UX Zeitgeist Announcements

Screencast demo of UX Zeitgeist

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:34:59 -0500

Wondering what UX Zeitgeist is and how it works? Take 5:44 to find out:

UX Zeitgeist is launching! Really! Finally.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:02:44 -0500

Well, that took a while! But UX Zeitgeist is finally open for business.

Rosenfeld Media's resources over the past six months or so have been focused on, um, publishing books. And we've made some definite progress on that front. We're now ready to begin inviting broader participation in UX Zeitgeist. New entries are beginning to appear, and we hope we're on our way to engaging with the UX community to develop an excellent, free service.

If you'd like an invitation, please let us know. And please keep watching; we think this will become something special!

Hello, beta

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:35:19 -0500

Lots of changes are happening with UX Zeitgeist, but you'll only notice three at this point:

We've dramatically improved the site's page load speed by batch-generating pages on a nightly basis. Much faster than building the pages on the fly...
We've begun to edit participant-nominated book topics for consistency. Aside from some basic word-smithing, we're normalizing topics. The result should be a much clearer and better picture of what books you—the UX community—would like to see published.
Throughout the site, you'll notice that we've swapped our alpha label for a beta; pretty cute.

But the most exciting change is currently invisible. We're finishing up work on an account administration interface. This will allow us to abandon using Survey Monkey to gather your responses, and make content entry and editing far easier and more efficient for everyone involved. This step should dramatically expanding participation in UX Zeitgeist, making it a truly communal tool.

As always, we'll keep you posted...

How do we determine topic ranks?

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 12:41:43 -0500

We recently divulged the weighting scheme we use for ranking books. Now it's time to show you how we do it for our UX topics (to see these in action, look at the topic index or any specific topic page).

Again, it's quite simple. We weight our quantitative measures for topic performance on a 100-point scale:

Nominations from UX Zeitgeist participants: 25 points
Number of mentions in other books: 15 points
Web search count: 15 points
Number of mentions in the blogosphere: 20 points
Number of mentions in our collection of seven UX-related publications: 20 points
Number of mentions in podcasts: 5 points

Any questions? Would you weight these differently?

How do we determine book ranks?

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 12:22:35 -0500

You may have noticed that our books are ranked (if not, have a look at the UX Zeitgeist book index). We believe our ranking system is wildly, brilliantly innovative and one of the most useful features of UX Zeitgeist. But our staff chaplain, Father Rosenfeld, has encouraged us toward walking a more generous, altruistic path. So we're divulging the recipe for our book ranking secret sauce here.

Truly, it's quite simple. We weight our quantitative measures of book performance on a 100-point scale:

Nominations from UX Zeitgeist participants: 20 points
Number of mentions in the blogosphere: 15 points
Amazon sales rank: 20 points
Number of mentions in our collection of seven UX-related publications: 15 points
Number of LibraryThing collections that include this book: 15 points
How LibraryThing members rated this book: 10 points
Number of mentions in podcasts: 5 points

Does this sound like a reasonable approach? We want UX Zeitgeist to be a community resource, so we're completely open to other ideas. Lay'em on...

Update

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 12:13:18 -0500

It may seem quiet on the Zeitgeistian front, but we're making a lot of progress behind the scenes.

Along with fixing various types of bugs that you'd expect to encounter in an alpha release, we're working on a couple of larger projects:

Improving our back-end administration interface. This will allow us to start dramatically improving the content associated with each participant's entry. Specifically, we can start normalizing topic entries (now underway) and deleting false hits from Amazon (currently, there's a good chance that Amazon will say you're an author, even if you're not).
Enabling participants to enter and manage their own information more easily. This is a big one. Once we can deep-six SurveyMonkey as our data-entry interface, we can do all sorts of nice things, like data validation and allowing participants to update their answers.

These features should start appearing in about a month. At that point, we'll begin adding new participants again.

Hate waiting? Want more UX goodness? Kill the next few weeks perusing the wonderful interviews with UX people that Tamara Adlin is publishing over at the UX Pioneers site.

How do we determine UX Mindshare?

Sun, 06 May 2007 21:34:41 -0500

UX Mindshare is a stunningly simple calculation (not to mention a total rip-off of Steven Johnson's Google mindshare). We calculate it by searching Yahoo! for UX-related documents, and then determining the percentage of those results that mention a participant's name or a topic that's been nominated.

While the name or topic change, the number of UX-related documents is a common constant for all of our UX Mindshare scores. That means all UX Mindshare Scores can be compared side-by-side.

