Hulu, Boxee, and the threat of user experience

I’ve been following the developing Hulu/Boxee situation closely because I believe the real issue here is one of user experience. In case you haven’t been following along:

…two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.

Full Post: the Hulu situation

That good faith didn’t last for long:

Early this morning, Boxee rolled out a workaround that let Boxee users watch Hulu shows again, which they haven’t been able to do since last month when Hulu pulled its shows off Boxee’s browser. Late this afternoon, Hulu squelched that workaround.

Full Article: All Things Digital

If you are in the business of serving web video content, why block one particular browser, one that could potentially be your largest channel? Because, when it comes down to it, Boxee provides a superior user experience for watching internet TV, superior, quite possibly to watching regular TV. In fact, Boxee, and it’s brethren could very well be the tipping point in the great public switch to internet television. The networks apparently agree:

Why does the TV industry need to keep Web video off your big-screen TV? Not because it hates technology. But because it hasn’t figured out how to make money off Web video yet — and needs you to keep watching TV on your TV.

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker all but admitted as much in a keynote this morning: “What we’ve lost in viewers and advertising dollars on the analog side isn’t being made up for at all on the digital side. We want to find an economic model that makes sense.”

Full Article: Silicon Alley Insider

Television is being tivoed all over again.

Patterns in UX Research

Steve Baty illustrates 10 common patterns found in user research data. Knowing what to look for can help you see the forest and the trees, but it can also make everything look like a forest.

One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior. Patterns demonstrate a recurring theme, with data or objects appearing in a predictable manner. Seeing a visual representation of the data is usually enough for us to recognize a pattern. However, it is much harder to see patterns in raw data, so identifying patterns can be a daunting task when we face large volumes of research data. Patterns stand out above the typical noise we’re used to seeing in nature or in raw data.

Full article: UX Matters

Laura Barton meets Gillian Tett | On the money

Gillian Tett, assistant editor at the Financial Times, on the causes of the credit crisis and how her training in anthropology helped her predict our current dilemma more than two years ago.

I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,’ she reasons. ‘Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

Full Article: The Guardian

Some thoughts on Frames and Interaction Design

Michael Angeles brings my attention to David Malouf’s latest post on language and interaction design.

In “The language we use,” David Malouf discusses how ideas about user interaction can become so ingrained in what we are familiar with, that our language begins to reflect that familiarity.

It strikes me that a useful thinking tool on this topic may be the concept of Frames. I became aware of Frames, when Cognitive Psychologist George Lakoff popularized the idea in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. However, the idea predates his use of it by 20 years, going back to 1974 and Sociologist Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.

A simplistic description is that a frame is the subjective definition someone may assign to a situation and as such relies on the past experiences, culture and language that person uses for interpretation. Applying this to Dave’s post, the “click” frame was being subconsciously applied by the student, based on his own past experiences with interactive technology, and this was limiting the range of imaginable solutions the student could devise to the problem.

Dave’s suggestion for how to overcome this challenge is a good one:

…you need to deconstruct your language. Write it down. Write down your narrative of your interactions and look for affinities that develop around words and phrases and see if anything calls out to you the way the word “click” called out to me.

In addition to a little critical self-analysis, I’d add a technique I learned early in my training as a designer. Try to consciously re-frame the problem at hand. It’s not a pencil, it’s an instrument for writing. It’s not a post-it, it’s a portable reminding device. It’s a simple technique but it can shake loose the subconscious frames that limit your thinking.

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

A straight-forward and clear overview of the major components of analysis for experience design. A must read.

Analysis is that oft-glossed over, but extremely important step in the research process that sits between observation (data gathering) and our design insights or recommendations. In many respects, analysis is crucial to realizing the value of our research since good analysis can salvage something from bad research, but the converse is not so true. This is where the literature tends to fall a little silent, jumping over the analysis techniques straight to a discussion of how best to document and communicate the findings from analysis. This article seeks to begin to redress that imbalance by breaking down the analysis black box into its major sub-techniques.

Full Article via: Designing For Humans

The No-Stats All-Star

A really great article about excellence and measurement, and how the two often are not in sync.

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

via: NYTimes