Sapphire Stream

Some recent research endeavors gave me an opportunity to look around for current demographics on various social media platforms. The campaigns that I have been working on do push the boundaries of the social media or messaging mechanisms that we use, one reason I enjoy working for a creative and innovative agency. The challenge for a user experience designer, however, is that there is often no precedent for some of the innovative things that we try or suggest. It is difficult to know what is really best for the user in these situations, and we often rule on the side of gut instinct. This is not necessarily a bad thing, I just wonder how to harness that experience to the pool of knowledge to draw on for projects moving forward.

Facebook has come up on two very different campaigns, so I thought it was natural to devote some time to understand the demographics of the social networking site. The first UK based and the demographics in question were of age, specifically users over the age of 35. The second was outside of the UK, the demographics focused on usage in three very different countries. In both campaigns SMS also came up, specifically around short-code usage, this may be a separate set of research, but I think given some of the numbers I have been able to locate, I could make a case not to rule out SMS as an option in favor of Facebook as a communications platform for interactive campaigns.

I was surprised to find little reference to general demographics on Facebook with any of the academic papers that I could locate so far. The demographics in this research, of course, were very specific to the research study in question. Most academic researchers studied Facebook in relation to college-aged students (roughly the 18-25 age group). This was not going to help me when looking at the over 35 set. Of course, many academic studies also only focus on one university in one location so knowing that I do not feel I can rely on those numbers to give me a clear picture of demographics across an entire country or region. What I did determine is that there is probably opportunity for more research with different age groups in this area. The challenge would be getting a large enough population and finding a way to reach users of a variety of ages.

It is not that these numbers do not exist at all; in fact, I did note that some academic papers were referencing one source in particular for datasets. The problem with this one source, however, was that the data was incomplete and it was difficult for me to justify the numbers that they came up with. The other worrying aspect is that this source was an infographic!¹ I am not inherently against infographics, but when they are being cited in academic research and then themselves not listing complete datasets and references then I do become concerned about the validity of the data.

It turns out that it is not difficult for anybody to get these numbers (at least from Facebook anyway). It did take some digging, but I am actually able to get a very detailed set of real time demographics data from the Facebook Ad Platform.² Since it is real time, I have started keeping some numbers in Excel so I can do a little charting of historical data. I am not really committed to doing this at regular intervals (there are some market research companies that are doing this anyway with the same data), but for my purposes this works really well for getting some useful demographics from Facebook, and very quickly.

The figures that I got are specific to projects that I am working on, but I was presented with a nice set of countries to try some comparisons on Facebook usage. The four countries I recorded statistics for included the United Kingdom, Mexico, Nigeria, and Indonesia. I was able to pull Facebook usage on each country and split it into my own set of age categories. I also researched total population for each country. As you would expect, the most users on the site are under the age of 35, but the United Kingdom does seem to have a significant proportion of over 35s on the site compared to the other three countries (37% for the United Kingdom and roughly 10-20% for the rest).

I did also look at gender. Across all countries, there are significantly more male users on Facebook, though it is about evenly split for both the UK and Mexico. I even did consider that some users would not specify a gender, but it turns out that this number is extremely insignificant (about 1% in every case). Most users do seem to include their gender on their profiles, which I have to admit did come a little as a shock to me.

My favorite set of stats that I gathered, though, was the graph I created on Facebook penetration, or a comparison of the entire population that is using Facebook for each country. When you compare the millions of people on Facebook to the entire population, you actually get a good sense of just how popular the social network is in these locations.

It is so easy to look at just the numbers and say, “well the UK, Mexico, and Indonesia have 30 to 40 million people on Facebook, and that’s a lot of people!” However, put total population on top of that you get a completely different story, especially with Indonesia where the total population is so high. Then with Nigeria, it looks like advertising efforts in Facebook might not be the best solution there (my assumption with Nigeria would be that SMS is a far more prevalent method of communication.) The Facebook numbers were estimated on August 5, 2011 on the Facebook Ad Platform, and the population figures were estimates from July 2011 from the CIA World Factbook.

What about Twitter, YouTube, and other networks? Unfortunately, this is not so easy. Many sources use the Google Ad Planner, but there’s some issues with this as a source, most specifically, Google does not have data sets for Nigeria, so I couldn’t do a consistent comparison for each country. I also noted significant differences in data when comparing Facebook statistics in Google Ad Planner to Facebook’s own statistics. The reason is that Google is measuring link traffic to and from those domains, not usage within. This does open up some opportunities to get data that are more useful from these other sites through further research, and certainly a good starting point to fill in gaps.

