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How to get value from using Twitter

18 January 2010

There's no doubt Twitter has reached the Peak of Inflated Expectations on Gartner's Hype Curve. Twitter was number four on the Google top ten of fastest rising search terms in 2009 and I lost count of the mentions I saw on old-media TV news shows.


Reproduced via Creative Commons licence from Wikipedia


I suspect it is reaching the Slope of Enlightenment for many, but for me it's well on the Plateau of Productivity. I believe I get value from using Twitter, because it helps me to connect and interact with people. I learn things from using it and have a bit of fun too.

So how can you get value from Twitter?

For a start, ignore the hype and do your own thing. Like most other internet tools, there's many ways to use Twitter, for good and evil, and just as many reasons. The only way to find value is to try it. It's free, so what have you got to lose except some time?

The standard Twitter interface provides a helpful question to get you started, with the "What's happening?" opening line (up until November 2009 it used to say 'What are you doing?').



Don't take the kick-start literally; most Tweeters seem to be ignoring it now, just making a statement or comment, sharing some interesting thing they've come across, or replying to someone else's tweets. Say what you like.

Getting started

You can look at someone's tweets (aka Twitter posts) without subscribing or "following" them, without them knowing in fact (don't worry you're not stalking them, just watching their Twitter account). Simply click on their linked Twitter name or their profile icon, and you'll see their tweets.



One of the factors about Twitter that can be annoying in the early stages is that people who tweet a lot can completely dominate your Twitter box. So initially only follow a few people you find value in, or you will be overwhelmed with tweets until you get the hang of it.

To expand your list of people you're following, look at the people you follow to see who they follow. You can do this by looking at the collection of icons on the right column of their Twitter page, as shown at the right. Hover over the image to get their name, and click to visit their Twitter page.

Do look at the profiles of individuals – it can help you weed out the spammers and noise makers. You'll notice under their profile that you can also see a list of people following them – this can be another way of expanding your list.

Yet another way is to search for people you know, or know of, by using the "Find People" option at the top right of the Twitter page. Cull your list from time-to-time, and don't be afraid to remove someone from your list if you don't find them interesting anymore: it's your list.

Over time I've found the most use in following friends and colleagues, and people who I find interesting, but I know people who just follow their competitors, or their favourite sports teams. Twitter can be used for many purposes. As a way of keeping in touch with mates it can be more useful than online chat, because you don't all have to be online at once. You can leave a comment and others can see it whenever they get the chance.

Following the pack

Despite the way many people behave, there's no race to get as many followers as you can. In the early days the etiquette seemed to be if someone follows you, you follow them. I no longer do this, mostly due to the use of Twitter by spammers and business people promoting themselves (see my comments about corporate tweeters below).

Frankly, I don't give a damn if you've got 24 followers or 24,000. If what you have to say is not interesting, I won't follow you. This is no different than any other web site or blog – content is king. Again.

Be wary of corporate tweeters

This was one of the biggest trends in Twitter in 2009 – corporates, the media, and organisations catching up with the rest of the web, especially after being told that "social media" is the latest thing and they should be doing it. And they are, by the truck-load.

I tried following news sources like TV3, Stuff, and the like, but the noise factor just became very high: they post too much. Posting every news headline actually wasn't that interesting and for me it wasn't a good way to consume news (I prefer RSS feeds into Netvibes).

In general, I have found people using Twitter to promote their business mostly annoying and more than often the Twitter equivalent of spammers. This includes those self-employed people who seem to think Twitter exists simply for them to promote themselves.

And naturally there are actual spammers and dodgey purveyors wanting to follow me and for me to follow them. Yes folks, these people have invaded Twitter also. These days I block them when Twitter sends me the subscribe alert. Click on the offending party's twitter link when you're logged into Twitter and you can Block or Report them. Feels satisfying every time.

In the image below you see a typical Twitter spammer in my Followers list. This guy has two Twitter profiles to promote his accursed video products. The ironic thing is he maintains a blog telling you how to market yourself on the internet using video. I wouldn't take any of his advice, because your customers will end up hating you. Block these types and definitely don't encourage people like this by following them.



If you look around, you'll notice people who appear to have heaps of followers often mostly have spammers following them. Sure it makes your numbers look good, but spam followers aren't contributing anything useful to the Twitter-sphere or the web. Deny them the satisfaction.

Even people I respect have crossed this line. For instance, Guy Kawasaki, the author, innovator, and former Apple employee now runs a web company called AllTop. His tweets are almost exclusively about that web site, which I don't see the point of nor care about. Very annoying. Very spammy. I unsubscribed.

