UX News Round-Up
Engagement in Web Metrics
Print advertisers buy space. Broadcast advertisers buy time. We used to measure the success of online ads by page views. The Washington Post this week suggests that given multi-tasking users and the rise of development techniques like Ajax, a better measure of success would be to develop new metrics, like “engagement”–a way to “’see’ what applications or sites users are interacting with”, not just how long a page was open on screen. Then, not only would the metrics help publishers and developers “do a better job of giving consumers the kind of Web content they want,” they would also provide a “direct means of [user] feedback about how [they] spend their most precious resource online — their time.”
Against Design Thinking, Towards Politics
A recent article in In These Times takes to task the notion of design thinking as a ‘cure to social ills’. Likening design thinking to the modernist design movement of the last century–out of which emerged such failures as the Chicago high-rise public housing projects–author Alix Rule criticizes ‘design thinking’ as a “naive progressivism” which relies on a “moment in the pursuit of social good that hardly ever arrives: when all the hearts are in the right place, all opinions have been brought into line and all that needs to happen is the change itself.”
While Rule admits that the design thinking of this century differs from the “arrogant and antidemocratic” design thinking of the last century by being “user-centered and participatory”, the point is “if the model has intellectual benefits, it’s doubtful they outweigh the deficiencies of ignoring the long process by which consensus is built: a.k.a. politics.”
Despite Rule’s castigation of design thinking’s pragmatism, as CNET blogger Tim Leberecht points out, Rule’s argument “disregards the impact of incrementalism, of those baby-steps and micro-innovations which may…instigate change on a mundane, practical level.”
MySpace Social Networking Safety Standards
Monday, MySpace announced a set of safety standards aimed at protecting minors. For the past year, MySpace has been under fire as “a towering danger to kids” from the “Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking”, a growing organization of state Attorney Generals. The plan has four “pillars” standardizing content review, parental tools, online law enforcement, and internal safety taskforces. The safety standards are designed as industry standards.
Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.
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