Some time ago, I started developing a few research questions around the area of social media in advertising. I did not approach this topic because it is trendy, in fact, not being personally trendy myself, that would be one reason I would be willing to avoid it. The reason why I wanted to explore some of these questions is because I wanted to separate out what is purely desire and speculation and what is actually true when it comes to social media trends. We are building integrated campaigns, some of them rely entirely on a social media platforms, others maybe not entirely but they rely heavily on them. As a user researcher, I want to be sure that integrating social media tools into a campaign be in the best interest of the users, the clients, and the agency. I also want to be able to consult on them quickly. A large part of what I am interested in doing right now is trying to understand how to get facts, figures, and numbers to people who need them in the least amount of time. The research I am collecting now is part of a larger body of research, but I do want it to be useful in the present. I may be able to spend several months researching a topic and writing it up for a dissertation, but often in an agency setting, I may only have several hours to spare before important decisions are made and we are already on to the next thing. The way I have wanted to approach my research work at the moment is by setting up a series of small frameworks that I can use now, and then maybe fit those into the larger research puzzle for my academic studies.

I happened into the field of User Experience Design first as an academic researcher, well, maybe a pseudo-academic researcher, since I have never felt completely comfortable in the academic world. As a librarian, naturally, my first instinct is to start with peer-reviewed resources. I have been researching like this not just throughout my post-graduate career, but also ever since high school (I was not long in college before I realized how top-notch my high school English teachers actually were.) I have been thinking about the ups and downs of using academic research in my current work for several months though, and am realizing that it is difficult to know exactly what to do with these sources in a “real world” environment. I have also realized that there is so much interesting academic research that often goes ignored with practitioners in a field because it takes too long to publish or it is just written in ways that practitioners simply do not have the time to parse. So instead, I sit here and sponge in all of this knowledge, but do not really have any mechanism for dispersing that to where it probably needs to go.

Then recently, I stumbled across an article that a friend, and course colleague, Jessica Hall, wrote about UX and Market Research. It got me thinking again, but in a different direction, why are we not talking about market research more in UX? Then I got thinking more, I work for an advertising agency, why do I not hear about market research more here? Of course, I know it exists here, but it is happening elsewhere from where I sit. I have met our analyst here, I know he is always working on interesting things that are probably similar to things I am also looking at, and we always say in passing that we need to “chat more,” but we never do. That probably has more to do with time than anything, but there is probably lots of great information sharing that could be happening here.

Am I trying to tap in too many sources in one place? Is it possible to take what is good about UX, market research, and peer review, and put it into something that will work for “real world” efforts? Moreover, if it is possible, how do I make it work? I know that many UXers are stretched too thin anyway. Many of us are doing great research in usability or creating personas, user journeys, and using various other methods to help us understand some of these questions with our users. I think I want to dig even deeper than that and try to understand how to avoid running into situations where we are making decisions based on weak or faulty logic, or watering down the good work that we do. I see too many trends pointing in directions where the experience and expertise of a UX professional is distilled too much into sound bytes. I also see too much research not being backed up by substantial evidence.

Browsing resources at my university library, I did find the book, Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and Practitioner-Resources. It tries to help bridge the gap, but the research topics used as examples here are still focused on social sciences that do not rely on technology in a fast-paced industry. I am making my way through it though; I believe it comfortably sits closer to the types of research efforts I am interested in, but I am still struggling to make it practically relevant.

Despite my struggles capturing this knowledge into something significant, I do know it is not all going to waste. There are certainly discussions happening with my co-workers or my insights are indirectly making their way into my user journeys and wireframes. There are also great discussions happening at events and conferences all over the world, not just locally. I respect that the UX community is one of sharing and collaboration. I also respect that it is a field that professionals are willing to learn and grow from each other, no matter where they work or the industry they specialize.

I recently attended UXCampLondon, a BarCamp event focused on topics relevant to the User Experience Design community. This is not the first BarCamp event I have ever attended, but it was the first UXCamp and the first one since living in the UK.  This unconference was set up a little differently than some of the others I have been to before, the most notable and enjoyable thing about this event was the quality of the presentations and the presenters were top notch. I know many people came prepared with things they have presented before, or have been developing for a while and you can tell that this preparation made for a better overall event in terms of quality. I did get the feeling that those people who attended the event last year knew what to expect, and this being my first UXCamp, it was still intimidating for a first-timer, even one who has done BarCamps in the past. I was a little nervous about what to present that might be interesting to a group of people I respect and admire.

