I paid a visit to my old friends at Commtouch this week. I worked for Commtouch for a few years and I follow their progress since. Commtouch is a unique example of a Company that managed to work a great turn around following the bubble burst. They transitioned years of large scale hosted email experience to a unique state of the art spam filtering and virus outbreak detection technology which enables them to be way ahead of the pack in speed and accuracy of detection. They have now put together profitability, positive cash flow and consistent growth. 

Anyway, the complexity of spam development has led me to yet another idea I will never get to - human spam filtering. Imagine how great it would be to simply filter people. A few things I would greatly appreciated getting filtered or blocked are:

1. Filtering mothers in law directly to the voice mail, especially if it’s the 3rd time and above they call during a 24 hour span. Prior detection of an anticipated call can be sold for a high premium.

2. TV Commercials - there must be a way to stop those and filter those. I can’t stand Yogurt commercials for example. Does anyone really believe that a yogurt drink is the key to siempre vida?

3. TV and radio commentators - I hear so many opinions every day! Many about subjects I don’t care about from people I don’t want to hear from. At least not often.

4. Cab drivers. Silence…please!

5. My neighbors. Silence…please!

Anyway, you get the point. Solve one of the five and you’re exit bound. 

      

Like most Israeli conferences the W.U.D started late. Over the past 10 years, I participated in who knows how many venues and I can’t recall ONE that started, proceeded or ended on time. Anyone in Israel care to rebuttal? Is it unique to this area?Anyway - I am not here to complain. Far from it. The World Usability Day (Israeli Venue) was well organized and educational. One of my colleagues, Amnon Dekel who is the VP User Experience at TriPlay (the company I co-founded) gave a very insightful lecture on the usability of smart phones. Does smart = usable? Good question – u can check out my own experiences in a previous post. Anyway a few worthy notes from the conference:Some great sentence which makes you understand the company is in “usability trouble”: + when the CEO/VP MARKETING etc. says “As a user…” he talks sh#@. We are never the users, we never were, we never will be. For consumer/mass market online services, we (the software development / start-up / u name it) are the most biased group of freaks who represent no one but ourselves. + “Internal testing shows….” – shows what??? That QA liked it?, the engineer who worked on the damn thing for 6 months understands how it works?. Don’t fall into that trap. If you want to know what people think - ask real people.

+ During registration the audience was handed out with 3 color papers – Red, Green and Yellow. These came in handy during an interactive panel discussion in which the audience voiced their opinion using the Green-Red-Yellow papers. Green for AGREE/GOOD; Red for Don’t AGREE/NOT GOOD and yellow being the undecided. We used it to ‘group comment’ on anything from Skype’s user interface to the interface of ticket machines in train stations. Guess what, it works! This is a great way to have large crowds participate without causing a big mess while gaining instant feedback.

+ Usability people (in general) are tormented by the fact that in most companies, the engineers call the shots. Usability people are used to being called in to clean up the mess before launch or after a dreadful release. Otherwise they are usually no more influential then Director level and are way over powered by CIO’s, CTO’s, VP R&D etc. While this is (mostly) true I say stop whining. Its up to us (usability experts…or as in my case, usability advocate) to stir up more mess and punch some sense into the ‘masses’. If we are such usability experts, I’m sure we can find an effective way.

+ Using images such as the below is a great way to drive the ‘usability argument’ home. Look at the two pictures below and think which store you would rather buy your next PC from and have a better experience doing it (leading to up-sale, second time purchase etc.). If its so obvious in retail, why don’t people think the same about online services?

+ Why do social networks work? – who are the idiots that write blogs , contribute to Wikipedia, etc. Why do they do it? what drives them? And most importantly how can we know it’s just not going to all of a sudden…stop? This is an extremely interesting and important subject to understand. Anyone dealing with the web 2.0 / social media world should get a basic grasp of the social participation phenomenon – Prof. Shizaf Refaeli’s gave a speech about his recent research. Check out the “publications” section on his home page - http://sheizaf.rafaeli.net/

+ My own 2 cents - Launching is a very important part of your usability study – you will never gain complete insight before. Thinking that academic, endless usability “due process” will result in flawless delivery is a misconception. Running fast, making mistakes and fixing them is better. If you want to know how to do it – you MUST read Getting Real by 37Signals. Its available for free reading at https://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php That’s it for now. More notes would make this post unusable. I will make a quick update once UPA Israel post the day’s presentations online.