The trick to spotting a good business tweeting is to look for those providing some added value to their product or service, not just trying to sell you something by posting a continuous stream of links back to their own web site.

Someone I think tweets very well is the Christchurch City Art Gallery. They write in a fun way, give me heads-up notices about things happening at the gallery, and don't tweet so much that it becomes annoying.

Who cares?

I've heard people (interestingly, often people in IT) say "why would I want to follow Britney Spears" or "who cares what someone had for breakfast?" Indeed, who does care?

Looking at the figures around popular Twitter sites, quite a lot of people it would seem. The New Idea sells thousands of magazines but that doesn't mean I want to read it. Like so much broadcast media, there's a lot of pap out there, and you have to be the judge of what you think is good and worthwhile.

These negative remarks also show an ignorance of how Twitter is used and who is using it. If you're not interested in what celebrities have to say, don't follow them. But if your favourite movie or pop star tweets, then it might be fun to follow them and maybe even interact with them (note: speculation abounds on whether or not celebrities in Twitter are really them or their PR person).

One of the most popular tweeters in the world, Stephen Fry, has over a million followers and his account has been verified by Twitter as being genuine. People who follow Stephen, and who he follows back, can make direct comments just to him. There aren't many other ways in the world for you or I to do this, and it's this ability to connect and potentially interact with people that is the most fascinating and valuable thing for me about Twitter.

Lateral writing

Other Tweeters I've asked about the trivia aspect of Twittering report that really interesting conversations often spring out of someone commenting about something as innocuous as their lunch. Often it comes down to how clever with words a Tweeter is.

For many Twitter users, the challenge of saying something interesting in only 140 characters is part of the fun, being clever with the language and thinking about their audience. One Tweeter (who prefers to remain anonymous on this quote) told me:

Twitter for me is mostly about fun with words, about sculpting 140 characters into something meaningful, funny, and informative – regardless of subject matter.

It all comes down to thinking laterally, being relaxed with the tool, finding your own suitable level of formality and humour, and not taking it too seriously.

Twitter tools

Another good way to get value from Twitter is to try some of the many Twitter apps available. The Twitter web site is not the only way to participate. These applications help you manage multiple tweets (TweetDeck and HootSuite), put Twitter feeds on your Netvibes, WordPress, Facebook, or Google home page, or provide a custom Twitter app for your iPhone or mobile phone.

There are so many of these, and new ones appear every day, so it's beyond the scope of this article to recommend any more. Try a Google search or ask someone you're following in Twitter what they use. At the bottom of each tweet in Twitter, in small letters, you can also see what twitter app that person tweeted from, like in this example below:



Following the "from…" link is another way of finding cool Twitter apps.

Other opinions

Writer and blogger Adrienne Rewi has found value in using Twitter.
Coach and entrepreneur Cory Miller was surprised by how useful it is.
Michael Arlington thinks Twitter can now be thought of as a search engine.
John Robinson thinks Twitter is well worth it:

The timesuck of Web surfing has drastically decreased. The serendipity of discovering interesting sites and ideas and opinions has dramatically increased. And befriending people near and far has been an unexpected blessing. (John Robinson)

And just to give a contrary view, Pear Analytics analysed US Twitter traffic and concluded:

Twitter is pointless babble, spam and self promotion.

Which reminds us all that there is a whole world out there, outside of Twitter. According to Kathy from Creating Passionate Users (in December 2006!):

…email, IMs, social networking, and blogs are nothing compared to the thing that may finally cause time as we know it to cease. I'm talking, of course, about Twitter.

Twitter can be a massive time black hole, so don't forget to get some value from your offline life also.


Reproduced via Creative Commons licence from Creating Passionate Users

Labels: user experience

posted by Greg on Monday, January 18, 2010, ,

Introducing user-centred web design

07 July 2009

Needles and Plastic author Bruce Russell has written the first of an excellent four-part article about user-centred web design (often termed UCD) in Computerworld.

Bruce writes:

Web initiatives are now a commonplace strategy for business and government alike. Increasingly, websites form the centre of organisational communication and marketing strategies. As a result, most of these organisations have got over the thrill of simply having a presence in cyberspace. Now people are asking the hard questions, like:

“What’s our website really for?”

“How do we use the web to make our business grow?”

“Are our customers satisfied with the experience of using our site?”

If business owners aren't asking these questions, they should be. Not only is the web a very cost-effective mechanism for providing product and service information, especially in these ultra cost-conscious times, it is also a perfect way to deliver good customer service and after-sales support. In general, businesses in New Zealand are still seeing the web as some sort of multi-media version of TV advertising, something they know they must have, alongside the Yellow Pages listing and an 0800 number.