I attempted to present something to stay in the spirit of the organizers’ wishes for the event, but only one person came to my session on UX and advertising. It was to be a discussion, and I really was not all that prepared so I was relieved there was little interest during the day. I even encouraged the one person who showed up to go to another session, but actually, we spent the 30 minutes chatting about all sorts of interesting things so it was not a wasted opportunity in the end. I am hoping that next year I will have some significant research done on my topic to actually have something to present more formally, now that I understand the format better. There is a reason for the topic, it is the industry where I am currently working, and I hope to have some focus on advertising and UX with my dissertation topic next year.

I have put together a bookshelf of books mentioned at this event on GoodReads. These are just ones that I noticed from the talks that I attended. Some of them I have already read and some have happily ended up on my “to read” list.

I have also gathered some notes about a few of the sessions I attended.

Communicating and Selling UX Design Deliverables by Jan Srutek

I really appreciated Jan’s presentation on deliverables. I know he mentioned that there was “nothing shocking” here for UX practitioners, but sometimes I think it is good to go back to basics or even to common sense. I am learning at my job all the time, especially when it comes to how I communicate with people using my wireframes, so it is safe to say deliverables are on my mind a lot. I think I am lucky to be working with a major brand on a project that also includes a lot of other agencies outside of ours, all of these things add certain challenges to the documents I create, but gives me some room to build my experience and skills.

One of Jan’s more obvious points was that, “Visual communication is powerful.” I feel that UX practitioners are on the border between the visual and the content-based communication of a project. IAs are here making designs that are “not quite” design decisions, and influencing content that is “not quite” copywriting. Our wireframes need to satisfy the needs of many people along the way.

Those people are all stakeholders, and I liked that Jan suggested the need to include them more in this process. I have actually had positive experiences talking through my wireframes with the client early on, and I do fully endorse this. I think one benefit of working for an advertising agency and doing our client’s digital work is that our direct line to the client is pretty easy, and we’re also in a good position to understand the overall brand message because it’s something that the agency has been doing for many years. Some of the best feedback I have got from my wireframes has been from sitting in a room with the client while going through them. It gives me an opportunity to understand their thinking, and that one on one, real-time feedback is very crucial, especially in early stages of a project.

Jan had some great tips about the deliverables themselves, and I am taking them to heart as a list of things I would like to improve with my own deliverables over time. These things include consistency, communicating priorities, aesthetics (minimalism), making callouts stand out, and including a cover sheet. One comment that stood out to me was that, “Your deliverables will be used when you’re not there to defend them.” I think it’s easy to forget in early stages of creating documents just how influential your deliverables can be to a project’s successes or failures in the future.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Gamification by Sach S.

I think it was a couple of weeks ago that I realized many of the projects I am currently working on have some sort of game element involved. It is a big part of our main digital work actually, and not surprising, as many brands use the “fun factor” in advertising. User experience is a large part of the creation of games and in game theory, whether it is explicit in the process or not. It became apparent to me during this realization that all of the user journeys I’ve worked on so far have included how a user moves through a game or puzzle, thus understanding a little bit of game theory, or at the very least the user satisfaction of fun, could be a great addition to my personal UX toolkit.

I think Sach’s presentation opened up a very lively debate in the room. There is a difference between game theory and just adding a bit of “fun” to things, but I think most people agree that fun can change behavior to a point. There was the additional point that you should try not to change behavior too much, it should be something that people can incorporate into what they do normally.

Sach played a couple of videos worth noting, the first was the “Piano Staircase”, the idea here that making the stairs into something “fun” will get people to use the stairs more frequently. However, somebody did point out that this might still only engage people for a short amount of time, as the novelty will eventually wear off.

The other video I enjoyed was “KLM Surprise”, though I think this also has short shelf life on the “appeal” scale, and KLM does not specifically address game theory in this approach to brand engagement (nor do I think that was their intent). KLM leveraged social media in a way to surprise a few customers with little gifts at the airport based on their travel destinations or personal information from their tweets. Obviously, this is not something that is sustainable over time, it is just a specialized form of advertising for them, but for those few KLM customers that were at the end of the surprises, the promotion may have created a memorable experience for them. In full honesty, anything to make the dire air travel experience a bit more “fun” is something anybody can appreciate.

