Subscribing and Commenting

I very much appreciate all of you who now regularly read this blog. Several of you have told me that you enjoy reading it and that what I've written here has led to further discussion elsewhere. I've been asked to improve the mechanism for subscribing to the blog which I've now done. You'll see a box in the top right of the page with a box "Subscribe to this Blog". I hope this will make following the blog easier for those of you who use feed readers to keep up with your blog reading.

I've also received requests to turn on commenting. This blog initially had commenting turned on when I started it in October of 2006. However, I started to receive spam-like comments and then decided to turn commenting off. I know that other bloggers have also turned off commenting due to this problem and yet others have taken down their blogs entirely in favor of using such things as newsletters instead. The essential problem appears to be anonymity and too easy access. When people are anonymous, they tend to express different views than when they are not and too easy access to commenting makes it easy to receive spam too. I really believe in blogs being a conversation so have wanted to turn commenting back on for some time. I've now turned commenting back on but you have to sign in with your gmail account to leave a comment. I may be wrong but it seems to me that pretty well everyone has a gmail account. We'll see how this goes. [Additional feedback I've received since this posting proposed that I allow open commenting with moderation which I've now switched the settings to. Thanks for the feedback!]

Please feel free to go back to previous posts in this blog and leave any comments you may have. I do really look forward to hearing from you.

Hidden iPhone UI Features

Even though we all love using our iPhone and iPod Touch devices, I'm struck by how many features in the user interface aren't readily apparent. Let say you wanted to delete some app icons or to move them around - you're stuck - unless of course you consult the manual (only one of the people I polled on Twitter used this method) or you somehow happen to hold your finger on an icon a bit longer than usual and see the the screen changes to the look like the one you see on the right. If the latter happened, you then have a clue that pressing the icons with the Xs on them might delete them and if you also happen to touch the icons and notice that they move, you have a clue as to how to move icons. Of course, you won't know how to get out of this delete/move state with the icons wiggling unless you happen to press the home button and notice that the wiggling stops. If you also happen to press the home button twice in quick succession, you'll see music controls come up in a beautiful transparent pop-up window no matter where you are in the system. Similarly, if you'd like to move rapidly to the top of a scrollable list, you might randomly hit the status bar at the top of the screen and notice that the list was reset to the top. Amazingly useful features but none of them, I would suggest, obvious to find in the user interface, nor all that easily discoverable either (unless you consult the manual, Google or Twitter it).

When we rave about the beauty of the design and the exemplary user experience of the iPhone/Touch, we often forget the difficulty we initially had in learning how to do some basic tasks. In fact, some of you may not have been aware of some of the features that I pointed out above. We've likely forgotten those difficulties for the same reason as I pointed out in my last post, we're more forgiving of designs that are otherwise really engaging and enjoyable.

It does make me think though that we need to find better ways of familiarizing users with hidden user interface features. As the iPhone/Touch type user interface becomes more commonplace, users will again raise the user experience expectation bar and likely won't be as forgiving as they struggle in finding out how to carry out the most basic tasks.

Design Makes Users More Forgiving

One of the benefits of good design is that it appears to have the effect of making users more forgiving of other problems with a product. I've come across a number of examples of this where customers accept a lower level of performance or reliability if the product's design was considered to be of a high quality. When customers fall in love with a product due to it's superior design, they tend to overlook other problems. An example of this that I've been experiencing has been the date and time settings on my iPod Touch. The problem occurs when I plug my iPod Touch into my computer and iTunes in order to sync it. If iTunes is already running, it causes the date and time on the Touch to get totally messed up. For example, I did a synch yesterday evening and the date was reset to Friday, June 27, 2008 and the time 4:41 a.m. This doesn't happen if iTunes isn't running when I plug the Touch into the computer. So, I can avoid the problem by making sure that iTunes isn't running (which it normally is on my computer) before I plug in the device. I put up with this problem largely because I really like using my Touch and figure that Apple will get around to fixing this sometime in the future. Every software update gets my hopes up that this problem will also be fixed but thus far those hopes have been dashed. I'm sure if I had that same type of problem with a product with a far inferior design, I would be much more upset. So, the lesson here is that design can have the effect of reducing calls to the help line and while you still need to fix problems with products but customers may be more patient in waiting for it.