Too often the responsibility for the design and content of the company's web site is out-sourced to the whatever advertising or media company they deal with. Instead of becoming a key form of communication between customer and business, the result is many New Zealand commercial web sites are just online brochures, that deliver very little value for the business or their customers.

How do you fix this? Read Bruce's article for a good start.

Labels: user experience, web design

posted by Greg on Tuesday, July 07, 2009, ,

Trends in web design: footers

21 May 2009

I could write a post about trends in the design of footers in modern web design. In fact, I'd LIKE to write such an article. But I don't have the time and reckon the Smashing Editorial team have done a much better job than I could ever do.

So, I thoroughly recommend this article about the latest design of web site footers by Smashing Magazine. It is very, very good. Actually, just about everything those people do is good.

Labels: web design

posted by Greg on Thursday, May 21, 2009, ,

Web design trends in this century so far

15 May 2009

Is good web design ephemeral and led by fashion, or does what is considered good design evolve and change, mature even, over time? In an attempt to answer to this question, I'd like to contribute the results of a small potted survey I did on this recently, which asked "is web design really changing over time?" from a user-centered point-of-view.

Recently we moved our home office to a new, smaller space and I had to purge some of my books. In the process I re-discovered two old books showcasing commercial web design, and found myself examining the contents, thinking "keeper or sleeper?" Both books were from the beginning of the century, with a strong bias towards the sites of commercial companies, rather than the social-networking and Web 2.0 type of sites we have now. Both tended to rave about designs that at the time the books' authors obviously considered innovative and creative.

This is fair enough when celebrating something from a graphic design point-of-view, but web sites today are about more than the presentation, or rather they should be. As Gerry McGovern is prone to say, these days generally,

when people come to your website they are on a mission

and if you make it hard for people to use your site by using a purely visual approach to the design, they'll not come back.

Looking through the books, I was curious to know how many of the sites were still operating and what they looked like now. Nine years is a very long time on the web, so I was expecting to see some changes.

The two books were

• Web Design that Works, by Lisa Baggerman, published by Rockport in 2001, and
• Cyber Shops, by Claudia Gerdes and Jutta Nachtwey, published by Thames & Hudson in 2000.

I followed the URL for each web site featured in the books, noting the site's current status, and what, if anything, had happened to the design. It wasn't a very scientific survey (see notes about this below) but the results were interesting nevertheless.

Of the 72 sites featured in both books, 68% were still operating, with around a third no longer in existence. This is surprising. Considering the economic and social events of this century so far, I expected to find more dead sites than this. Maybe the good designs from the beginning of the century had stood the test of time? In fact, not. Further examination revealed a significant trend.



Of those still operating, the majority had new designs, and many of them had moved away from the design ideas so lauded and featured in the books. Several of the sites (7%) that previously used radical navigation and quirky presentation, had morphed into the now standard E-commerce site model, using the familiar product catalogue, product details, shopping cart structure.

It was disappointing to see some of the sites still using Flash only (10%), although this design-ethic is still very common today, sometimes appropriately, sometimes not. On the other hand, it was was good to see many (20%) were now using a web standards approach, with valid HTML/XHTML and CSS for layout and presentation.

A significant design trend

The overall design trend of the web sites in these books indicates a normalising of web design, using elements and layouts most likely considered "standard characteristics" for a web site now. These characteristics include:

• a clean, less cluttered look,
  
• a centered, fixed width layout,
  
• consistent layout and placement of site components like search and navigation,
  
• more accessible use of colour across the content body of the page (as opposed to that around the content, where visual design has become spectacular in some areas thanks to creative use of CSS),
  
• invariably white or pale backgrounds for the main content,
  
• more common use of standard or uniformly installed web fonts
• type size generally set larger and easier to read.

None of this is surprising considering some of the things discovered and written about by people like the Nielsen Group and others (see list below).

So can the design trends seen in the web sites featured in these books, be extrapolated to other web site types, like those found now in these "Web 2.0" times? I think so. Obviously the purpose of a commercial site can be quite different to that of a social networking site, but people do use both, so the design metaphors or elements that people recognise, and are familiar with using, are likely to be common for both types of site to succeed.

A problem with these graphic design books is that mostly the sites were being judged purely on their visual appeal not the usability or user-friendliness criteria considered good practice today. In doing so, these books illustrate nicely the warning that Jakob Nielsen and others give about departing from the norm in terms of web design – be very sure your audience can cope with this or you site will be doomed. On reflection, I think we've come a long way since the beginning of the century.

