I wrote this for a lovely (and good) singer I met in Brussels a few weeks ago. I was interested to see that she didn’t really do any personal marketing. It was her thoughts that to become famous she’d need to impress someone upstairs and so I wrote her this email:

Your general goals
This is a guess but based on our short conversation
-Get more gigs in and around Benelux
-Build your own reputation with your fans

The goals of a venue
Any venue wants more people, if when looking for bookings you can say you have a mailing list of 10/100/1000/10000 fans that you can email and get down your chances of getting that booking and indeed increasing what you’re worth (fee) will be in your favour.

The goals of a fan
When I hear someone I like, I want to know when they’re performing and where as well as who I might bring along. An email everytime you get a booking updating me would be really nice.

What an email mailing list can achieve
You want to satisfy both your fans and your venue. Your fans enjoy your music and hearing what you’re doing, where you’re singing and ideally where they might even be able to download or buy your music for their little ipods.

Look at this email:
Hi, I’ll be singing this week at [Bar name], it’s a really nice bar near the tram museum. They serve good food and it’s a perfect place to bring a date. Make sure you phone chalks the owner and book a table on this number: 02/…, say I sent you See you there x Diwa!

A fan gets your endorsement on where they can go for dinner and take a friend/partner and they think by saying your name they’ll have more chance of actually getting the booking. The bar gets table bookings and every time one of your fans phone up they say Diwa sent them, the venue (if a restaurant in this case, you could do different things for different types of venue) knows that you’re bringing in a crowd with you and you’ll immediately become much more important in their eyes.

How to do a mailing list?
Simple an A4 piece of paper that you let people write their name and email address on. You tell the manager of the bar when they book your, or on the night, that you’ll be putting out a piece of paper near the door where people can write down their details. You tell them that you’re doing this at all of your gigs and that every time they book you’ll send out an email to your list and that they’ll get the benefit of all of your fans and get new clients.

Then at the end of the gig you tell the audience, in a nice friendly way, that if they want to know more about you to checkout your homepage and that if they want to hear about all the great gigs you sing at to put their names on a mailing list that you either have at the back or get a few friends to hand out and collect.

You could then tell them that if they want your personal contact details to see you at the end and that you’ll give them one of your personal cards. This means that anyone who is a really big fan or was impressed will come and speak to you and you can get their details as well as see if they might be interested in bookings, gigs or even helping you out.

There’s a great (free to start with) app/site called www.mailchimp.com which you can use to send your mailing list from.

Update 1
You could even give away a cd with a free recording for the people who come up to see you personally.

Blog/twitter/myspace/facewho?
Most people above the age of 18 (myself included) either don’t know what myspace is and/or don’t want to know what it is. The majority of people also understand ‘mailing list’ whereas they don’t really understand blog/twitter/myspace/facewho?

You need to make it really really easy for any normal, non-geek to get to you. I’d suggest that you set-up a page with www.posterous.com. It’s a very simple, clean and easy to use blogging platform to put up photos, videos and blog entries and with a very little bit of work you can collect email addresses from people as well as make yourself appear under useful search results like ‘Soul singer Belgium’

MySpace
There are no contact details here, how do I contact you for bookings/keep up to date. In fact I don’t think it even mentions that I could book you.

Domain Name
Giving out www.myspace.com/[singer name] is all and great but www.singername.com or similar would be alot easier/more professional and only cost ~€10/yr

Twitter
This isn’t essential I think you need to get the basics before you really focus on this but as it takes all of 3 minutes to set-up and add to your blog/myspace/business card/mention at shows, you have no excuse not to get it even if you only ever post once a week/month on there. Eventually you’ll build up a great channel to your fans that you can use to have conversations with them and another channel to talk about your shows in.

Additional points
I just remembered we talked about collaborations/working in bands and all that. One of your goals was to do more of that and become better known within those people. I’d suggest that soundcloud.com is the best place to start. It’s where most switched on bands/djs/producers hangout and post their work. You could even start a regular monthly show on mixcloud.com, again for free..
Follow people you’d like to work for, they’ll probably follow back and regularly post recordings of your vocals and eventually someone will come knocking..

This email has turned out to be a little bit longer than I expected and I think I’ll post it on my blog as it looks like quite good advice. If you want to catch up for a beer I think everything above can be set-up within in around an hour or two and I’d be happy to give you a hand. My thoughts (and that of many others) are that if you want to become famous, the community of fans starts at 1 and you have to go from there.

Let me know when you’re next down and I’ll drop in and say hi!

