JonathanMelhuish.com

Al Tepper has a background in publishing, where he focussed on how to create value in a world where an infinite amount amount of information is available free of charge.  More recently, he’s been working with Natural Collection, an ethical online retailer, to launch Ooffoo.com, a community marketplace.

I asked Al to share his thoughts about how publishers and retailers alike can benefit from building an online community.  You can download an Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get the audio of these interviews as soon as they’re published.

I recently participated in an excellent 2-day web usability training course run by Userfocus. We covered a lot of ground, including how to use contextual enquiry to elicit customer needs, using personas to communicate the findings, and practical ways for developing and evaluating designs quickly.

In this short video, I focus on an useful technique for deciding how to organise the content on your site: Card Sorting. By getting several customers to group the content and label it in a way that makes sense to them, you’ll come up with a scheme that’s likely to make sense to everyone - not just you.

Online card-sorting and analysis tools: Optimalsort, Websort
Windows-based tool (and card templates): SynCaps

I finally got around to editing and uploading the video of our team’s final presentation at Social Innovation Camp 2007.  Over the course of the weekend, a team of half a dozen techies put together a piece of mobile phone software that reads a barcode and loads up a wiki page.

Of course, as Richard Pope emphasises in the video, the beauty of this technology is that it’s really flexible - you’re just using the barcode as an entry point to related information.  As it’s user-editable, people can put anything there.

Still, I thought it’d be interesting to have a vague idea of what people might use such a device for, i.e. what unsatisfied informational needs they are aware of during their shopping process.  So I gathered a team (including ethnographer Charles Armstrong) to go to the local supermarket and pounce some unsuspecting shoppers!

Here’s the presentation showing some of my research results, followed by a live demo of the software:

Thanks to The People Speak for shooting the original footage and patiently transferring it all to my laptop for me.  Here’s their video of me attacking one of the techies and trying to pin down some use cases for this technology, and then going on to explore the potential for promoting ethical information.  Here’s my photographic exploration of ideas surrounding attaching objects to information.  The source code for this project is still available for anyone to build on.