Greg ----------------------

Some worthwhile articles about good web design:

• Robin William's advice
• Advice from Smashing Magazine
• Excellent survey of modern good practice by Web Design from Scratch with fine examples.

Footnote: Why this survey might not be very scientific.

• I based it only on two random books, which may or may not have been good judges or relevant indicators of the web design industry – fair call, but the books were from reputable publishers, written by leading web design experts of the time, so unlikely.
  
• Maybe the books picked rubbish sites – not really, most were from highly successful retail brands and businesses, which would be expected to have commissioned leading designers of the time.
  
• There was a bias in the sites featured, in that most were commercial sites, not the more modern Web 2.0 sites we have now, where people expect to interact more – indeed, it's been my observation that the business world in general doesn't understand the web at all.
  
• My categories are completely arbitrary, and not based on any scoring system – actually the categories more or less created themselves based on what had happened to the sites.
• I didn't use any specific design criteria – true, but maybe I used experience and a trained eye.
  

Labels: web design

posted by Greg on Friday, May 15, 2009, ,

Optimise your web site for iPhones & touch-screen devices

20 February 2009

The second generation iPhones have been around for a while now and owners seem pretty happy with them. Other mobile devices and mobile browsers have appeared that use similar finger touch-screen interfaces, and people have had a chance to work with them and understand just what a change the touch interface makes to using a mobile device.

On top of this, the increase in people connecting to the internet and in particular the web, seems to have surprised many, especially in the web design industry. I've met web designers who laughed when I said we should think about optimising our sites for mobile users. "Hardly anyone looks at web pages on a phone!" has been the usual reply. Why do many web designers seem to just want to cater to the majority - "hey, most people have IE, so who cares about other browsers!" Why would you cut off potential visitors just because of the technology they use?

Anyway, it appears people do want to access web sites on their mobile device, and some predict this will be the most prevalent way people use the web in the future. Many popular sites are already providing mobile-optimised options for their users, including Google, Amazon, TradeMe (the NZ "E-bay" – actually it's a better user experience than E-bay), Air New Zealand (these guys are using the .mobi domain so that proves they acknowledge the need to provide for mobile users), Yellow Pages (NZ), Wikipedia, and one I wouldn't have predicted considering its very rich large-screen monitor-orientated interface, Facebook.

The Facebook iPhone-optimised screen is very interesting, as it shows just how pared down one has to be, or can be, to suit the mobile interface. Here's the way Facebook appears on the iPhone in desktop view (left) compared with the optimised verison on the right (image taken from the .net magazine article mentioned below.)



So what does this mean for those of us designing and running web sites?

If you have a website that is likely to be used by mobile users, then you should consider optimising your site for such devices. I've said this before on this blog, and maybe I stood alone. Not any more.

Craig Grannell has written an article for the excellent .net UK magazine about optimising a site for iPhones (Optimise your site for iPhones, Craig Grannell, .net, January 2009, pp. 72-74). In his article Craig explains that although one can use the Safari browser zoom-in interface that comes with the iPhone, and apparently some prefer it to using a laptop (are they crazy?!), he thinks developers and designers could do much more to make it a better experience to use the web this way.

By default, websites appear in pint-sized versions, with text generally being illegible and links being practically impossible to target. … all is not entirely rosey in the land of the iPhone, and developers could do more to help."

The article (unfortunately it appears to unavailable online as I write this) gives some excellent advice. First, Craig suggests web designers think carefully about whether the site is likely to be visited by a mobile user. The minutes of a local city council meeting are pretty unlikely to be used by mobile users, but the opening times of the council-owned swimming pools or the local museum may well be.

Second, if the site fits the criteria, than hone down the content, keep things tidy and simple, and present a streamlined, simplified version of site that focuses on the key features people want from it (hint: sorry, this isn't Google ads or a beautiful Photoshop-ed banner).

Then he provides two options. Create a mobile-optimised site, or create a mobile-specific site. Personally I prefer the former, as I strongly agree with this next statement he makes:

…working on an iPhone-optimised website is akin to dealing with print style sheets. As long as you're building sites using semantic markup and using CSS to style your layouts, you can [easily] create an alternate style sheet for the iPhone to present a streamlined, simplified version of your website."

Craig suggests browser-sniffing to detect the iPhone device. I'd rather use the technique of providing alternative media type style sheets in web pages – screen, print, aural, handheld, etc – and then letting the browser select which one to use, but this so clearly doesn't work in the web browsers provided with so many mobile phones (I'm talking to you Nokia). This is because the default browser on many mobile phones has been built by the phone's manufacturer and most just seem unaware of web standards. As more third-party web standards compliant browsers (Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc) are provided for mobile devices, this problem will hopefully go away, but in the meantime, I'd follow Craig's advice.