Cheers, Duncan

I thought I would share my results from a quick experiment written up in A-level style science experiment. I did in my own home with the help of a normal Dell computer, a regular mother and some internet.

Note: This is a long post ~2k words and is intended for anyone who is involved with designing webapps and or is interested about how badly they are designed for normal people. In this case it’s about Twitter which is unique in that there are some conceptual barriers that people must first grasp before they are able to properly make use of the service.

Why did I do it?

-I was asked to design the user flow for a web-app for normal people, i.e. anyone off the street who has some digital experience. Maybe even an iphone (more on this point later).
-This article on user flows which explains how a hotel pre-empted all of the actions a guest might take before, during and after a shower
-Listening to this interview about a twitter consultant who has and still does spend a long time explaining Twitter to people and also founded oneforty.com
-I wrote out all of the steps involved (below) in joining twitter and found that I had some questions as to a users expectations of what would happen next and wanted to understand if they had all of the context required to take the decisions necessary to use twitter.
-Discovery of a new twitter client mixero and the realisation that Tweetdeck and most clients are great for people who know but not for those who don’t
-A common knowledge that people who are not in tech land or over the age of 18 find it hard or that it takes time for them to ‘get’ twitter and similar services like Dailybooth

My hypothesis

That my user would not have sufficient context, explanation or experience in order to take the right decisions to get themselves up and running properly.



My Candidate

-Primary school teacher
-Educates children weekly on how to use computers, i.e. login, browse and access learning materials
-User and evangelist of interactive whiteboards at school of 3k+ students
-Uses Google, Gmail, Facebook, Outlook, MsOffice, Chrome (tabbed browsing) and apps she buys online or on a CD
-Has heard of Twitter through the Radio (Terry Wogan) the TV and my sister (@kirstymalcolm)

Method

I asked the user to sign-up to Twitter, my goal was to prompt as little as possible and only intervene when the user is at a dead end and close to giving up. The user without prompting also spoke what they were thinking almost as if it were subconscious which helped enormously with the results

The Twitter sign up process & some questions

• User visits site
• Context: User is interested in the service/value in the site and clicks register/sign-up
• User clicks register
• Question: Does user now expect to have to fill in some details?
• User fills in fname, sname, displayname, email, password
• Question 1: What does user expect when they click register?
• User gets directed to an initiation process with three clearly laid out steps
• Step 1: User gets directed to suggested user list & selects people to follow
• Step 2: User is prompted/offered to find friends through uploading contact lists & selects people to follow
• Step 3: User is prompted/offered to find friends through search & selects people to follow & clicks finish
• Context: What does user expect when they click finish?
• User is presented with feed and main page

Results

First visit to the site

• User arrives on site, reads information and realises that they are being prompted to search something, sees the suggested terms in the bottom row and asks ‘What do I want to know about?’

-At this stage the user does not realise twitter is something they join or how they might contribute to it

• User types in a google style question

-The user has had no instructions on how to search on twitter or how it is different to a regular contextual search engine

• Gets search results
• Clicks on a user icon
• Expects an article not updates

-User is still in search engine mode

• ‘Don’t want updates’ – Question: What did you expect: ‘Not what I expected to see’
• User doesn’t understand, goes back to the beginning and decides the question was too complex
• User searches ‘Andy Murray’
• Clicks a bit.ly link, gets taken offsite to a spamy page, now offsite & confused

-User does not realise that they are off page or that they have accidentally taken a dead-end route

• I prompt user to close the offsite tab and return to original search results tab

-User expected ‘chatter’ and still doesn’t understand that the search results are the chatter

• Searches my name & doesn’t find anything

-User is beginning to give up

The signup process
After this initial experience I prompted the user not to give up hope but they should sign up for an account. They hadn’t thought to do this in the first instance but went on to the sign-up process by clicking the Sign-up link in the header.

Signup form

• Enter name, easy

-User is unaware of privacy issues and as they are a teach I suggest that they just use their first name rather than putting a full name

• Username, very hard ~3 minutes

-The user was completely stuck as to what they should name themselves. They understood that this would be a public name and wanted something that related to them/they could relate to, that wasn’t silly and that was sufficiently anonymous. After a few minutes I suggested firstname followed by an initial would be both them but also anonymous. This was taken, after a quick thought and no suggestion from twitter, they then added two initials in reverse order.

