As usual all teams bunkered down – keeping their ideas and projects under wrap as they worked on them in secret.  The usual banter began in earnest.

Each team then had a strict 5 minute slot to present their concept/project to the company.  The event was kindly judged by one of our partner clients… and they had the arduous task of selecting the winning entry.   

It’s always inspiring to see what people manage to achieve within a day – and also the ideas that spark from these events.   Over the years we’ve had a number of hack day projects that have had a major influence on our products and product code bases.

The Hack Day 6 presentations consisted of… 

• A conceptual new Content Management System built in Silverlight
• Job and candidate demographics visualisation in Google Maps
• Tea Shelf – an efficiency saving door entry system
• Android Job Seeker mobile phone application
• TheFriendlyPlaces  – An online Dog and child friendly pub guide mashup
• Monty Python styled Lorum Ispum text generation
• Visual Job board dashboard showing daily job views and application rates

The Hack Day 6 cup and prize money was awarded to Team Tea Shelf – for a lovely bit of fun that entertained everyone with its off the wall (literally) creativity and amusing presentation video clips.

Visual Studio 2010 Launch
The first event of the week was aimed at Heads of Development, Development Managers and Software architects and featured a whistle-stop tour of the key features of VS2010.  Our Development Managers were present and were impressed with some of the features of the Ultimate edition – especially liking Architecture Explorer and Test Manager. From the .Net 4 features being showcased, they were both impressed with the parellism offerings, and were keen to try it out to make the products even more scalable.

Visual Studio 2010 and .Net
Four developers made the trip to Fulham for day 2. As is typical, they all took away different highlights, including:

• the echoing of the Development Managers enthusiasm for parellism
• improvements to Silverlight making it a technology worth looking into again
• improvements in Entity Framework making it worth looking at again, especially as the speakers were open about the drawbacks of the original release
• multi-monitor support – all our development team have 2 monitors each, being able to make use of them within the IDE will be good
• the idea that our QA team could record their test actions in a permanent manner which the developer can then use to debug as if in real time rewinding and fast-forwarding as necessary until finding that bug (intellitrace)
• diagramming tools via Architecture Explorer
• the idea of “gated check-ins” via Team Foundation Server seems to have been one of the more contentious points with a 50/50 split between loving the idea and hating it

Windows Phone
One development manager attended this event to learn more about Windows Phone 7 and to see what the Microsoft view of the future of mobile was.  Again, the speakers were honest about where things were sub-optimal in their existing offerings and went to lengths to explain the improvements. Microsoft sound like they’re following the Apple model and are controlling the hardware to prevent dilution of the brand and prevent development fragmentation, and will also provide an app store model meaning a certification and validation process (not a crowd pleaser). The search functionality will be powered by bing and apparently “a puppy dies each time you use google“.  The Push notification is HTTP REST based, which was enough to get our Development Manager all fired up and enthused and ready to start developing.

Summary
All of the attendees seemed to come back with areas they’d like to spend some time looking into, and one team at our internal hackday last week was dedicated to making use of some of the VS2010/.Net 4/Silverlight 4 features, so they were obviously inspired.

Our expectations are very different when we search an individual website. For example, when we carry out a search on a classifieds or e-commerce site, we expect it to be able to show us every single item it has that matches our criteria. To use an analogy, imagine if you went into camera shop on the high street and asked to see all of their digital SLRs. Imagine if the sales assistant responded by showing you a few cameras, but then admitted that there might be more items in the back room, possibly better deals, and that you’d need to try re-articulating your requirements in various different ways to find out. A crazy idea. You’d think they were incompetent and walk out.

A shop assistant should know what stock they have, and they should be able to match it against your requirements. The same goes for websites.

Keyword search has been made famous by Google, but there are other ways to elicit users’ requirements. Faceted navigation (aka “faceted search” or “guided navigation”) is one of them. It is, in essence, a very simple concept. Instead of giving users text fields for them to fill in, you give them a list of links to click on. These links consist of lists of attributes, separated by type, each with a numerical count adjacent, indicating the number of results that will be displayed if selected. This may sound quite unremarkable, but it completely transforms the act of searching an unfamiliar database from an intimidating procedure into an easy task. The user just reads the options and clicks those that are most relevant to their needs. After two or three clicks, they have narrowed the results down to a manageable list of relevant items.

So, to summarise, keyword search can sometimes be quite “hit or miss” and involve a fair amount of thought from the end-user, whereas faceted navigation helps guide users to their destination. To break the benefits down into themes, faceted navigation helps by:

• Deconstructing search into a series of easy ‘bite sized’ subtasks: rather than declaring a complex set of criteria ‘up front’, the user can declare one criterion at a time, gradually drilling in.
• Appealing to the psychology of recognition rather than recall: it’s much easier for humans to recognise items displayed in a menu (“Which of these options should I click?”) than recalling them without any cues (“What should I type into this empty box?”).
• Setting expectations accurately: adjacent to each facet label, a number is displayed, showing how many results will be displayed if the item is selected. This means users are never taken by surprise, and it enables them to make informed decisions.
• Orientation and framing: When arriving on the site, the user can see at a glance the distribution of items within the various facets, which orients them as to what is on offer. If the site uses appropriate labelling, this can be very reassuring for the user as they will recognise the site ’speaks their language’ and has the kind of content they are looking for. (This is known as “information scent” and “information foraging“).
• Preventing users from reaching dead ends: links that have zero results associated with them are never shown. This means users cannot accidentally reach blank results pages – which we all know from personal experience is extremely frustrating.

By this point, you might be thinking we’re advocating faceted navigation as a cure for all ills. It isn’t – it has a mix of strengths and weaknesses, and this mix is quite different from keyword search. In fact, since each approach has strengths in different areas, it makes sense to provide both types of functionality and allow the user to decide which is best suited to their needs.

