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The Digital Experience Group of the New York Public Libraries (NYPL) decided to try a bold experiment. Knowing that they wanted as much user feedback as possible and that they had willing participants—namely their web users, the Group created a trouble free survey tool to gather data. You may be saying, “Ohhhh, online surveys! What’s so bold about that?”. As usual, it’s the chosen implementation that helps to make the difference.

The Digital Experience Group created Infomaki, a system that provides a simple, one question survey asking a subject something as easy as “What would you click on to find events?”. After the subject answers that question, they are thanked, and simply asked if they would like to answer another question. Here’s what is so great about this approach: it’s very mindful of the subject’s time and very non-intrusive. The concept is that this will lead to more people willingly being repeat subjects. Also, more random questions will be answered. With a traditional survey, you may tend to get the same questions answered at the start of a survey, but have people drop out, thus not getting sufficient answers to the end questions.

There are a few bugs in the system, but it appears the team is actively working on fixing them. I gave it a try, and quickly got hooked. While obviously, my subjective opinion and observations do not constitute a usability test, I have observed most test subjects glad to answer a single question. But conversely, I have seen that grimace or shoulder slump when a subject can sense you are settling in for a multi-part questionnaire. My experience would point to Infomaki being a well received data collection methodology.

But don’t take my word for it, look at the results of the 48 hour pilot:

[a prior] survey received 7,341 individual answers to questions from 520 respondents, 60% of whom completed the whole survey. This totaled 7,341 individual answers over 14 days. Infomaki, on the other hand, garnered over 6,900 answers from 840 respondents in its initial 48-hour maiden voyage.

Seems like the concept works, but the real measure of success will be the continued interest of the subjects and the quality of data. Let’s hope we here more about how Infomaki works out.

Perhaps one of the most crucial parts of UI design is the feedback you provide to users. Like all the information you display, you need to prioritize and provide the proper context for your users. Or said another way: it’s important that you make sure what you think is important is also important to your users. Why the emphasis on important? Well, I found a great example in Web Position Pro (version 3) that helps to prove my point.

First off, Web Position is a fantastic software application that helps you to track your search engine ranking. This post, by no means, is meant to slam this product. However, I did find one Important Notification in the product challenging to the user.

Upon startup—and after a fresh, fully-licensed install I might add—I was greeted with the following error message.

Error message from Web Position Gold 3

What’s the issue? Well, first of all, the user is presented with a modal window and is being told that a service they never signed up for has expired 4.24 YEARS ago. More pressing, is the use of the word Important. To whom is this message important. Certainly not someone that has let their service expire over 4 years ago! Perhaps it is important to the sales department at WebTrends, but not to the user of the software. It would have been better to present the message in the proper context. One suggestion might be an on-screen prompt, not a modal window, and language that is more honest: “We can help you: sign-up for page critic today!”

Lesson to learn: Save UI conventions such as modal windows and strong language such as important for messages that are important to the user, not just you.

There is a great post on Web Design Tuts discussing How to Design The Perfect Form. The author does a great job of showing many different examples, but in particular, he breaks down form design as:

• Less is more
• Context & Assistance
• Distractions
• Modals

It’s a great read and well worth exploring.

The folks at A List Apart have provided an excellent “howto” guide for JavaScript debugging. Not only is this article provide some very practical real world experiences, but it talks about debugging javascript across 4 different browsers (IE8, FireFox, Safari, and Opera) instead of just focusing on FireFox. It’s a good start to debugging in general, and the only point I would add to the article is that you can use the debugger to learn about JavaScript by examining existing sites.

Sitting with my Sunday tea, I came across this:

Of there is the usual Adams’ dry humor. But it points out the elephant in the room that isn’t often spoken about. What happens if companies choose to start gaming the system when it comes to social networks?

Quick definition: gaming the system refers to someone who exploits weaknesses in a set of rules to further their own needs. An example would be someone who creates lots of fake Web sites to point back to their real Web site, just to increase their Google rank.

Back to the question. Are companies, and for that matter individuals, gaming the system? For instance, do companies have hired reviewers that create favorable review on Amazon? 

Early on, given the size of social networks, there was a lot of self-policing. We would talk about meritocracy and how you had to earn your right to have a voice—well, at least a voice that would reach the masses. But now social network sites are much larger and more mainstream. FaceBook alone had 222 million visitors in December. How can that large of a group police itself effectively? Who sets the rules?

There have been several notable cases of companies and individuals getting caught faking reviews, creating biased articles on Wikipedia, or voting up their articles on sites like Digg. Despite these challenges, it would seem that there are many factors that help to keep companies in check.  Many people take it as a challenge to try to expose someone gaming the system. Consumers can be skeptical by nature; this plays into it as well.

Perhaps the largest factor is trust. The strongest social networks are built on trust and if you want people to take your post, review, comment—whatever—seriously, you have to have built up social capital. Social network pioneers like Robert Scoble earn our trust even when they tell us they have been hired by a company as an evangelizer. As such it behooves companies not to lose that trust for quick gains.

In addition, the ability for consumers to join in on the conversation and have their voice be heard, not only keeps a company honest, but can also increases trust in the company. As their social capital builds, so does a new level of trust in the company. How can companies make sure they don’t appear to game the system?