iPhone Designs that Suck

The more I use the iPhone/Touch user interface with various apps, the more I appreciate the well-designed apps and get frustrated with the ones that are poorly designed. I get the impression that some people think that the superior design of the device itself makes it impossible to create bad designs. They're wrong. There are numerous instances of problematic designs. The example I'd like to provide here is one poor design within an app which I find to be otherwise fairly well designed. See the image to the right. It is the status update screen within the Facebook app. The problem with it is the placement of the primary action buttons "Cancel", "Clear", and most seriously "Post" which submits the update. The problem is that the button is placed right above the "O" and "P" keys, making it all too easy to hit the "Post" button in error. When you do hit it in error, you've then submitted your status update and it is sent out to everyone of your Facebook friends. The design that works much better is to have the primary action buttons placed above the entry field. This is just one of many instances like this where designers need to take into account the fact that users have to use their fingers which differ quite significantly in size from one user to another. Making an error such as hitting one alpha key instead of another while annoying can be easily corrected and often is by the software itself. However, the placement of buttons that yield direct actions which can't be undone should be examined very carefully. Only designers that have experience with Kiosks have had to deal with these types of problems in the past whereas now all designers of mobile apps have to take these sorts of issues into account.

Lowering the Barrier to Entry

I had a discussion with a customer today that got me thinking. Despite the pervasiveness of computers - desktops, notebooks, and now even netbooks - a number of people are still not comfortable with computer technology. However, these same people are often quite comfortable with cell or mobile phones. If these people had so-called smart phones to date, they likely haven't used many of the features of the phone that are considered "smart". Those aspects of the user interface have often simply been too complicated on the smart phones that have been available, until recently.

Full screen and multitouch user interfaces were first introduced with Apple's iPhone and now also available on the Google Android G1 phones and the new RIM Blackberry Storm. The far superior user interface on these phones, the intuitiveness of the interaction style, and the simplicity of operation (turning them on and off, installing apps, etc.) may well have the effect of lowering the barrier to entry for the very people who haven't felt completely comfortable with computer technology to date. When these devices can be fully untethered from computers completely, they may well become the sole computer devices used by these types of users. When you couple this potential trend with the observation that so-called emerging markets already use cell phones as the primary way to access the internet, we may be witnessing the emergence of the most important and pervasive computer device yet.

Fine-Tuning the Design Throttle

I've been reflecting on a phenomenon that I've observed that is characterized by a team coming up with a significantly improved design which is then met with strong negative feedback by users. What's puzzling is that the design itself is clearly far superior to the previous design but yet users are negative on it.

Facebook, for example, recently launched a brand new design that, in my view, is clearly superior in many ways yet I've witnessed predominantly negative feedback on it. This is despite, as I pointed out earlier in this blog, the fact that the Facebook design team sought out and received extensive feedback from users on particular design issues using its own tool. Similarly, Microsoft's new ribbon user interface represented a bold attempt to re-design their Office suite. It is clearly a significantly better design but when I use it, I often have to spend valuable time trying to find a function that used to be second nature for me to find with the old design. There are many more examples like this.

This seems to be happening more frequently lately. I suspect that we didn't see this as much years ago when visual and interaction design disciplines weren't as influential as they often are today. With that influence, though, comes the responsibility of determining how much improvement is just right, not too little and not too much. I'd like to propose that there is a "design delta threshold" beyond which teams shouldn't take their designs. This threshold mostly applies to products and systems that are used by many users for whom the design hasn't changed for a long time.

The best way to know whether you're exceeding the design delta threshold is likely not by carrying out isolated design feedback or user studies. These may not provide an overall sense of the changed user experience design. An Agile Development approach that involves the delivery of fully functioning subsets of the product or system and gathering user feedback on these progressive milestone versions of the evolving offering are likely the best way of determining whether the changed design is exceeding the magic threshold. Teams should be vigilant too in looking for evidence of exceeding the threshold and then racheting back the design to a level that is acceptable to users. At times, it may take a release or two extra to make the complete transformation in the design.

Those who have been around user experience design circles for many years I'm sure are please to see designers having a signficant impact and likely welcome, as do I, the new challenges of fine-tuning the design throttle in the ways outlined here.

A Mobile UI Innovation

Input and output on mobile hand held devices have been a challenge for years. Recent advances in these devices have dramatically increased the resolution of the output to the screen. Direct manipulation via multi-touch has also vastly improved the ability to interact with content on the screen. However, getting input into these devices has seen little improvement other than trying to get to parity with desktop and laptop devices. Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch introduced the software-based keyboard. Although this was novel in many ways, it didn't fundamentally address the problem of trying to type on a very small keyboard with fingers larger than the surface of the keyboard.

