UsableMarkets - markets, design, usability, research

Zignals is a rather new site that I came across recently. They provide charting and alerts services for individuals looking to analyze stock price movement. One of their supposed highlights is their interactive charting … which they provide using Silverlight.

For those of you who aren’t running screaming from the room at the mention of Silverlight, I will expend a bit of extra effort to talk about the charting on Zignals. In short, it’s extremely clunky, and not necessarily something that you can’t get anywhere else.

Many of the features are hidden away — it took me several minutes to discover where I could add Bollinger Bands, and that by accident — and the mouse over actions are weird, leading to that frustrating experience of moving your mouse to read something, and then having the whole layer disappear because your mouse is no longer over the specified area.

I also found that once I used the panel to add some Bollinger Bands that I could not close it for the life of me.

The maddening thing about Zignals is that it does look interesting, but the usability is just plan awful. Just try and recover a password, I dare you.

Once the panel is opened, you can never close it

~alex

The Economist has an excellent piece about medical tourism (or the future of health care, as some might say).

If you don’t want to read the article, here is the UsableMarkets “hot points” (thanks Health Populi):

• The quality of health care in some emerging countries (India, Thailand, etc.) now rivals that in the US, and other established economies.
• It’s also cheaper there than here
• So people are going for surgeries, and more, saving money, and having good experiences
• This new competition may indeed improve the price of heath care in the good ol’ US of A
• And this new source of income certainly doesn’t hurt the emerging countries that can provide this

It looks more like this …

… than this

~alex

Nice blog entry by Ethan Zuckerman on his blog (my heart’s in accra) about a recent ethnography research report the AP commissioned to better understand how young people digest news:

One interesting snippet for you to snack on:

The researchers offer the nine generalizations from their field studies and interviews. I’ve clustered them below, not in the order they appear in the report summary, but in the order I’d like to talk about them. (It’s my blog, after all. You can go read them in the right order in the report if you prefer.)

* News is connected to e-mail
* Constant checking is linked to boredom
* Contemporary lifestyles impact news consumption
* News is multitasked

* Television impacts consumers expectations
* News takes work today but creates social currency

* Consumers are experiencing news fatigue
* Consumers want depth but aren’t getting it
* Story resolution is key and sports and entertainment deliver

The echo chamber
The entry also includes another interesting fact:

Project for Excellence in Journalism observed in their 2006 State of the News Media report that the 14,000 unique stories found on Google News in one 24 hour period only represented 24 discrete news events - that’s a function of wire content being used by a huge number of newspapers and sites around the world.

Lots of space … few views

thanks to James Neeley and flickr

~alex

Needless complexity — that most dastardly of design sins — seems to be pervasive in the financial community. The FT’s column, On Wall Street, makes this clear in an examination of the types of derivative products still being offered to investors. The complexity of credit products leading to a near implosion of the financial system apparently wasn’t enough.

To quote:

The existence of dizzying complexity in the capital markets has been at the heart of the storm that has engulfed the world financial system …. But beyond credit, several derivatives markets based on equities, commodities, foreign exchange, energy, weather and even property are flourishing, seemingly unaffected …. Are these a series of disasters waiting to happen?

But what leads me to think that complexity is embedded in the minds of bankers and investors is this quote from a financial analyst in today’s FT. It concerns how Russia’s behavior is affecting investor attitudes towards them. He says:

“Last week’s attack on Mechel’s pricing behaviour by Putin and the lasting TNK-BP saga found a bloody next act in a screenplay that could be named ‘how to destroy the investment story of one of the strongest credits in the emerging markets universe’.”

Hunh? Come again with that title …?

Find the profit in the design

desmo100

~alex

Wikinvest has included a nice new feature on the website: editable stock charts. Users can map comments to time periods, which can then be displayed on a stock price chart. This seems hugely open to abuse, but I have to say it’s easy to use, and kinda neat.

For example, it was pretty easy for me to map the whole “Steve Jobs is sick” story against their stock price. The results are below:

~alex

The NY Times, in their never ending quest to provide neat information graphics, has come up with this one to help people understand their utility bill.

Although the bill has recently be redesigned, and captures the complexity of doing information design when complex rules, regulations and options must be reflected, I have to say the bill is not any more illuminating that the previous version. The numbers are too far apart for them to be easily connected - to the extent that they’re even in different columns. I find even the nomenclature a bit opaque. People don’t think about their energy use in the home using terms like “Supply” and “Demand”. It just arrives.

Too bad the NY Times didn’t make suggestions for how the utility bill could be improved.

~alex

The FT has a nice piece in the Lex section about Google and Cuil (a new search engine, in case you don’t know, founded by ex-Googlers and meant to challenge Google).

They rightly skewer Cuil for a number of reasons, not least because …

While web-surfers regard such wrinkles as distinctly uncool, Cuil has more profound challenges. It is relevance that counts on a search engine, not size. A quick test yesterday morning demonstrated this. Plugging “Cuil” into the new site brought back a link to properties for sale in County Sligo, Ireland, as its top result (Cuil is Gaelic for ‘knowledge’, apparently). Over on Google, the top four results all referenced the big topic of the day, the new upstart.

Upon reading this I thought an interesting challenge would be to plug Google into both search engines. Google’s results are what you would expect …

But I have to say that Cuil’s results are better, namely because of added organization which helps you explore a topic, such as “Google” in a more efficient manner.

I haven’t fully run Cuil through it’s paces, but contrary to most analysts, I’m heartened by Cuil’s attempt to add more sense and structure to search results.

~alex

Update
Everyone appears to have reviewed Cuil. TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, and on and on.

From John Authers, Investment Editor at the FT, we learn that fellow FT columnist John Kay has found a word for what the inverse of a bubble is. It is a bunge.

Don’t take a bath in the bunge!

~alex

For those of us in the user experience community, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about why most social networking / community sites fail comes as no surprise. The article, itself based on a study by Beeline Labs, highlights some trends:

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – 6% of these businesses spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.

And why do they fail? Metrics for success are not well developed; not having people experienced in community sites manage the site; and finally companies, when building their community / social networking site “have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology.”

The suggestion to rectify this — that companies spend more time and money reaching out to their users — will come as no surprise to anyone who has built websites only to find that they missed the mark in understanding what their users really wanted. Perhaps the moral of the story here is: just because it’s “Web 2.0″ doesn’t mean it’s automatically more useful and usable.

I also find it fascinating that the report suggests that one day CMO’s should really be CCO’s (or Chief Community Officers). Of course marketing is about so much more than building a social networking site, but point taken.

Your future CCO

~alex

I’m not the only one with a bit of fascination about all the oil inspired information graphics that are out there. Junk Charts picks up on these from The Guardian.

For those of you who are UsableMarkets aficionados, you will of course remember my fascination with oil inspired graphics earlier this year, here and here.

~alex