Here are some tips:

1. Prepare a strategy for how your company should use social networks. 
2. Appoint a team or lead person to be responsible for you presence on the Web, not just your Web sites.
3. Provide guidelines for employees and make sure your employees know the rules. It may be that an employee that means well will falsely promote a product or service because they feel it will help the company. Let them know how this can actually damage the company. Let them know what they can blog, tweet, talk about and how to do it.
4. Join the conversation openly and honestly. If someone leaves a negative review or comment, don’t respond as a “fake individual”, but rather as the company. Be transparent.
5. Include social networks as part of your touch points in your brand management strategy

A good place to start would be to read Robert Scoble’s book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

What are your thoughts? Leave me a comment and let me know. I started a poll on LinkedIn that asks: Do you think corporations should join in social networks, if you have a second, I would appreciate your input. 

If you don’t know already, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy (more on that here, or here for the US site). If you are already into astronomy, this will be a great year to listen, learn, and share stories with other amateur astronomers. If you are new to astronomy, now is the time to try it out.

Whether you are a new to the hobby or even have a couple years under your belt, one of the hardest parts is learning to “walk your way around the sky”. Even if you are quite astute at picking out major stars, planets, constellations, and other objects, often times you would like a little more info or perhaps you run across something you can’t identify. My biggest problem is I haven’t logged enough time with my scope and I haven’t had the opportunity to be taught by someone experienced at working the night sky. For me, this means many trips between the backyard and my computer—which totally wrecks my night vision.

Finally, for me at least, the problem is solved! The folks at Vito Technology have created an excellent iPhone app called Star Walk that serves as a star guide—and it’s an offical product of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). This app finds your location (even on a 1st Gen iPhone) and shows you what is in your sky at that moment.

In addition, you can:

• Search for objects—including Messier objects and Meteor showers
• Move time forwards or backwards
• Get summary info of objects
• Pan, Zoom in/out
• Link to the Web for more information

Even cooler, it has a nite-mode which turns the whole screen red to help save your night vision. The interface in this app alone is worth the price ($4.99).

You can find this app via the US IYA2009 site.

I purchased MacKiev's “Dr. Seuss's ABC”, a Mac based educational game for kids. It's a great game to help teach your kids the basics of the alphabet. My three year old loves it and was able to figure it out quite quickly. It comes with the Dr. Seuss book and is sure to be a hit with your kids. Unless you are running you Mac on a drive formatted with case-sensitivity enabled…

If this is the case, the app will not run, but will keep giving you an error message that it can't find the Xtras folder. It turns out there is an easy fix, just execute the following procedure:

• ctrl-click on the Dr. Seuss application
• select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu
• in the finder window that pops up, go into the Contents folder
• next, go into the MacOS folder
• copy the folder called Xtras to your Desktop
• rename the folder to xtras (little x)
• copy the folder back into the MacOS folder
• close the finder window and run the app
• the app will now work

On a related note, the folks from MacKiev have wonderful tech support. I sent a note on Christmas day and received a same-day e-mail from a very nice person who provided me some basic troubleshooting thoughts. They did not give me the procedure above, but did suggest that the app needs to be on a case-insensitive volume. That tip lead me to experiment and to the procedure above.

I must say, I can't remember the last time something was so hyped and I wasn't woefully disappointed when I actually got my hands on it. I feel the iPhone lives up to the promises. The interface is a actually smoother than I ever imagined, the web browsing is better than any mobile device that I ever used, and setup couldn't have been easier.

The big question is could it replace a Blackberry? I never had one myself, but having tried some of my friend's Blackberrys, I can say it seems like a powerful replacement.

While I certainly can't wait for a new iPhone (is it June yet?), I am really excited about the new Airport Extreme. It features 802.11n, which will help with increase network capacity and range. But what I think is a great feature is the ability to plug in a USB hard drive and share it with the network.

This solves a big issue for me. I hate using a disk drive for backups, it creates clutter and it is also a pain to plug it in every time I want to backup. With the new Airport Extreme I can keep a large hard drive plugged in and back up one or more computers at anytime. For me this means more regular backup–plus I save a USB port.

Most people complain about the cost of the Apple base stations, but I find that the ease of maintenance, setup and the reliability make up for the price. Plus, you can usually find a refurbished on on Apple's site for $30 off.

I find that when I am traveling, one thing that I often need is to have my travel information (directions, reservations, schedule) printed out. This way I don't have to break out my laptop every time I need some information. The problem is I tend to print out lots of full 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheets that are both wasteful and cumbersome. I did start an Java ME app that allows me to sync this information to a Java enabled cell phone, but this is still time consuming having to copy/paste the information into a different format.

It would seem that PagePacker is just the application I was looking for. It allows you to easily drag and drop any PDF or image on to one of 8 “spaces”. These 8 spaces then print out into one foldable 8 1/2″ by 11″ page. There is even a catalog of 84 DIY (do-it-yourself) planner pages, such as to-do lists and calendars. And like any good Mac application it is easy to use and doesn't get in the way of getting the job done.

Right now it's free, but is set to expire in June. There is no mention if the June “upgrade” will be free as well—I guess we will have to wait and see.