I recently came across a true innovation that cleverly addresses this problem. Shumin Zhai and his team at IBM Research have created WritingPad, a free app for the iPhone. The innovation here is that you don't simply tap out individual letters and correct each one as is the case with the default iPhone keyboard but, instead, you simply drag your finger across the WritingPad software keyboard contiguously and the system infers the words. Corrections are done at an individual word level rather than letters.

The other innovation here is how this research team is gathering user feedback on the design of the app. They provided it as a free app in the iTunes Store and with it's built in rating and commenting system, the team has been able to rapidly collect huge amounts of very valuable feedback. A quick read through the feedback indicates that this direction as a new method of providing input into a mobile hand-held device is a real hit and deserves more focus.

So, hats off to the IBM Research team for this design innovation and for an innovative way of collecting feedback on it. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and would like to try WritingPad for yourself, here's where to find it in the iTunes Store.

Designing the Perceptual Experience

I've been of the view for many years that visual design of software and industrial design of hardware have a much more powerful effect on us than virtually any other aspect of design. I've made that point in print and in presentations and workshops I've given at industry conferences over the years. However, this point of view has typically not been well-received by professionals who are not visual or industrial designers. In fact, some go to great pains to point out that ease of use is the most important attribute of design and that visual and industrial design are unnecessary or superfluous "eye candy" and others of course point out that function and speed are the most important attributes.

I believe that the experience of the past few years has reinforced the view that visual and industrial design trump virtually any other aspect of design. Our goal should be to optimize all aspects of design but never compromise visual and industrial design because these impact attributes of products and systems that directly effect our perception. Our perceptual experience with products and systems, in turn, drives satisfaction, purchase intent, and overall brand loyalty.

A great case study on this topic is Apple. While Apple does a reasonably good job in all aspects of design of it's products and systems, it really excels in visual and industrial design. It's market success is largely due to a maniacle focus on these attributes of design. I'd like to suggest that the halo effect that has been created for the company with it's focus on these aspects of design has made people much more forgiving of problems in other aspects of their products. Many of their products, for example, are not easier to use than those of competitors, people just perceive their products as easier to use. I regularly use a number of Apple products and, like most others, love using them. However, I've been more attentive recently to the ease of use problems I've been experiencing. There are many of these problems but, despite the fact that some are quite serious, I still on balance enjoy using these products. Interestingly, Apple products have recently experienced problems so serious as to make some products unoperational but the brand loyality they have built up still serves to keep customers coming back. The power and business value of designing the perceptual experience is amazingly strong.

I'd like to reiterate that our goal should be to optimize all aspects of design -- ease of learning, ease of use, usefulness, efficiency, user assistance, accessibility, globalization, etc. -- but we should never compromise visual and industrial design because these impact attributes of products and systems that directly effect our perception and color our perception of all of these other aspects of design.

Chrome: The Browser that Isn't

Earlier this week, Google entered the browser market with its shiny new offering called Chrome.  I don't know the derivation of the name but in design and engineering circles the non-content part of the browser is usually called the chrome.  If that is the derivation then they should have called it mini-Chrome because the design objective appears to have been to show as little chrome as possible.  I fully agree with this design objective and think that Google has accomplished it.

Interestingly, Google has also tried hard to make this browser a non-browser and it has met that objective too.  In application mode (which you get into by clicking on the page icon to the right of the address bar and selecting "Create Application Shortcuts") the browser really shines.  It has none of the browser elements (navigation buttons, address bar, etc.) but simply has a very small border around the web application display.  This makes web apps appear and behave like desktop apps.  That mode also creates a shortcut on the Windows desktop making the launch of any web apps the same as desktop apps.  Add to that the Google Gears replicating local data with the data in the cloud and you have desktop and web user experience parity along with all the advantages of having web apps with data available in the cloud.  Pretty cool.

Google has done some other cool enhancements to the user experience design.  Other browsers have a Google search bar (or two) together with the address bar.  Well, Google has combined these into a single entry field that acts like an address bar if a url is keyed in but acts as a Google search bar if non-urls are keyed in. Key in whatever you like and Google will deliver it to you. Pretty cool too.

In addition to these user experience enhancements, Chrome also delivers a number of additions under the covers including the isolation of web instances (tabs) so that when one site or app dies, it doesn't take down the entire set of browser instances.  There are also enhancements to the ways Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are handled optimizing their performance.

