Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Monday 3 November 2008, 7:11 AM
Can we measure digital mood?
Simple things like colour contrast may not seem too important to you - but if you are colour blind then use of reds and greens suddenly become a whole lot more important. Keynote says its monitoring technologies provide a useful insight in the way sites are used so that they can be refined and, well, made a bit better.
The interesting thing here is that if a site is improved from an accessibility perspective, the upshot is that usage is generally improved for all users not just blind or hearing impaired people, or those with motor or cognitive challenges that they need to overcome.
Let's go one step further then and talk not just about user experience measurement in this quite basic sense - can we also determine the digital mood people experience when online?
'Free image use: Wikimedia Commons
Behavioural analytics player SeeWhy Software reckons they have a customer experience system that can track an individual’s digital mood resulting from their ecommerce experience. The idea of course is to track what happened to customers who have been affected by poor online sessions and serve those folks better next time around.
SeeWhy says that, “With dozens of potential causes of poor performance, the online experiences of different customers can vary significantly, so only by measuring actual experiences can an organisation reliably assess quality. Measuring individual customers’ online experiences in real time is the only way to optimise customer service and head off web application performance issues before they affect the business.”
This type of measurement is carried out a range of best practice key performance indicators (KPIs) such as page errors, page load times and abandonment of critical processes.
OK, so they’re definitely trying to be cute with their whole “online mood” idea, but they may have something up their sleeve here. Any period spent shopping online surely leaves you feeling good, bad or indifferent. But that’s usually a result of whether the site has been designed well enough to process your transaction without an endless stream of silly menus.
Again, it comes back to the experience of the individual while online and we’re all different aren’t we?
PreviousComments on this post
Hi Adrian.....I like the idea, and maybe it could stretch to improving the online experience of the partialy sighted with sound signatures/textures for links, and with voice text readers haivng been available for some time, making use of this technology could give a valid web experience for the blind as well.
For instance; with a good pair of headphones, soft texture type sounds could be used to flag the position of the mouse pointer/changing position=changing sound, the link would be asigned another sound.
Titles and text identifiers would be more tricky, but I'm sure that could be overcome. Maybe the voice synthesiser could just speak out as it passes over text or could be configured to summarise content.
Digital Mood: I think this is where an emotion reader would come in handy (they're not far away) You could have an infared type impression of the body, or go down the sound/colour route.
You should have seen mine when I found out windows seven can run on an intel atom (which also means microsoft could persuade those pesky pentium 4 laptops that won't die to up to W7). And that you can create or change the size of a disk partition on the fly.
The details are here in windows weekly episode 81.
http://twit.tv/ww
Hey Roger,
Liked that link http://twit.tv/ww...
But hang on, still got my head in this whole disability thing - it's so hard to know what to say and whether we can even use the D word anymore. I heard a great line from a blind guy presenting on this subject who said that he didn't like the term visually impaired as it could be taken as meaning that someone had ugly face...
It's such a big subject - blind users (in my VERY limited experience) generally say that although Windows has done great things for accessibility... Mac OS rocks pretty good. If I highlight this block of text on this page as I type and then hold CTRL down, I can have the whole lot read straight out from the on-screen menu that pops right up. But you probably know that.
I think we need to plug all of our senses into all of what we do all of the time - that way all experiences are heightened... for example:
BBC STORY
... that said, VR headsets give you headache don't they? Although, the last one I used was to play DOOM with a 3D mouse!
Hi Adrian.
"Disabled" is the correct term to use in the eyes of our government. Handicapped is not OK.
I didn't know that about the mac. Good for apple on that one. Now that I listen to mac break weekly on TWiT I do look forward to digging deeper on the mac. So far I've only used them for playing around with logic audio.
That BBC story about the food was interesting. Yes we are sensory creatures, and in my mind the ultimate wet wire systems.
Not tried a VR headset but it's funny you mention doom 'cos I've been hearing noises about doom and quake on silverlight although I can't find any evidence to support this on the web.
Hmmmm....interesting....would love to comment on this as it's right up my alley but the value of the IP offered would be far too valuable to give away for nix.
Do you actually require help with this or is it merely conversation?
TFD
Thanks for your comments guys...
Just chewing the fat on it really. I have all the info I need from having been in touch with the very superb people at:
http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/
They highlight the availability of a two piece keyboard for people with carpal tunnel syndrome, they call it the "lift and separate" keyboard.
AdrianB
