Observer Interactive

Category Archives: userexperience

Wow, It Has Been a Month

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Been longer than anticipated for blog updates, but there’s good reason. We’ve been doing a lot, and there’s more coming:

released thatsracin.com v3, which will very soon lead to 3.1. That release will include even more user-driven feedback and requested changes and will drop in early April.
released an entirely new Classified engine, eliminating [...]

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Immediate, Iterative Changes

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Once you have your platform settled, one of the beauties of online product management is you can make iterative changes fairly quickly that can help users.
For instance, on our recent thatsracin.com launch:

Brought out no. of comments & recommendations to our rail A stories
Made the statistics/weather area area able to be shown/hidden based on [...]

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Little Things, Part II

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Flickr – almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world – shares developer thoughts on the little things only a couple days after my mention.
A snippet:
“Getting the fine details down “just so” can take extra time and effort, but in my experience has always been justified - and whenever your work is [...]

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The Little Things Add Up

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To perhaps no one’s surprise that knows me, I get a little (well-deserved) grief from my team about “keeping user patterns and design consistent.” I may focus on user experience so much so that if I happen to present an idea that’s not in line with another part of the site in question, Dave [...]

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A super easy way to do chat

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Create an account at http://www.coveritlive.com/
The site will give you a one-line strip of code (an iframe) that you can place into a template. I used the content_top page element for insertion.
Depending on the dimensions of your main content rail, you’ll need to adjust the size of the iframe (pretty easy to do).
During our redesign, we [...]

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Auto-Starting Video

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Internet product managers — we should adopt rules for internet video as it pertains to auto-starting playback. For our users.
My position:
If the user initiates video — as in clicking on a link clearly marked as video via icon or text — auto play the video. It saves the user a step. Example: CharlotteObserver.com, of [...]

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Big News: Making Life Easier for Producers

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A feature you see frequently in modern CMS systems is the ability to get to the job of editing content straight from the presentation layer. If you’re viewing a story on the site — and you’re logged in — a little edit icon allows you to go straight to that task. This greatly improves work flow and increases efficiency.

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Distribution: Should You Twitter?

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I often get asked by folks inside (and outside) our building if they should get a personal twitter account or if their company should be doing more on this site. The audience appears smaller than the traditional media site, and the work to update is like a blog in that it requires attention… sometimes a lot of attention. The question to me is more, “Why would you not?” [...]

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