Ask Users to Help Design Site?

From the mid-nineties, when many of us became active on the web and interested in its marketing uses, the question of successful website user experience has been front and center. It’s hard to do, but a lot of people—think Dr. Jakob Nielsen as well as others—preach website usability. Web marketers make extensive use of metrics to understand what content is most popular on their site.

Both are good things. Designing a site for usability should involve a substantial amount of user research prior to and during the construction of the site. That includes asking people what they expect the content to be on various proposed pages of the site. Note, however, that even the research suggests a pre-conceived idea of site structure. Metrics require a site that is in operation with content available. Baynote provides an interesting example of mining user data to better understand content needs, but it’s still after the fact.

What about asking users for suggestions in the early states—perhaps before you even develop the concept statements and concept pages for your site? When I found the DoubleClick ad in the eMarketer newsletter yesterday, I thought “what an interesting idea. Aren’t there other people doing similar things?”

Not as far as I can see. There was a lot of buzz about the “Chrysler Listens” program earlier in the year, and it’s still on the site. According to the Auburn Hills (Michigan) Globe and Mail they have recruited about 5,000 members to their advisory board and are instituting other “listening” programs. This program appears to be mostly focused on product satisfaction, for obvious reasons. VW has a program called “What the People Want” that focuses on popular culture. To me the whole thing seems a bit lame, but it’s drawing traffic, and I have to admit that I’m probably not in the target audience demographic.

So DoubleClick’s program seems pretty unique. The advertising campaign is based around “Three Questions”—answered by a DoubleClick staffer or an outside expert. The viewer can even volunteer to be the outside expert—interesting touch.
Notice the Help Shape our Site box on the main (landing?) page. When you click through, you get 3 serious questions about what you’d like to find in the new “Nerve Center.” I’m always looking for data about our industry, so I answered the questions and submitted my thoughts. They thanked me politely, but didn’t promise anything specific, which probably makes sense in this situation.

How will they analyze the suggestions they are getting? Some type of content analysis, I imagine. That could be a very interesting foundation for site design—content categories suggested by users.

This will be interesting to watch. It’s also interesting to speculate on the impact of Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick on this program. But the key point is that DoubleClick is asking users to help frame their new site, apparently well in advance of actual site development. A really provocative use of the interactivity of the Internet!

Ubiquity of Content--Users' Perspectives

Read Part 1 here.

This series started with a headline that predicted that users will watch 25% more video five years from now. The challenge for content producers is to make content of all kinds accessible “anywhere, any time, on any device” that users want. How much do marketers know about what they do want? Here are a few of the things we’ve learned recently.

A study by Deloitte reported in eMarketer (newsletter, June 5, 2008) focuses on entertainment and the differences between age cohorts. The fact that this is a trend lead by the young is not a surprise. Look at the Boomers column, though; does it surprise you that boomers participate in a lot of these activities—but mostly on the desktop, not on their cellphones. I’m reminded of the friend who ran around taking videos of a patriotic celebration over the weekend and the discussion of where to upload them that followed. The whole point was to share the celebration with distant friends.

Another study, this one by Ipsos and featured in Marketing Charts, found that the percentage of video watching on TV had gone down from 75% to 70% from 2007 to 2008. This chart gives a lot more detail on the devices used. When you look at it carefully, there’s something really interesting. As you would expect, TV watching is lowest in the younger age groups, but the trend is not linear. Look at the “portable DVD players.” It’s much higher among the very young (too young to pay for one themselves), lowest among the two middle age cohorts, and higher among the two oldest. Is this an affordability issue among the 18 – 34s, who are the lightest users? Or is it a preference? Marketers beware of extrapolating trends!

With that warning in mind, here are some related factoids from two recent Pew studies:

From a telephone survey in December 2007:

• 48% of internet users said they had ever visited a video-sharing site such as YouTube. A year ago, in December 2006, 33% of internet users said they had ever visited such sites. That represents growth of more than 45% year-to-year.
• 15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site "yesterday" -- the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site "yesterday." Thus, on an average day, the number of users of video sites nearly doubled from the end of 2006 to the end of 2007.

A later release from the same survey revealed that 62% of respondents had accessed the Internet or data from a mobile device:

• 58% of adult Americans have used a cell phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) to do at least one of ten mobile non-voice data activities, such as texting, emailing, taking a picture, looking for maps or directions, or recording video.
• 41% of adult Americans have logged onto the internet on the go, that is, away from home or work either with a wireless laptop connection or a handheld device.

According to John B. Horrigan, Associate Director of the Pew Internet Project and author of the report “People’s growing reliance on their cell phones, together with wireless internet access from laptops, suggests a shift in expectations about cyberspace. For many people, access to digital information and resources is an ‘always present’ utility for answering questions and documenting what is going on around them through photos or video recording.”

Marketers should remember that age matters when deciding how to provide content for mobile users, but it may not matter in easily predictable ways. It’s important to find out how your own target audience wants their content and on what device. You can assume they want it when they want it!

FriendFeed--Another Approach to Social Media

It seems like a new approach to social media pops up every day. And for a lot of people that’s one of the problems; they have a lot of “stuff” scattered all over the web—how can they bring it together in a central space. Apps like Google’s OpenSocial are a somewhat “more formal” approach—one requiring developers to build the apps.

FriendFeed is a different animal. It’s a user-controlled site that lets users see what their friends are sharing on a large number of social sites. This video from Vator TV spends about the first 6 minutes on FriendFeed, the next 6 or so on a video mash-up site called Gorilla Spot, and the last 3 or so on new approaches to ad networks.

As I understand FriendFeed, the user sets up an account and chooses the sites she wants to share. It appears that, if the user chooses a public account, she gets access to all the items her friends share on each of the networks and they get access to hers. If the account is private, each friend must be separately identified. According to the FAQs page, “For most sites, all you need to provide FriendFeed is your username, and the FriendFeed crawler will automatically find and broadcast all of your public activity on that site.” To me, that’s another big “Ouch,” but once again, I’m not part of the target demographic.


It works with iGoogle and Facebook pages. Here’s the set of sites FriendFeed now accesses; wonder how many of them you and I recognize. Here’s a list, in case you need it.

A final thought. One of my students recently found a “social network fatigue” poll on PopGadget, the technology site for women. It’s hardly a representative sample, but the two competing explanations for why so many users are spending less time on social networks are interesting. The first is that users are simply getting bored/losing interest and spending less time. The second is that it’s just taking too much time to keep it all updated—hence sites like FriendFeed. I’d add a third possibility; users have settled down to just a few key sites—maybe just one, maybe two or three for different purposes—in order to manage their time. Personally, from what I see, I’d vote for my third option. What do you think?
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