Google Chrome advances the state-of-the-art in user experience design.

Human-Human Computer Interaction

The term "Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)" has been used for years to describe the discipline concerned with improving computer technology for humans. All those years, the focus was on improving the ways in which humans could get information into and out of computer systems. Of course, that discipline is still going strong. However, with the advent of Web 2.0, I'd like to suggest that the term "Human-Human Computer Interaction" is more directly relevant.

I've written previously in this blog about various aspects of Web 2.0 and have made the point that much of so-called wisdom of crowds was really the wisdom of a few in the crowd. In other words, many of the Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, and Digg have contributions of content from less than one percent of their users. However, such is not the case with Web 2.0 sites and services that truly involve Human-to-Human connections. These include MySpace, Facebook, and perhaps the best example Twitter.

Twitter is a fascinating phenomenon. When you describe Twitter to someone, they invariably respond with something like, "I can't imagine why anyone would use that". They're of that view until they first try it and then they're hooked. Twitter essentially involves keying in 140 characters of text (that's right, no graphics) and allowing others to read what you write (followers) and you being able to read what others write (following). That's it, full stop.

So, what's the appeal? Human-to-human contact. Its really easy to access the service. In addition to using the website, you can text in your updates using your cell phone (if you're in North America), you can use various desktop applications (Twirl is my favorite), and you can use various iPhone/iPod Touch apps (Twitterrific is my favorite). And, its really easy to follow other people and have them follow you. What about the content, you say. Well, I follow industry leaders, news services, and friends. Many of those as well as people who listen to my podcasts follow me. I can stay current with current events and news by the minute as they unfold, read about websites and blog posts that people whom I follow recommend, and I get a personal insight into the lives of people whom I follow and the same goes for people who follow me.

What's interesting from a design point of view is that Twitter has virtually no user interface to speak of - just 140 characters of content. The important insight to take away from the huge success of this application/service is that it is fundamentally a really easy way to connect human-to-human in a way that people find it powerful and valuable. Lots of Web 2.0 technologies and tools try to deliver on this promise but most fail. The reason why this one hasn't is its amazing simplicity and its support of what makes us human.

If you'd like to try it for yourself, just go to www.twitter.com and sign up (its free of course). And if you'd like to follow me, I'm karelvredenburg on Twitter.

Dawn of a New UI

Many years ago, designers at Xerox, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM each contributed to what became the user interface standard for personal computers. Back then, issues like whether individual windows should overlap were hotly debated. Of course, all of that is now behind us and the basic elements of the user interface of personal computers are amazingly consistent. Sure there are some differences between OSX, Windows, and Linux systems but there are vastly more similarities than differences. Enhancements to these systems are also not dramatic. Such should be the case so that users can have a mental model of how these systems work and that mental model shouldn't change very often. Of course, there are some basic problems with each of these systems that nobody is willing to fix at this point because the standard is so ubiquitous. A number of details could have been changed quite dramatically in those very early days because users hadn't yet built up a mental model.

We're witnessing another major wave of this type of phenomenon right now. The introduction of the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 represent the beginnings of a new user interface standard for multi-touch mobile devices, and likely, multi-touch devices of all sorts in the future. It is therefore wise for all designers to explore and experience this new user interface for themselves. I've spent significant time with the new user interface and am of the view, consistent with many others, that the design is exemplary. It should be pointed out that the design is appropriate for the device it was designed for - the iPhone/Touch. I'm less sure that the design will be appropriate for other non-mobile devices that it may well be used for in the future. And remember that Apple has had difficulty in the past with successfully adapting and evolving designs such as was the case with the iPod when it started to include content in addition to music. If the experience with personal computer user interfaces is any indication, flaws in the designs of this new mobile user interface standard may have already been introduced and we have to live with them for a couple of decades.

Designing in Collaboration with 100,000 Users

MySpace is widely recognized as a user interface design mess. Facebook started out life as the clean and simple design alternative. However, with the addition of its development platform that created numerous 3rd party apps, the Facebook profile user interface has become more cluttered, unwieldy, and disorganized. Interestingly, recent stats from Nielsen indicate that Facebook traffic to the site is declining too.