• Email, password & catchpa easy and without prompting they would have left the newsletter radiobox ticked

-At this stage just before they clicked the submit button I asked question 1: ‘What do you expect to see next’. Their response was a screen that says ‘Welcome to Twitter’ and that they would be in the application. From the next stage I think that they were in form filling and instruction following mode.
-The user acually got a fail whale here, when they re-logged in they didn’t get the usual process users get to find people and also more importantly didn’t know that they had missed it. I had to kill their account and re-create it to get them to the next step.

• User starts to browse categories and understands that they are there to find people and follow them without prompting

-Later on I discovered that they wondered if the people minded if they were being followed, clearly here there was no context for them to understand that everyone knows that their data is public (perhaps they don’t know either?).

• ‘Where do I search for people?’ – User expects to have to scroll through all of the results to find who they want and knows that this could take some time, also ‘They’re all American’

-At no point is it explained to the user that they will go through a 3 stage discovery process nor is it indicated in the guidance above that they will have the opportunity to search for people. They also wanted localised context for the users they wanted to follow and didn’t want to follow any of the us tennis stars, comedians or politicians. I prompt them to try clicking next as they are running out of steam they want some results.

• User gets the find people you know window and says ‘I don’t want to find people I know’

-As there is no ‘I don’t want to do this’ button the user assumes that they have to. Again prompt to try next button

• User misses the search box and clicks next and lands on their Twitter page

-At this stage I thought back to when they were looking at the categories and were trying to find Terry Wogan but couldn’t. I suggested that they click back and try to find him.

• User sees the search box (was too small and they missed it first time) searches for Terry, finds him and clicks on their profile image rather than on follow

-The profile image and links shouldn’t really be active here as it adds confusion to the whole thing, they want to follow so why have all the rest active, there is an argument that they might want to go and see if it’s the right person but that’s countered by the fact that they will be greated by a screen/view they don’t understand anyway.

• User follows Terry and clicks next. They remark that they can only see Stephen Fry posts

-There’s no guide as to what an ideal minimum of people someone should follow in the sign-up process. Currently if there was they probably wouldn’t be able to find enough relevant tweeps anyway. I suggested that the user search for me and my sister.

• User searches for my name in the twitter search box on the right and doesn’t gets some non-relevant tweets
  -The user assumes that they can find people by searching in a search box which is normal, perhaps having a button which says Find People next to it would clear up the confusion or this might be isolated.

  The user went on to find my sisters profile and follow them. Overall they now seem to understand that a user page has all of the things a user has said and that their page shows people they are following.
  -They are not aware of how best to discover people
  -They don’t know what a @reply is or a RT
  -They are not aware that there are apps that they can use on twitter

  


  Conclusion

  There are an alarming number of things that my user found hard to use in this sign-up process. The service is not dis-similar to alot of others out on the web but they seemed to lack guidance and context at a couple of main junctions and on occasion were given too many or not enough options to choose from.

  Contexts/Missing links/User assumptions/Problems
  Searching – They didn’t understand that they were searching for keywords in what people were saying
  Tweets – They didn’t know that the tweets were tweets or that they are limited to 140 characters
  Post Signup User discover – The process was not spelt out to them and that lead to confusion on the first page when looking for people
  First user discovery page – The users first conclusion was that it was poorly designed and that they would have to browse through lots of results to find the one people that they had thought of which they started to do.
  Not enough options – Some parts the user wanted to skip and may have pulled out there is obviously a balance between driving behaviour and dropout and I don’t know enough about Twitters to know which is the most beneficial to them
  Too many options – The user got confused when they thought they were following people and ended up opening peoples twitter pages.
  Layout once signed up/first sign-in – Little or no guidance as to what to click on, or what steps to take next.

  


  Finally

  This has been a very interesting experiment and experience and will definitely shape how I define user sign up, flows and first touch experiences. I will be looking to make them so that no only the technically savy can use apps but also those who are new or who never will be pin-sharp. I hope you find it useful and will pass it on to other people who might also find it useful.

  I leave you with this: Having been to a recent meetup in Belgium about Facebook a new iphone user asked ‘Can I get the facebook app on my iphone’. They didn’t realise despite having bought (and here you have to buy @ €430/piece) that they could download apps and didn’t know how to. So just because someone is an ‘iphone user’ does not mean they know how to use their iphone.

  


  Additional notes/Update:

  Since I published this last night I’ve had a few additional thoughts around the usability and priming users with enough context to follow the intended behaviour pattern. The information below is less structured but is focussed on the solution rather than the conclusion.

