Archive : September 2009

In the time I’ve been away and had a baby (she’s 10 months old this week…), a lot has happened.

There’s no denying that Spotify has taken the world of online music to a new (legal) level. Their ever-increasing catalogue of artists and albums, coupled with the acceptance of their app into the iTunes store will, no doubt, alter the way millions of people both pay for and consume music.

The application is a model of elegant simplicity. It easy to find your way around the service, listen to music and create and share playlists.

However, there are times when you open the app and you have no idea where to start. To torture the metaphor – you have a potential fire hose of music content but turning the right tap can sometimes be difficult. What do I fancy? What’s my mood? What am I doing? Do I just want some background noise or some hum-along favourites?

Anjali’s blog post on ‘Measurement versus engagement‘ made me think.

We’ve spent a great deal of effort over the last two years We’ve spent a great deal of effort over the last two years smashing painstakingly integrating Agile thinking into the strategy and design practices, but at the other end – the delivery end of the process – Agile is too often neglected soon after launch. painstakingly integrating Agile thinking into the strategy and design practices, but at the other end – the delivery end of the process – Agile is too often neglected soon after launch.

This shouldn’t be surprising.

I found this while going through Slideshare over the weekend. It’s a 6-month-old presentation that Charlene Li made at SXSW’09, but with Google launching Sidewiki recently, I thought it would be very useful to re-visit the concept of how a social network is going to change. WithSidewiki, you can write your comments to a post alongside it, and they’ll be ordered according to relevancy, preserved for all time. 

I went to a talk on measuring social media earlier this week, and was thoroughly disappointed. One of the things mentioned was that measurement should be built into the strategy of a social media campaign, to which my immediate thought was: you can have success metrics, but will people come to your site once it’s built? And then what happens to your forecast? I’m reading Groundswell at the moment so it may be a sort of ‘Groundswell hangover’, but the truth is that a project or campaign that is built for the client and not the people is looking at failure even before it launches. It may be the most beautiful Flash application ever created, but unless it brings value to the user, will they come the second time around, after looking at it once and murmuring ‘Oh, beautiful site’? So considering the metrics and having them as a guideline is good, but it is best not to have that as a benchmark of success.

1. Service Design Tools: An open collection of communication tools for complex design processes.

2. Personas: A project from MIT, which mines data from around the interwebs to analyse what sort of personality you are. It decided that I like movies and music equally, which is actually true, if a very narrow description of my myriad interests. James was apparently arrested for felony in 1871, which seeing as how he didn’t exist then is rather amusing. Or he had an evil brother in the1800′s. I like the way they explain the logic behind the project though: “It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important, if not more important, than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are largely opaque and socially ignorant.”

Stumbled on on this very interesting article titled “Is Happiness catching?” in The New York Times published the day after my write up on John Cacioppo’s talk at the RSA on how loneliness is contagious.

The article is based on Christakis and Fowler’s research on the National Heart Institute’s Framingham Heart Study. 15,000 Framingham residents and their descendants have been followed since 1948 to learn about cardiovascular disease – but two years ago, Christakis and Fowler used the very same data set to analyze if people can influence each other’s behaviour just by socializing.

We’ve recently redesigned and launched new campaign pages on Protect The Human. The aim of the redesign was to improve the user experience and usability, which would lead to the increase in numbers of people getting involved in the campaigns for human rights.

Campaigns play a crucial role on Protect The Human. They are designed to highlight the ongoing problems happening in the world. Each campaign has a range of actions for people to take in order to fight the injustice.

To improve the campaign pages and increase the number of people taking actions, we’ve done some major changes. We started with the campaigns index page.

British Airways wanted to follow up on what Metrotwin started by extending the concept of twinning to their second most popular route after London-New York, namely London-Mumbai. Except we decided to go with a blog this time, for various reasons, the most significant of which is that India’s blogosphere is an extremely active, growing place and a blog would be a great way to document the best of both cities while attracting the right audience at the same time.

V is an organisation funded by the Office of the Third Sector to promote and fund volunteering for 16-25 year olds. V came to Made by Many 8 months ago, asking us to create a vision for future volunteering with the expectation that digital engagement would reduce barriers to young people joining in voluntary action. In May we started working on Climate Squad, joint funded by V and Bank of America, as the first implementation of the strategy we defined with V.