.  The upgrade does give me hope that the version of Seesmic that does include Ping.fm’s cross posting functionality will be feature rich and a worthy competitor in this space.

Seesmic - ÜberTwitter Comparison

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This weekend I was in LA to see The Pee-Wee Herman Show. Yes, Pee-Wee is back along with Ms. Yvonne, Cowboy Curtis, Chairry, Conky, Pterri, and the rest of Puppet Land playing nightly at the Club Nokia.

Friday night Pee-Wee announced was the one year anniversary of his signing with his manager, Kelly Bush of Vie Entertainment. One year ago he had been dropped by his management company, had no work and was directionless. She helped Pee-Wee turn that completely around. Now his show is back, he was on the last week of Conan, he’s contemplating taking the show on the road or to Broadway, and he has his sights set on producing another movie or two.

Some people are struck by lighting and achieve success from nowhere. Others seem to have the same thing happen, but it’s the result of years of effort. Pee-Wee worked incredibly hard to get from that low in 2009 to be back in 2010. What a year of effort that must have been. How many of us can say that we work that hard, set some goals and tap into our relationships and fans to get it done? Like Pee-Wee or not he and his manager are an insipartion for the effort and drive to achieve results.

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As part of Jack Morton Boston’s 2010 Kickoff today I’m giving a presentation about Brand Community and specifically social media.  The presentation is primarily a collection of inspiring creative and strategy from 2009 delivered in my typical fast and furious style.  So if you were there and missed something or are just interested, here are some things that I referenced and examples that I presented this afternoon.  Enjoy!

Russell Davies – Post Digital
Meet The New Schtick

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San Francisco Zoo Critter Quest
OurSFZoo.org

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Nike Livestrong Chalk Bot
WearYellow.com

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350.org
Use Social Media Like An Activist

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Skittles.com

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Axion Band Banner Ads
BunkFace Through My Window Banner Concert 2

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Samsung i8910 HD Phone
YouTube HD Camera Trick Challenge

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T-Mobile
Dance at Liverpool Street Station

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I dabble with Lifestreaming, displaying activity from across multiple social media and networking site in one location, and have gone as far as to tweak a plugin to add a bunch of feeds and work just like I wanted, but it takes a lot of maintenance.  Currently my Lifestream page is down again and not displaying anything and I havn’t taken the effort to fix it. Now along comes the Lifestream Wordpress plugin which is an easy way to set up a lifestream, appears to be robust and has a nice set of support resources to help maintain it.

Once you have the plugin installed and activated a whole Lifestream section is added to the Wordpress right navigation bar.  On the Feeds screen you can enter all your social network activity RSS feeds.  There are 62 options available from Amazon to Yelp and with a few generic feed options for extending it further.  You can also add multiple feeds from each option which is nice if you have more than one Twitter account or something.  From each feeds set up screen there are options to adjust the feed label, icon, whether to group actions from each day and whether to show a full, partial or no excerpt.

The Settings screen lets you set a variety of universal properties such as date and time formatting, number of items in your lifestream, description length, icon styles, creation of a lifestream feed and a lifestream digest post option.

By and large I found this to be pretty easy to use and customize, though my Flickr, Amazon and Netflix feeds all had issues that I am still trying to work out completely. Luckily there are lots of resources for maintenance and support.  The Maintenance/ Debug screen is key for a quick default settings reset, cron timer reset and to check extension file locations.  You can then see all events downloaded by the plugin on the Events screen.  Finally there is an Errors screen, a change log and a link to support forums if that still doesn’t resolve your problems with the plugin.

I haven’t yet decided whether to replace my existing lifestream with this new one or not.  Check out my lifestream that I set up with the plugin or this other example and let me know what you think of the results.  Clearly it is easy to use, has great resources and is more stable, but I’m not crazy about the layout and until I can fully work out the issue with some of the feeds I won’t be fully satisfied.

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