Usabilitygene Blog

I love this quote. It shows the importance of Social Media today:

Traditional marketing and advertising is just not as effective as it used to be.  You have to stop and think if your marketing dollars are being spent wisely if TV ads are being skipped with DVR, radio ads can’t reach iPod users, un-wanted email gets marked as spam, direct mail campaigns end up in the trash, and online banner ads live in a crowded space, making them harder to be seen.
The consumer is online. The consumer is social. And the consumer does not want to be spammed.
Welcome to the REAL world of social media.

This quote was taken from this post: http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/02/02/what-your-agency-isn%E2%80%99t-telling-you-about-social-media-2/

Ok. I don’t believe I am alone. I found several usability issues that made Google+ confusing. After hours of searching and testing I believe I finally found the answers I needed. The problem here is that no “near follower” is going to use Google+ until these things are made clearer:

• What happens on the backend of a Circle communication? It is easy to create a circle, but what do other see when I add them?

Google did a good job of communicating the frontend of Google+ by helping everyone understand Circles. However, they are doing a horrible job communicating on the other end get when they are added to a Circle. Do they get a message by email? Text? What happens if they do not use Google+? I had to call-up a friend, “with the old social technology called a phone,” and went through the motions with her to understand what other see. Then these 3 concepts understanding came to me:

Circles are only for you to disseminate content. You control how much content hit your stream by adjusting your volume of each circle like this:

What the other person gets is information added to there stream. As you know, when you post something to a circle, it will only showup in the stream of those people that is within your circle. When you add a person to a circle, they have no idea what the name of the circle is. They could have just been added to a circle called “Crazy People” for all they know. All they will see is that a post has been made on their main stream. If the person you added to the circle does not have a Google+ account, they will be sent an email instead of it being posted to there Google+ account stream.

• Spark missing? Replaced with search….ok. How do you share a circle?

Yes. Google Sparks are gone. Google did it again. They are good at explaining something new, but horrible on explaining things that has been removed or changed. Sparks seems to be replaced with a search saving feature when you do a Google+ search. When you use the search box on the top of the page, you can choose to save it. This causes the search term to show-up in the same area where sparks were located. This transition to this method was horrible. You can STILL find many instructions online about using Sparks. I had to go through several comments to find out what happened to them. If you know where the Official notice was for this please add a comment of it’s location.

• Sharing a circle? I could?

One thing what I thought Sparks help with was to publicly to share Circle. If I wanted a Circle to know they are part of a group, I would create a Spark. Nope. This too has changed. You now share a Circle. I found this video to show how it is done here:

This is poor usability on how features are added and changed. It causes the “near followers” to die off, and the rest that world to hesitate to follow because of the confusion. People do want to use Google+. It is a great idea. Nevertheless, trust is being damaged by the confusion of changes. I shouldn’t have to dig around to find out this information. It is a step that people won’t tolerate with a Freemium app. This stuff only makes things unusable and frustrates the user at the most critical engagement time of an app. Well, I hope my research will reduce your frustration as it has for me.

I was wondering if I can add plug-ins to my free WordPress.com blog today. I wanted to be able to share contents with my Google+ streams. After doing my research, I found the answer at:

• http://en.support.wordpress.com/sharing/

Here is a video I found about how to do it:

This answered my questions:

1. Can you add plugins to the wordpress.com version? Or do you need to have a full install?
2. How do I post my blog to my Google+ stream?

Live content is the fastest way to build “street cred” for a small business.  Having customers interact with your content of your business by text(twitter), photos, or Facebook is a powerful usability factor(ufactor).  Usually, this was left to the big-boys, but today anyone can communicate live information.
For website, I believe this is what Drupal brings to the table.  Static content need be to limited on a site.  With Drupal you can create multi-faced user content that is separated by roles within your business.  You can have people access content by a “Intranet,”  while at the same time a User Interface(UI) can update content from your customers.  The key power behind doing this is that added energy is not left only to just a website developer.  Energy now comes from everyone who interacts with content.  Just like Facebook, all you need is for people to log into a site and that energy is used to update the content.  Content becomes a living document instead of static information.
The growth of app stores have shown this to us the most.  People find apps more usable than many websites.  Why? The added “live” interaction of content is what people expect when they download an app.  This is the Fail point of many websites.  Social media has shown us that information is more relevant, and brings attention the best if one can be sure what is seen is “live.”  Then they can add to the live content or choose where they want to add even more energy.
How does this effects a small business?  Services from a small business need a method where people can add energy to it.  Lack of energy on a service also shows us what needs to be stopped, or repackaged.  No longer is this energy on the shoulders of a web developer or designer.  A developer today only point to something that they would want more energy from, like an ad in Google.  However, true energy is generated by people interacting with an idea.  Having a UI for behind and in front of the “curtain” will place you quickly to the top of the web.  It will open doors just because a person will believe your business is more accessible and usable.

Suggestion that was emailed to Chase.com:

I was upset that you took another $5 from my savings account.  I tried to search for why on your site and could not find it.  I had to go to Google and do a search to find out why.  Please do two things:

1. Provide a link next to a fee explaining why it has been charged.  It should not be so hard to find out why you have taken money from me.
2. Allow us to activate alerts that would warn us of a upcoming penalty.  For example…When I have reached 6 withdrawals limit within my savings account for a statement period.  I can activate an alert that will tell me that I will receive a $5 charge on my next withdrawal.

——-
Gene Tucker

Internet Strategic Specialist & Website Usability Architect

http://www.usabilitygene.com