The User Experience and Design team at Facebook has launched a major redesign. They're considering organizing the profile content using tabs, adding a new publisher feature for more simply adding content, and making navigation to applications easier via a drop-down menu. They don't plan on changing the site's visual signature, color palette, or branding. The design changes aren't radical but the approach to getting user input is. The team created a Facebook group within which they've been previewing proposed designs and then, using the commenting feature of Facebook, getting user feedback on them. There are 104,629 users in that group as of this writing and lots of them are providing valuable feedback. I think its brilliant that the team is using their own site to design the site.

The Facebook organization appears to be maturing given the way they're approaching this redesign. Previous changes to the site apparently didn't involve iterative design with user input and the results were disastrous.

I look forward to seeing and experiencing their redesign as an observer of their design as well as a daily user of Facebook itself.

For an in-depth report on this project, checkout BusinessWeek's recent story on Facebook's Big Facelift.

The 8 Billion Dollar Design Challenge

It has been estimated that advertisers will spend $8 billion this year on search engines. The companies on which this money will be spent are attempting to enhance their designs in order to compete in this market while at the same time having to balance the interests of users completing the search and advertisers wanting them to consider their products. Add to this, the rather dramatic changes in the content mix on the web with a greater volume of video and image material.

Google entered the market in 1998 and succeeded due to 1) superior search accuracy, 2) simplicity of its user interface, and 3) its ability to make advertising relevant to the search and insert it non-obtrusively in the search results. This is really a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) success story. Providing users what they want in a way that they want and incorporating the business model for Google seamlessly into the user experience by making it relevant and minimalist. It is truly HCI brilliance!

However, the vastly increased importance of the online platform for advertising (as witnessed by the recent takeover bids of search companies) and the new media formats on the web have created a design challenge for companies in the search engine business. In a recent article entitled Gunning for Google, author Matt Vella summarizes the key design challenges and what the major companies are doing to address them.

The Wisdom of a Few in the Crowd

Much has been made of Web 2.0's wisdom of crowds and the notion that the new read-write web is the ultimate democratic everyone can contribute nirvana. When you run a Web 2.0 site, which I have, you quickly learn that things don't really work that way. Lots and lots of people may visit and use the site but very few actually contribute. You then spend some time pondering how your Web 2.0 site could be so different from all the other Web 2.0 sites out there but if you also do a bit of digging, you find out that they're all like that. Less than one percent of all visitors to Web 2.0 sites actually contribute anything! Turns out that that very small number of very dedicated people do a lot to contribute, hence the title above "the wisdom of a few in the crowd". What's even more interesting to learn, though, is how the big Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Wikipedia actually work. Slate Magazine recently ran a really interesting article, Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy that examines several different models of contribution and governance that are being used at the various sites.

Designing for the World

When we think of designing products for global markets, we often just think of translation, unicode, and other language-related issues. With the increasing importance of visual and interaction design, it is also becoming important to ensure the design of products is appropriate to various cultural preferences and sensibilities.

We've been aware of this opportunity at IBM for some years based especially on our experience with using our design centers around the world for the design of systems and websites for the Olympics. Each Olympics requires that the hosting country be responsible for a good chunk of developing systems for it. What we quickly discovered was that visual designs originating from certain countries were very different and sometimes differed significantly from North American preferences and sensibilities. It can therefore be quite a challenge to determine the best style to choose. Of course, that isn't any different from the other design decisions that need to be made based on user input. The point is though that this is another important factor to consider in design. It is also a great source of novel ideas to influence innovative design. A recent article in Fox Business reports Nokia Opens Satellite Design Studio in Rio de Janeiro and outlines Nokia's use of its world-wide design studios for the design of its future products.

Advances in User Interfaces

Many of us have been going to professional conferences like CHI for many years and seeing technology demos and other research into novel new advanced user interfaces. However, we typically go back to computers with their screens, keyboards, and mice. Although that environment is likely to be the optimal one for many people doing many of the things they do with computers now, it doesn't have to be the case for some edge type uses. I, like others, have been delighted to finally see some of that university research technology getting into products recently. The best examples are the Nintendo Wii and Apple's iPhone. Both use gesture as a primary input mechanism and do it really well. You know that a paradigm shift is happening when you can't just read about or watch someone else using one of these devices; you have to experience it for yourself. The first game you play on the Wii and the first time you flick your way through stuff on an iPhone, you've got it. Its a different experience entirely. I think this is an exciting development in the area of advanced user interfaces and one worthy of following - and one worth following first hand yourselves!

Read more in an interesting article Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine in the New York Times.