  A key overlooked point from the first post
  -When my user followed her daughter she did not realise that the user would probably get an email saying that she was following her, this led them to feeling as if they were stalking and made them feel uncomfortable as they perceive this as spying. At no point were they primed to know that this would happen
  -Another user who I was talking to who was using the service only realised a month after they had signed up that if they follow people legitimately that there was an increased chance that the person they followed would follow them back
  -My user thought that they were using/on twitter when they were searching and it was not indicated that they should use keywords vs keyphrases/questions

  Typical questions that from social network users considering twitter
  Q: What are the benefits to me?
  A: Twitter is different things to different people. Having read the post from Both sides of the Table this morning we can safely say that the geeks and techies know how to use it for what they need which is sharing information and contacting people within their social circles. Normal people associate online publishing with celebrities and people they want to hear more about probably on a National (Country based celebrities e.g. Terry Wogan), Local celebrities i.e. Boris Johnson and super local i.e. local councillor, PTA rep and so on.

  Q: Why would I want to have random people hear what I say?
  A: You probably don’t but once you realise that you can add to the conversation by replying to people you may want to contribute and join the conversation.

  Q: Why would I want to listen to random people?
  A: This is a question I asked myself while writing this, my user actually had an idea. They wanted to follow celebrities. People know about twitter from others who are on it talking about it.

  Q: Who would I listen to and follow?
  A: People I know but don’t have access to i.e. celebrities

  There are also some considerations for Twitter
  -They want users to publish as this increases content and drives interaction/growth
  -They want users to follow and discover people as this also drives interaction/growth

  The reality
  -Twitter is an easy to maintain personal blogging space that as a result of its limit on characters requires very little effort to maintain and thus doesn’t have the expectation which people associate with writing a normal blog.
  -Most people are now beginning to understand the idea that they can have blogs and if they have a good enough reason such as sharing their world travelling that a blog would be a good way to share this information.
  -Microblogging: Most people don’t understand this term.
  -People are curious about twitter

  Priming
  Before throwing a user into a twitter feed they need some additional priming and context that is currently not being achieved. Web design is trying to override the needed guidance through design and ‘usability’. This clearly works with things like door handles which we are taught to use and interact with from a very young age, email which is similar to sending a letter and even Facebook which mimics real life relationships and bonds.

  While twitter does mimic real life relationships the relationship behaviour is not shown or understood by all and the benefits are certainly not communicated. I would liken it most to relationships between children; easily made, broken and repaired. Users might find it easier if they were simply told:

  -When you post a tweet it is public like newspapers
  -People you follow are notified by email & might follow you back
  -You can reply to someone by adding an @ before their display name and it will appear in their feed
  -Follow people who you know or want to know about
  -You can use other applications to access twitter

  Further points that are not essential at entry but useful to know
  -People don’t get an email when you unfollow and won’t care (much)
  -You can protect your tweets

  While these final points of information are not conclusive and require the user to do further research they are breadcrumbs which are needed to get tweeting. The same principles apply to any applications which are introducing new concepts to a normal audience.

Most of what I’ve read about Boxee has been about what it does and not what impact it will have. I foresee a small potential bump in the road not for the people over at Boxee but in your living room. The issue relates not to software or hardware but more to over specialised/niche content. If we ignore for a minute the eager cutting edge of society I think most average households will find boxee a very strange presence.

Up until now most living room content has been created for the masses. This means that if over Christmas I turn on the telly, across the few hundred channels I get there will be something that I and anyone else of all ages and interests in the room will find vaguely interesting.
If I’ve been organised I might bring up something I saved earlier off my Skybox/TiVo, even then the content saved is still probably acceptable by most as it was created with that in mind..

This Christmas I hooked up a computer to the family TV and showed them the delights of Boxee and we watched a few programs. There was however one problem. Nothing I wanted to watch interested them. While 20 minutes of entertaining YouTube videos was good, it wasn’t particularly relaxing although was good to get everyone talking about what they’d seen last year.

Yes there will inevitably be an iPlayer and a Hulu and all the other mainstream shows that we find on the TV. And yes it’s a great victory against the current living room gatekeepers. It will however I suspect lead to people getting into more niche shows and really fighting for the remote.

What I can guarantee is, is that when I want to sit down and watch Drawn Together when I get back from work there will be a fight over the remote.

Background
Towards the end of 2008 according to Techcrunch, Boxee raised $4m to build their socially networked media centre built on the open source XMBC software.

Since they’ve successfully partnered with D-Link to provide you with an inexpensive sub $200 media centre for your home. I think that the whole thing is going to be great and I will be first in the midnight queue wherever they’re being given out.