The Fun Theory

From Swedish guys.

Fun to entice people to change their behaviour. And it works.

I would personally love to try these stairs! And I can’t imagine the messy noise that would make in Paris’ metro at rush hour …

Fallible representations… ?

Always very interesting and innovative research from the guys at MIT Media Lab (my favourite so far, the Huggable project from the Robotics group).

Enter your first and last name, and Personas mines the Web to draw a representation of how the Internet sees you!  …Thanks Sandrine for posting about it !  As you can see, the Web sees me more as a “mess” than you…. …and I am still wondering where this “illegal” thing comes from …!!!!!

Augmented Reality and Location-Based Services

A video demo in Paris for services such as finding a metro or taxi station or finding a restaurant.

This is in French.

Top 5 Web Trends of 2009…

…According to Read Write Web, they are:

• Structured data: semantic web, the conversion of unstructured data to structured data for more intelligent computing
• Real-time web: micro-blogging, real-time news tracker / search
• Personalization: among other social filtering
• Mobile Web and augmented reality: social networks going mobile, location-aware social apps (such as Foursquare) and promising augmented reality service such as the Paris Metro Subway app for iPhones/Pods
• Internet of things: sensors, smartphones, RFID… getting a message from your fridge to go and  buy milk

Optimizing e-commerce UX: HFI Webinar on June 25th

For the e-commerce people…Visit Human Factors International to register for this webinar :

"Optimizing e-commerce UX: Create websites that empower customers, are effortless to use, and create a joyful shopping experience"

Thursday, June 25th, 2009
3:30 to 4:30pm ET (US)

Les dessous de la stratégie 2.0 d’Obama

À voir si vous êtes à Montréal  le 16 Septembre prochain.

Rafah Hafroush présentera les dessous de la stratégie Web 2.0 d’Obama pour sa campagne présidentielle. Si vous n’avez pas déjà assisté à celle de David Plouffe, ça devrait valoir le coup! Rafah Harfoush est membre de l’équipe nouveaux médias de Barack Obama.

Cette conférence est organisée dans le cadre des RDV Média Infopresse – L’événement annuel des médias.

Le mercredi 16 septembre 2009 au Centre Mont-Royal de 9h à 17h.

Social Technology Adoption

In a recent study that my supervisor and I conducted at the University of British Columbia, we collected data on the ‘social’ profile of 200 North American (US+Canada) online shoppers. This gives the opportunity to compare our figures with the ones reported by Forrester in a 2009 in The growth of social technology adoption.

Interestingly, we noticed that online shoppers seem to be more ‘socially active’ than the average US online adults forming the sample surveyed by Forrester Research (it is also possible that this is the general adoption which grew a lot between their last study  – Q2 2008 – and ours  – June 2009).   In fact, they do everything (create, critic, collect, join social networks, and consumer user-generated content) more. Notice the greatest gap in terms of the percentage of joiners(which we have almost 35% more in our sample of online shoppers).

As a reminder, the groups include consumers participating in at least one
of the indicated activities at least monthly:

• Creator: Publish a blog, Publish your own Web pages, Upload video you created, Upload audio/music you created, Write articles or stories and post them.
• Critics: Post ratings/reviews of products or services, Comment on someone. else’s blog, Contribute to online forums,  Contribute to/edit articles in a wiki.
• Collectors: Use RSS feeds, “Vote” for Web sites online, Add “tags” to Web pages or photos.
• Joiners: Maintain profile on a social networking site, Visit social networking sites
• Spectators:  Read blogs, Listen to podcasts , Watch video from other users, Read online forums, Read customer ratings/reviews
• Inactive: None of the above

DEADLINE post-it stop motion

Just for fun…and in honour of these creative students from the Savannah College of Art Design.

The final video

 The making of

Protoshare: a collaborative tool for “wireframing” and design

This is for the usability and design people…

I just tried  Protoshare: is a great tool to help designers collaborate in creating interactive wireframes. It provides a very easy-to-use web interface to help multiple users create, comment on, and test their designs. Portability, flexibility, reusability, ’sharability’… all the very useful characteristics we love for web design!

Thanks to Nada from Bell’s web agency, i.e., District Agency for letting me know about it.

Bing Map vs. Google Map

Some people have been presenting Bing (a search engine recently launched by Microsoft) as a Google-killer application…and some have argued that this is not even close to reality.

Well, I just tested the Map application and compared it with Google map. Bellow are the results for the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver….

So which one would you prefer if you wanted to visualize the place before going there for the first time for example ? ….

(sorry for the annoying “unregistered version” in the pictures…from Galdwin print screens tool….it seems I have not bought their product yet )

[Google Map– With the satellite view]

[Bing – With the bird’s eye’ view]