UserZen

With the new world full of interactive smart phones, Geo-aware devices and augmented reality, we need to be aware of the real world experience that consumers want and need. It is not enough to test and analyze products in 1 or 2 dimensions or just looking at how users interact with a website or product in their home.

We need to investigate how people interact with their environment as whole. People are using the Internet, their smartphone and cell phones in conjunction with other people in meatspace as well as wanting to utilize technology in conjunction with brick and mortar storefronts and their friends in real time.

It is not enough to have a website or an application for mobile phones. These interfaces need to take into account all the other ways people accomplish tasks and search for information or products.

Samantha Stormer talks about designing for the Space Between.

She says;

UX professionals can’t constrict a user’s experience to specified devices, touch-points, or time periods. As devices integrate with each other and with the real world, we have to design for this integration and blurring. This new world requires a different way of thinking about UX and design.

The new way of thinking would involve assessing the usability of your service or product at all the touch points with your consumer. This means that as researchers, we would need to talk to people about all the ways they hear about a company, through Facebook, magazines, billboards, television, etc.

We need to track how a person makes a decision to purchase or use a product, which could involve something shared on a friend’s Facebook wall, a notification to their smartphone based on the fact that they are close to the store, checking out reviews on Yelp,  a similar consumer website or Twitter posts.

The new technology users have all this literally at their fingertips and we shouldn’t ignore their impact on behavior and opinion. The experience of consumers today is not limited and our research needs to reflect that.

I will be following this new analysis as I think it points to the future of usability and marketing research.

Really like this new way to search for flights or train. A timeline re-sortable by price, time, and other descriptors. Great infographics result.

And hey! It’s even usable!

http://www.hipmunk.com/

OAuth is a relatively new open authentication protocol that allows secure API communication without the necessity of continually passing a username and password with each request. The idea for OAuth was conceived in 2006 by a group of individuals working on the Twitter implementation of OpenID. After reviewing both OpenID and other existing industry practices, such as Amazon Web Services API and Flickr API, it was decided that a proposal should be written for a new open protocol for application authentication. The movement quickly gathered momentum, with support heralded by Google, and in July 2007 an initial specification was drafted. We find ourselves using OAuth Core 1.0a today, with a new 2.0 spec being drafted.

How Does It Work?

Here’s a real-world example — one that you may have already come across and not even known it.

Let’s follow the OAuth path of how foursquare sends tweets on your behalf:

• foursquare has initially registered themselves as an “application” with Twitter. In doing so, they’re provided with a token set called “consumer key” and its paired “consumer key secret.” These are used by foursquare in their application code and as a part of the OAuth model in generating requests.
• From a user perspective, when you log in to foursquare and click the “please link my Twitter account” button, foursquare uses its consumer key to contact Twitter and generate a “request token.” You’re then provided with a special URL that whisks you off to Twitter’s website.
• If you aren’t already logged into Twitter, you’ll be prompted to just like always, and then presented with a screen that asks if you’d like to provide said application with access to your account.
• Clicking “Allow” tells Twitter that this app (foursquare) which has requested access using its particular consumer key should have access to your Twitter account. Twitter then redirects you back to your application (the foursquare website) with an attached coded verification string.
• The foursquare application then reads the previously generated request token, and takes the returned verification to ask Twitter to generate a final token set called “access token” and “access token secret.”
• Now when you perform an action on foursquare and it’s tweeted, foursquare calls the Twitter API by creating a request using its Twitter-provided consumer key and the newly stored access token for your account.

And amid all of this, your Twitter username and password are never seen, let alone stored, by foursquare.

By the way, the best graphical representation of this process I’ve found is documented here by Digg.