Well-Designed UIs Critical in Enterprise Software Buying

An article on Wallstreet Online reports on a recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting on the importance of user interface design on enterprise purchase decisions. The study found that 82 percent of those who make purchase decisions consider an enterprise software application's user interface a determining factor when deciding to replace their enterprise software and 90 percent indicated the user interface as a priority when purchasing additional new software. This corroborates recent conversations I've had with people in large enterprises as well. I think this indicates two things. First, that user interface design is becoming much more important and we're starting to see actual numeric validation of it.

I would argue that users have seen the importance of good user interface design for a long time and this has resulted in us seeing better and better designed products for the consumer market. Remember that the user and the purchase decision-maker are typically one and the same in the consumer market. However, that is not typically the case in the enterprise market where users are not normally the decision-makers too. It has therefore taken longer for the importance of good design to be realized by enterprise decision-makers. However, this study and recent experiences I've had indicate that the importance of good UI design is now not only realized by enterprise purchase decision-makers but it is also seen as critical to them in making their decisions.

The substantive findings here are important but also the fact that they exist at all. Studies like this that examine the importance of design to business have in the past been all too few. We need more applied research like this investigating and quantifying the business importance of design.

Introducing the UXDesignCast Podcast Series!

I've been doing webcasts for many years and also podcasts for the past year inside IBM. A number of colleagues from across the industry asked me to consider starting an external podcast series. I thought it was a great idea as it would give me a chance to broaden the user experience and design specialists I can include in the sessions and, of course, broaden the audience of listeners.

The series will includes interviews with user experience and design practitioners from a cross-section of the industry. I will also feature a monthly panel discussion during which a panel of specialists will survey and discuss recent news, technologies, and research in the field of user experience and design.

You can access and subscribe to the podcast directly from the iTunes Store by searching on "UXDesignCast" or you can go to my podcast blog at karelvredenburg.podbean.com. Of course, the podcast is free and will be published approximately once a week.

Demographic Design Targeting

Increasingly, concepts from other fields are turning out to be relevant to contemporary approaches to design. It used to be the case that target marketing meant choosing which magazine your company would advertise its products in. However, now with everyone online, targeting also affects design. What's really interesting about this trend is that it is perhaps the most conservative industry, banking, that is breaking new ground here.

A recent article in Bank Systems Technology outlines how several banks are including social computing Web 2.0 features in the design of their web presence. They're doing it to appeal to a younger demographic and also to provide those customers a user interface experience that they're familiar with - including AJAX-based responsive Rich Internet Application user interfaces as well as blogging and commenting. It is also interesting that this trend tends to be more advanced in Canada. I think all designers should take note that the demographics like age are important to factor into their design work. While some may have done that previously, the new trend suggests that demographic design targeting may be key to addressing core business objectives increasingly being articulated by business stakeholders.

Web 2.0's Built-in Customer Input & Collaboration

During Web 1.0 and before that, companies had to go out of their way to collect feedback from their customers and when they did, it was in the form of customers communicating directly with the company. Web 2.0 changes all of that. Now customer feedback is an integral component of most social computing sites. And, the feedback is public. This provides great benefits to companies by getting more direct and regular feedback but it also changes the nature of the feedback process in that customers can also use the feedback from other customers directly as well. An article by Vicky Burger on Web 2.0 transformation addresses this topic.

However, things are not quite the way you may think they are in the world of social computing. Very few people are aware of a recent study which shows that less than one percent of visitors to social computing sites contribute in any way including providing feedback whether comments or ratings. So, the challenge here is that companies are now able to get additional feedback directly from customers but they may run in to two problems. The first is that unless the site gets a huge number of hits, the amount of feedback the site may collect will likely be very small (remember less than 1% contribute). The second, and perhaps even more difficult to deal with, problem concerns the likelihood of the sample being unrepresentative in some way. I haven't seen any research on characteristics of users who tend to contribute to sites versus those who don't and without that type of information it is difficult to determine whether the feedback a company gets in this way is representative or biased in some way.

Companies that are serious about making strategic decisions on the bases of direct customer feedback coming from Web 2.0 sites would be wise to adopt the best practice from market research of directly testing the non-response bias. The way that's done is to solicit input on the same questions from people who didn't contribute the information unsolicited and then comparing the results to test for a systematic bias. Without a specific focus on this aspect of Web 2.0 user feedback, companies could find themselves honing the designs of their sites based on the feedback of the small group of people who contribute feedback and these changes may not be optimal for the entire population of users who the company is trying to satisfy.