David John Mead

Another good NEOUPA talk…

This months speaker was Chris Braunsdorf and his topic was Meet your users: Learning from the iPad, iPhone, and Facebook & thinking about the future of user interfaces. Starting with the story of people searching for ”Facebook login’ in Google and being confused when the top result was not Facebook, but an article on Read Write Web.

Opening the conversation to the room, a lot of discussion was about the responsibility of the UX/UI professional to help fix these issues. Bolstered by points such as the increase in age of users to Facebook and the web in general, Chris mentioned a quote from an article by Gillian Andrews about web literacy and our expectation that everyone knows what a URL is.  Google’s video showing that people are not really aware of what a browser is pushed the conversation forward.

Moving to the iPad and iPhone, Chris then steered the conversation towards the simplicity of devices and asked, will that solve some of the problem?  I think the initial problem (about logging in to Facebook) will remain until the iPad does away with Safari completely and becomes the browser itself.  Though it wasn’t brought up I was reminded about ‘The Social Agent‘ by Chris Messina and the direction that is taking.

All-in-all I thought it was good discussion (barring some early technical difficulties) and I’m looking forward to the next meeting.

LinkedIn applications are here

A while ago a group of us were chatting about LinkedIn and how it still didn’t offer a lot of the social network doo-dads that others sites, such as Facebook, does. Since then there has been a slow procession of functionality creeping into my Profile.

First there was Answers, which let you post, & reply to, questions from other users.  Then, after a redesign, came Groups and the ability to update your status.

Now LinkedIn has introduced Applications.  This lets you embed applications along the same lines as Facebook.  They are business-oriented; SlideShare, Company Buzz, and Huddle to name a few.

I’ve added SlideShare but I’m getting a lot of server errors when viewing which I’m hoping is down to volume at the moment.

It’ll be interesting how far they go along this route and truly become a “Facebook for business”.

Technorati tags: linkedin, applications, facebook, slideshare