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New Media Age Top 100 says we’re “Ones to watch…”
Despite the fact that Isaac has mysteriously become Isaac Pin in the online article, it was great to see that we’ve been named as “ones to watch” by New Media Age. We’ve been in business for just over one year so this is really exciting.
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Metrotwin.com err.. “takes off”
Super-exciting news this morning as we’ve finally take the stabilisers off Metrotwin, British Airways’ new social recommendation service that we’ve been working on since March. The site has been in private beta and today we pressed the button and brought the password/log-in screen down to make the site accessible to everyone.
Metrotwin has been a collaboration between Made by Many, BBH and Agency.com. We led the service and interaction design and worked with BBH to create the network of bloggers and online communities who provide the recommendations. The site is a social utility rather than a social networking site: it’s an online community that treats London and New York as a continuum and it’s aimed at anyone living in or travelling between the two cities who’s struggling to navigate the vast volume of web content about these cities. If you’ve ever tried to use the Web to plan a trip to either city you’ll understand – so many web pages, so little time. These must be two of the most written about, blogged about, photographed and videoed pairs of cities anywhere online.
That idea of pairing the two cities has been developed into something that we got really excited about: social twinning. When you listen to people explaining the other city to each other you hear it: “What’s the Harvey Nicks of New York?”, “Shoreditch is kinda like Williamsburg…”. There is a fuzzy, collective understanding about how each city maps on to the other. These are sibling cities – very similar and yet very different. Within this weird love:hate rivalry (always respectful, it has to be said) there is real social currency. The fact is that I have more in common with people in New York City than with the good folks of Dagenham (no offence).
The site you’ll see today at Metrotwin.com is just the beginning. It’s the core. We’re in a good place to push the site in new directions – more social features, like a ‘People’ page and the ability to follow other people; or more playful ways to bring the idea of twinning to the fore; or new ways to visualise the city and to take Metrotwin with you inside an iPhone or printed out on paper; or perhaps a souped-up ‘Neighbourhoods’ view of the site. There are already some very cool features, including ‘Metrotwin Recommends’ – a collaborative filtering tool that looks at what you like and recommends places you haven’t been to yet; and the ‘Metrotwin Index’ – which provides a people-powered view of the best of the long tail of both cities. Who knows? The plan is to watch real people play with it first – we’re going to see what sticks, look at what happens and make changes and new releases based on all of that.
Many, many thanks to all involved – especially everyone at Made by Many and BBH who have worked on it. We’ll be following this post up with some more about the technology used for Metrotwin and the way we’ve all worked together on the project. Tally ho!
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Amnesty’s ‘Protect The Human’ on BoingBoing – save Troy Davis
This lunchtime saw one of the first big pushes for Protect The Human in the wider web – our friends at Amnesty are raising awareness via BoingBoing of the plight of Troy Davis, condemned to death for a murder he maintains he did not commit.
It’s very exciting to see how the PTH platform gives Amnesty the tools it needs to quickly respond to issues as and when they arise – clemency was denied to Troy Davis a matter of days ago and with the potential to gather support from across the web using PTH to push out to Facebook, digg, delicious and others, Amnesty supporters could make the difference to obtain a total stay of execution.
Follow the conversation on Protect The Human, and take a five minute action to save a man’s life.
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“Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design” – Joshua Porter, Dconstruct 2008
My colleagues and I went to Dconstruct – a one-day conference about designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.
All of the talks were interesting, although I found some too techie for me as a designer. However, one talk by Joshua Porter was particularly interesting.
Joshua talked about biases that affect the way people think and make decisions. He also shared some insights into how to use cognitive bias to get people signing up and using software. Here are some notes.
Examples of cognitive biases:
Bandwagon effect – people tend to do things because other people do the same. This is related to group pressure – if we don’t know something we follow the others, we use shortcuts rather than do the logical thing, which would require gathering all needed information (we act like sheep).
Example:
• Freshbooks uses the bandwagon effect tactic to attract new users by emphasising number of new users, showing them on a worldwide map, and displaying reviews from “Happy Users”.
Representational bias – people tend to follow like-minded people
Example:
• Freshbooks uses a representative selection of happy users on their homepage with authentic photos, job titles, quotes, real names, etc.
• Yelp.com – for review of the day, they’ve chosen people that are very active on the site (lots of friends, lots of reviews). This is the desired behaviour that is valued at Yelp.
Loss aversion – people prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains.
Example:
• Best buy – you can shop there without creating an account, but at the end of the shopping process they say:” Create an account to save time the next time you shop”. Would be more effective if it was: “Create an account so you don’t lose the ability to track your package.”Ownership bias – people value things more when they feel sense of ownership. Some websites can get you engaged by creating something first before asking for any sign up – this creates an instant feeling of ownership.
Example
• Slide – instantly engage you into creating a slide show without signing up. They encourage you to sign up afterwards so you can edit this slideshow later.
• Geni – gets you started very quickly, they just ask you to fill in three bits of information and you can start building a family tree that you can share.
• Flickr – using “You”, “Your” – gives users a feeling that they own it
I agree with Joshua that it is very important for web designers to understand and translate social psychology into a positive experience for web users.
By understanding biases designers can use them to their advantage to attract and convince people to sign up and use the service.
Equally, if it’s not clear what the site is about and the proposition isn’t strong enough to attract users, then it won’t build an audience. And what’s the point of that?
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Rails Conf Europe 08
Stuart and I were presenting at Rails Conf Europe last week in Berlin on a Rails plugin called Juggernaut which I’ve been working on for a few years now.
Juggernaut lets you do ‘Server Push‘, i.e. you can push data to the client from the server.During the presentation we showed a live chat application, with a real-time presence list of connected users.
We also demoed a real time map application, where users could show where they had traveled from to visit the conference in Berlin.
You can find the demo code for both applications here and here respectively. You can also find a PDF of the presentation here.
One of the other presentations I really enjoyed was Security on Rails by Jonathan Weiss (presentation here). He approaches security from an attacker’s perspective, which was a really effective way of getting the presentation across.
All things considered, it was an interesting conference – now for the dConstruct writeup…
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News from the Rails Europe conference
Stuart and Alex are over in Berlin at the moment at the Rails Europe conference. They’re too busy learning about Design on Rails and other Rails-related issues to write, but here are a few snapshots of their past few days.
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Mydeco.com signs JV deal with German publisher
I read in yesterday’s Telegraph that mydeco.com have signed a joint venture deal with German magazine publisher, Burda, for the sum of £2m. Having worked on the community development for mydeco in its earliest stages, it’s great to see the site going from strength to strength.
Archive for September, 2008
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