Visit any karaoke studio and you’ll find a notebook full of songs, listed alphabetically by title or artist. While this architecture is useful for searching, it’s nearly useless for browsing, which is the prime behavior pattern for patrons. Looking laterally, the online music industry has quickly adapted this construct, offering social tagging, categorization, and recommendations. [...]
Tags: behavior, data, interaction
I stumbled upon a list analyzing ROI for top universities based upon cost of education vs lifetime earnings. The most interesting thing about the article however was the third comment from the top: “I always thought it would be an interesting experiment for any of these top schools to have their admissions people select an [...]
Tags: context, data, metrics, research, storytelling
Consumers today are faced with information overload, to the extreme. The rapid expansion of the internet society is the main cause of this phenomenon. There are far too many options in every decision we make, so we must rely on gut feelings, recommendations, stereotypes, and context clues. What this means as a designer, is you [...]
Tags: behavior, data, interaction
Online advertising gets a bad reputation because people get all jumpy around behavior tracking. To increase effectiveness, companies are tracking browsing habits and matching them with other marketing data to deliver targeted ads you’re more likely to be interested in. This is all well and fine (for most people), but its subversive and stalkerish, and [...]
Tags: advertising, data, Improvements
I stumbled upon a few new smartphone apps: GetGlue allows users to check-in to their favorite movies, shows, books, and music and see what friends are enjoying, add comments and ratings, and receive personalized recommendations. Avoidr uses the Foursquare API to help you avoid exes and former friends. And Assisted Serendipity monitors guy/girl ratios at [...]
Tags: behavior, data, Improvements, innovation, interaction, metrics, mobile