I agreed with some of the discourse after this presentation that not every example is “true gamification,” but there is value in understanding this from a UX perspective and how we can leverage it in our own projects.

What is UX anyway? UX Models, Traits, and Industry Trends by Stavros Garzonis

There was a small group at this particular session, but I think it appealed to my ongoing journey through trying to understand the thing that I love to do, and actually doing this thing that I love to do. Stavros went through many very familiar diagrams and we had a good discussion among the group about some of the traits that make a UX person.

In the midst of the familiar diagrams, one really stood out to me, first because I had never seen it before, and second because it was the best diagram I have ever seen about what makes up a UX person. I found this diagram in Jason Mesut’s presentation called “Sell Yourself Better”.

This diagram makes me happy.

I love it because I can point to exactly where I am on here, I have a place. I am pretty open about saying that my journey to finally get into a position that I enjoy, and doing a job that I also enjoy has not been an easy one. Last year, trying to find a job and further my career, has been one of the worst year’s of my life, trying to find a place in the world while many factors are eating away at your confidence and self-esteem is difficult to claw your way up out of.

When I first started out as an IA, it was 2002, which now feels like an eternity ago, and what evolved into UX was not full on the radar then. I took a diversion into Library Science, only to find that Information Architecture had changed dramatically in only the few short years I was out of the field. I knew I had a place in there still, and I knew this is where I wanted to be, but trying to communicate this in a portfolio and to recruiters has been difficult. I have walked away from interviews knowing that my portfolio was not “pretty enough,” and I walked away from recruiters just to have them undermine my experience as “too academic.” I stuck with it because perseverance is actually one thing never waned. I am glad I did too because what I think I can bring to this field is a balance of experience, both practical and academic, and I keep adding to both of these personalities every day.

Anyway, I thank Stavros for introducing me to the work that Jason has been doing. I think I will be following him more closely as my career continues to grow. In addition, if you are a UX Practitioner, take Stavros’ survey, I know he will appreciate the feedback from people working in the field now.

Prototyping with Hardware by Alexander Baxevanis

My interest in Arduino was sparked last term when we had a couple of hands on lectures during my Experience Design module. Though I do not see a direct correlation to Arduino and hardware prototyping to my current work, I am interested in learning how to tinker with it more on a personal level. Alex gave some great reasons for UX designers to experiment with Arduino, including the ability to make your own platform, learn some interaction design basics, and to connect with the “real world.” Most of the presentation was an overview on how to get started, and since I had already done this in my course my takeaway from this was that there are other UXers also interested in Arduino. A conversation did spark up after this session about how to present Arduino or hardware prototyping in a way that is more accessible for people who already know the basics, and balance with the people who are new to it. I am not sure anybody in the small group came to any conclusions about this, but that may be an obvious barrier to hardware prototyping and making it accessible to newcomers, while also keeping the momentum going.

Alex has just started a Twitter account and a group for an Arduino UX Club he hopes to get going in the near future. I know I will definitely be watching that space and I would like to see more and play more in this area soon.

The Future of Wayfinding by Cennydd Boyles

I joked a bit at the event on Twitter that if I were to create an UXCampLondon drinking game it would include any time anybody mentioned or showed the tube map during a presentation. It is not a coincidence that UX people are interested in maps and wayfinding, it is a “real-word” metaphor for what a lot of us do with digital information. Wayfinding is not a new topic in the field, but newer technologies and user habits have changed how we approach it, and that means we need to adapt our techniques. After Cennydd’s initial overview some of the more interesting points I pulled from his session were:

• How GPS technology has changed wayfinding – personally, for as much as I rely on my GPS on my iPhone, the aging phone fails me most time when I need it in London. Cennydd mentioned that it “still needs a layer of human processing.”  I agree.
• The user as a destination – we are seeing this more with services like Foursquare or Gowalla, checkin based applications are giving our friends a real-time synopsis of where we are in the world.
• Real-World Digital – or as Cennydd explained it, “creating an API between the real and digital worlds.” I especially liked this concept and I think it relates directly to what I have heard others talk about when referring to “ubiquitous computing.”
• Ethics – and of course the balance of privacy and convenience. This has been shaping for a while and I think it will evolve in years to come. User Experience designers should understand the ethics and the implications of anything we are designing for our users, not just wayfinding or geo-location tools.
• Wayfinding Skills – with a general question, “are we going to lose our own ability to wayfind?” I personally see the potential for this happening. The ability to use maps or locate your way around a transport system is a learned skill like any.