• Unfamiliar terminology: the language you use inside your organisation may differ considerably from your users. Be careful to validate your chosen terminology with real users, to ensure you do not alienate them.
• Overly long attribute lists: lists in user interfaces are known to work well at around the 7 item mark, but become taxing for users when they become very long. If you absolutely have to use a very long list, you should try to prioritize the most important items to the top, and add a ’show / hide’ control which keeps the bulk of the list hidden away unless needed.
• Overlapping attributes and blurred boundaries: if users perceive three attributes of a facet to be almost the same, they are presented with a conundrum – which one do they click? To be on the safe side, they have to view each one in turn. (This is known as ‘pogo sticking’ and can be extremely frustrating). Some systems avoid pogo sticking by allowing users to select multiple attributes from each facet – however, this can create usability problems.
• Poor editorial control: if your content creators assign attributes incorrectly, this will make the entire system ineffective. For example, on job boards, some recruiters mistakenly believe that by assigning their job ad to all the categories they can, their job ad will get more valuable exposure (in fact it’s a very poor tactic and reflects badly on the recruiter). The best way for a website owner to avoid this kind of behaviour is to provide a content creation interface that gives contextual tips and prevents users from making such errors where possible.

This time the challenge is related to palindrome numbers. A palindrome number is one which is the same when read from either end, i.e. 1, 11, 101, 10101, 12321 etc

The challenge is to produce a console application in C#, which takes in a file of input numbers (specified as an argument to the console app) and outputs a list of numbers which are the next largest palindrome numbers to those specified in the input file.

So, for example, if the input file consisted of:
100
8
101

The output file should contain:
101
9
111

The input file will always be in the format of numbers separated by line breaks and ending with a number.

The code should be supplied in a single file, and the solution which output the correct results in the shortest number of ; characters and the number of } characters (i.e. statements) will be the winner. Only .Net standard assemblies should be referenced.

All solutions should be submitted by midday on 31st March

Madgex are currently only recruiting for a Global Sales Director and so we weren’t really present from a recruitment perspective, more from the position of reminding the local community that we are still around and active, and to share our experiences of working in the media sector, and what the various job roles we have actually involve on a day-to-day basis.  Weekly, internally to Madgex (although hopefully coming soon to the lab site), I produce a newsletter listing all of the community events I’ve tracked down from around Brighton, Sussex and London which seem to be relevant to the team.  Today we produced a special list of these for the next 7 days to distribute to anyone interested, which allowed us to introduce people to some of the more active, and frequent local events like Flash Brighton, UX Brighton etc

I spoke to a wide variety of different people today, from sixth form college students, to people finishing their MAs in Digital Media, to java developers, to freelance designers, to Adam from Garage Studios (who taught my flash course), to one of the ladies from City College who oversees the NVQ I’m doing, to a business coach, to creative writers and film-makers.  I enjoyed talking to them all, suggesting events, or people that they could or should talk to, and I even managed to get a few plugs in for my Brighton Bloggers site, so am hopeful I’ll see a flurry of new add requests soon.

All in all it felt like a good event, enabling me to practice my networking skills with a more diverse group of people than I usually meet.  Of particular benefit to me was the opportunity to talk to Sixth Form students, and BA/MA students and get feedback from them on how they see the world of media evolving and understand more about what their various courses actually involve.  Thanks Wired Sussex, I hope to be back next year.

The lazy registration system we introduced in version 3 of our platform last year is a great example of this. One of the biggest leakage points of any webapp is registration: users are forced to make a clear decision about whether they want to enter a long term relationship with your site. It takes some effort to complete a registration form and choose a password, so it’s no surprise that many users drop-out at this point – which is a big loss for the site owner.

In 2009, UIE (a leading user experience consultancy firm) found that removing compulsory registration from a large US ecommerce store delivered a staggeringly huge uplift of $300,000,000 in annual revenue– this just goes to show what a significant psychological barrier registration really is!

Analytics data from early versions of our job board platform revealed a similar pattern, though at a smaller scale, so we set out to solve it. We started our analysis by deconstructing the concept of registration. Registration is actually a cluster of things: the user typically has to enter their email address as a unique ID, accept your terms and conditions, choose a password, and, in some cases, verify their email address.

Although all these things are normally bundled together within a single registration step, there is no good reason for this. If you have the technical capabilities, it’s possible to tease the components of registration apart and allow users to do each thing separately, at a time that suits them. This approach is known as lazy registration.

Interestingly, when carrying out usability tests on our prototypes, we found that when registration was a forced barrier, many users complained that it was tedious – but when we took it out, most didn’t even notice its absence (though afterwards tended to report higher satisfaction levels). This just goes to show that good design doesn’t have to “wow” users – it simply has to help them achieve their goals quickly and easily.

After an initial iterative prototyping and research phase, we came up with the following model of lazy registration (shown below), which is now implemented in all of our newest Job Boards.

Using a feed reader and can’t see the youtube video?

It’s interesting to consider that some job board providers actually take the opposite stance on registration, and use it as an opportunity to glean as much personal information as possible from end users. In some cases they require users to fill in their entire CV and work history before allowing them to register. We’ve steered away from this out of respect for job-seekers, and it’s turned out to be great news for site owners too.

For example, when Star Tribune recently migrated their job board to Madgex, they experienced a substantial uplift for a number of their conversion rates, including 56% uplift in email alert creation, and a 67% uplift in job applications. We can’t take credit for all of this, as there are always other factors involved in real world deployments (including a big marketing push from Star Tribune), but nevertheless it provides a clear indicator that lazy registration can bring real benefits when combined with good business practices.