Here are the terms we're currently searching to determine the total number of UX-related documents (feel free to suggest additional terms for the denominator by commenting below):

user experience
experience design
information architecture
usability
findability
interaction design
information design
interface design
visual design
graphic design
knowledge management
content management
information management
ux
technical communication

Our intent with UX Mindshare is to show how much penetration each topic or person has in the broader world of UX. Most people have a score lower than one percent; four or five percent is considered pretty darned good.

Known bugs

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:03:28 -0500

Updated: May 6, 2007

As of now, our two major bugs are:

Our topics aren't normalized. We intend on combining synonymous topics, like "UX for children" and "designing experiences for kids," setting on a preferred term and listing variants. This should result in a far more useful topical index.

False hits for authored books. We also intend to weed out books that Amazon mistakenly thinks were written by UX Zeitgeist participants. This will especially be a problem for names like "Jane Smith," "John Jones," and, oh, "William Shakespeare".

It's hard to call these bugs; they're really just tasks that are waiting on some fixes to be made to our back-end administrative interface.

We also know that the number of search results that is associated with a content source (e.g., "See all 75 results" for Mentions in Books) isn't always quite correct. That's often due to timing; we may be a day or more behind. But this type of discrepancy seems to be true of just about every Web 2.0 service; we're not sure we can do much about it.

We also know that there are a few true bugs; for example, the "Participate" link is broken.

What have we missed? Please let us know by commenting below.

Acknowledgments

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:29:21 -0500

Though UX Zeitgeist is still very much in progress, it's never too soon to recognize the people involved in its development. Here's an incomplete list, in something of a chronological order:

I came back from DUX 2005, high from sniffing UX fumes, and decided that this was a good idea.
My old friend, Superpatron Ed Vielmetti was helped me think through the concept. Ed introduced me to Jose Nazario, an author and developer who has quite a lot of fantastic mashup work under his belt.
Jose did much of the early development, and when life got too busy, helped me find Blake Nicholson, the site's primary developer, who has squeezed in some outstanding work in between his various duties as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan.
Somewhere along the way, my pal Jess McMullin of nForm suggested the name "UX Zeitgeist".
Carl Collins and Olga Khroustaleva, then masters students at the University of Michigan's School of Information, have been immensely helpful in thinking through the site's interface, metrics, and information visualization, and have held my hand when I really needed it.
Peter Morville, Dirk Knemeyer, Rashmi Sinha, Michael Angeles, Liz Danzico and Victor Lombardi have been an ongoing source of support and inspiration, egging me on to just release the damned thing.
Content providers, like Tim Spalding of LibraryThing and Dave Pell and Alex Wright of Rollyo have been incredibly generous with their support and patience.
And of course, I'm very fortunate to work with CSS guru Dave Shea, who is responsible for the site's visual design.

Not sure how to even begin to thank all these folks.

Hmmm; guess I just did...

Which UX journals do we index?

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:16:03 -0500

We've worked with Dave Pell and Alex Wright of the fabulous service Rollyo to set up a "search roll" of user experience magazines. Rollyo allows us to concurrently search these magazines and return a combined list of search results for each of our topics and people's names. Pretty darned useful.

The magazines in UX Zeitgeist's search roll are:

If you'd like to suggest additional UX-related magazines (Web-based ones, of course), we're all ears.

UX Zeitgeist now in alpha

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:44:12 -0500

Welcome! I'm thrilled and more than a little anxious to begin soft launching a project that's many months in the making, and full of bugs, known and not, that might make this service a bit confusing for you. I'll start a known bug list soon, but first let me give you a sense of what UX Zeitgeist is about.

First, my goals for UX Zeitgeist are to help the user experience (UX) community:

Develop a value-ranked, canonical list of UX books—both popular and "dark horses"—that the community should know about
Assemble a ranked list of UX topics that that are important—important enough to possibly merit a book (or an article or a course)
Show how the value of each individual book or topic changes over time, based on a variety of UX-related criteria
Provide a useful source of information on UX-related books, topics, and people that is a strong manually-edited complement to what Google would retrieve

UX Zeitgeist is essentially a vertical mashup that combines content from a variety of sources:

Nominations of UX books and topics for books from members of the UX community
Aggregated content from a variety of broad and UX-related resources, ranging from Google and Amazon, to LibraryThing, to Boxes & Arrows and UXmatters magazines
Manual editorial effort on the part of Rosenfeld Media to delete false drops and normalize topics

Will it work? We'll know soon enough. And I know that it'll have a better chance of succeeding with your input; please let me know how to improve UX Zeitgeist and make it a true servant to the user experience community.