And here's how. According to Craig, the simplest way to implement this is by using Javascript to make sure an iPhone-specific style sheet is used instead. (I'm not sure where this leaves those of use who want to optimise for HTC Touch or the new Palm and Android devices, but I will try to find out for a future post. Is there a standard userAgent id for other devices or do we just use some default mobile one?)

Craig provides the code for this technique as follows:

if ((navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPhone') != -1) ||
(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPod') != -1))
{
var cssNode = document.createElement('link');
cssNode.setAttribute('rel','stylesheet');
cssNode.setAttribute('type','text/css');
cssNode.setAttribute('href','iphone.css');
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(cssNode);
}

I strongly recommend web designers look into this approach, or variations of it to suit the situation.

Two other tips from Craig's article are worth mirroring here.

Don't think that the superior resolution of an iPhone screen will make it easier for users to read your web site text. I was surprised to read that the higher pixel density of the iPhone screen (163ppi) compared with a typical PC monitor (in the range of 72-95ppi) means fonts that are quite readable on a larger LCD screen tend to look very small on an iPhone.

And don't use Mac-orientated design conventions, because it seems most iPhone users are not Mac users. Say what?! Love to know where he got this from.

Labels: mobile design, web design

posted by Greg on Friday, February 20, 2009, ,

There is life in information design - still

29 October 2008

Has been a while since either of us posted here. Apologies for that. Is certainly not because we haven't had anything to say! Far from it.

I'll hit you with the "we've been busy" cliché first – we've been busy. Bruce has found himself involved in a number of interesting projects, both work and play, and I've started a new job.

There goes the climate

We've both noticed an increased awareness of and demand for the skills of information design, and predict that if the overall business market in New Zealand does contract over the next twelve months, as seems likely, this will just increase competition for better ways to grab market share.

Although spending on things like web design and information management have often been the first to be cut when times got tough in the past, we have a suspicion that competition and the better economies of scale marketing through the web can present will provide good opportunities for those in the wider information design industry. Time will tell.

Labels: mobile design, web design

posted by Greg on Wednesday, October 29, 2008, ,

Technical Communication morphs and changes into Information Design

25 June 2008

Our colleague Alison Reynolds from the GDID programme has just published an article in the Southern Communicator (the journal of TCANZ) proposing the profession redefine itself as 'information design'. It's about time the industry faced this rather difficult decision. We suspect the debate won't be popular in some parts of the world, nor some parts of the industry, because it's about re-defining what the industry is and does.

Alison has given her permission for us to reproduce some key comments here. (The full article is only available to members on the TCANZ web site.) She starts by tracing the development of technical communication.

As new technology became more accessible to the public, the demand by consumers for products with supporting documentation grew rapidly. Technical writers became technical communicators as they found themselves responsible for more than effective writing. They needed to ensure that documentation was aimed at the users’ needs rather than just a ‘tack-on’ at the end of product development. Therefore, their roles changed to include competencies, such as audience analysis, document design and computing tools to produce a variety of information ‘packages’ to meet the users’ needs.

Practitioners now need a broad range of skills that are more focused on problem-solving approaches to communication needs that occur in commerce, health, education, as well as in the traditional areas of science, computing and electronics. I believe that it is these changes in the core competencies of technical communication that drive a need to redefine the profession as ‘information design’.

So what are these competencies? Our industry and academic advisors carefully monitor the competencies taught in our programme that includes the following courses:

• writing and editing (still a ‘must have’)
• current research and practice (international information trends, localization, interviewing skills, ethics, group dynamics, personal skills)
• information management (content management, single sourcing, task analysis, project management)
• information design (design strategies for online and paper information products)
• usability testing.

No doubt these competencies will continue to change as the profession meets more information challenges. The only way to keep up is to take up the challenge of learning new skills through further education."

It is clear from the feedback given by GDID students that there is a strong demand for people with these skills. There is almost a hundred percent employment rate of GDID graduates, although to be fair, many are already in employment while they are doing the course. Students report that the information design skills they gain from the course are valuable to them and their employers, and helped them do things at work they couldn't do before.

This tells us that re-defining technical communication in the broader terms of information design is more than likely going to make people more employable, and considering the economic times we live in, this has to be a good thing.

Greg and Bruce

Labels: information design

posted by Greg on Wednesday, June 25, 2008, ,

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• How to get value from using Twitter
• Introducing user-centred web design
• Trends in web design: footers
• Web design trends in this century so far
• Optimise your web site for iPhones & touch-screen ...
• There is life in information design - still
• Technical Communication morphs and changes into In...
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