The very day of UXCampLondon I did have an interesting wayfinding experience on my way home that got me thinking about a lot of the points of this presentation. As usual, I was one of the last people to leave the pub, and I tend to be a bit braver about trying to find my way home via unknown routes. I think the one thing that is good and bad about having a GPS or a smartphone is it does give the user a sense of security (knowing they can rely on it to help them out of a sticky situation) which can also a false sense of security (they are not thinking of potential systematic failures before they happen).

I knew I would probably need to take a bus home, what I did not anticipate was that it would take me an hour to find the correct stop. It also took a combination of using my iPhone and physical maps. The limitations to using my phone include a flaky and slow loading GPS, and the fact that I do not want my phone out of my pocket as I am wandering around unfamiliar streets and neighborhoods, this surely risks my personal safety. But the limitations to relying on signage is that it’s often not clear, especially when there’s high concentrations of bus stops in some areas. Actually one usability flaw I noticed on bus stop maps was that none of them included a “you are here” arrow, that would have been extremely helpful since I normally knew what street the stop I wanted was on, but not which direction that street was from the one I was standing near. The City of London does have a number of streetside maps. These are very helpful, but they are very general so I had to use a combination of streetside maps and bus information to navigate my way around unfamiliar streets after midnight.

This was the first time I took the night bus home to where I live now, and of course, it was complicated and painful because I had no prior knowledge of where I was or where I needed to be to get the correct buses. It wasn’t impossible, and it probably wasn’t the most ideal way to find my way home, but I have some knowledge now that will help me next time. I was also completely aware that I was relying on nearly every one of the bullet points that Cennydd addressed in his presentation as I was navigating the various tools I had available to me along the way.

Cennydd has a great list of resources, and credits to his presentation, worth a look and a bookmark.

When can we do it again?

Of course, there are always great things going on that you inevitably miss, and there was one session in particular I wish I had attended, a discussion on UX Design and education. My course colleague even came up to me at the end of the day and said I probably would have enjoyed the conversation and dialog there. It is relevant to my life right now and I do have many opinions about it, hopefully that is one topic that continues in the future. I did write up of my thoughts on this topic on my personal blog before I began the course at Kingston. I should revisit this at some point, maybe toward the end of my degree, but I do have mixed feelings about higher education now that I have started another degree.

I cannot wait to revisit all of these topics though, and see what new ones are around the corner by the next event. Thanks to the organizers for a fantastic and enlightening day.

I have thought about Sapphire Stream for over a year now. Not only because this is how long I have had the domain registered, but I do have some business things associated with the name. Though, what I really needed to pin down was what this space would be. So here it is, an exercise has taken me over a year.

I already have a personal blog and several little blogs, those are not going away. I think like many other people my blogging has declined since I have started using Twitter. Then when trying to approach a professional themed blog, I was tormenting over whether I really have much to say here.

The Sapphire Stream Twitter account has existed for a few months. I admit it is mostly links and I do not engage much there, though I think that is because I already have a personal twitter account and I want to engage in that space on all topics. I started thinking about the people I would follow on the Sapphire Stream account though, thought leaders in UX, people I respect and admire, and other UX practitioners. That feed was less about who was following me and became about whom I was following. I do find keeping multiple Twitter accounts more difficult than keeping multiple blogs, but having a dedicated feed to UX on my Sapphire Stream Twitter account has potential as another stream for discovery.

Then I thought I wanted Sapphire Stream to only be about freelancing, but that is difficult when I know I do not want to only be a freelancer. I like the freedom of freelancing, but I actually also enjoy going to work. Of course, having an awesome job to go to will help. I do want this space to have some flexibility and to adapt as I do with my career.

I think the future of Sapphire Stream encompasses the future of my professional life and me. I am a part-time post-graduate student in UX that needs to start thinking about a dissertation. I am also a part-time IA in a top advertising agency in London, which I admit is pretty exciting and unique. My job has obviously given me a new fascination with the advertising world and how UX fits in, and I think this space would be a good place to explore that more.

What I have finally concluded is that Sapphire Stream is still about me, but it is the UX part of me. It turns out I do have a lot to say on the subject, with a number of blog post topics lined up, and why not? It is what I am passionate about!