Facebook Flaming

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In this day of smart phones, it is super easy to blast out an angry Facebook update or Tweet from nearly anywhere. Rather than ranting out-loud to people within your vicinity, it may be easier to vent online. The only issue with publicly ranting about superfluous issues is that everyone in your social networking circles can read it and respond.

Lately my own experience has been to think about what my Facebook friends or Twitter followers might think if I posted a silly rant or something unprofessional. I am aware to keep in mind that I am a professional and that there are new and potential opportunities out there. I would rather keep my ranting to my close circle of friends and share my positive experiences with everyone else.

I have seen my friends share their frustrations online and it can be a high class dramatic act played out online. One of my favorite examples happened 4 years ago when a friend decided to lash out on Facebook against another person. What made it interesting was the individual who initiated the rant was one of the most popular people  on campus. It didn’t go well for the victim because people tended to believe the misinformation and other people from the peanut gallery added more fuel to the fire which kept the controversy alive for a week and it contributed to slight entertainment  because it kept us distracted from doing homework. I wish I could divulge into more specifics but I prefer not to since these individuals continue to remain my Facebook friends. What was detrimental about this Facebook flaming situation was that it worsened throughout the week-long ordeal before the school intervened and corrected the matter.

The take away from what happened was that news travels fast regardless if it was factual or not and that anything can be poison for participants in a social network circle. The end result from that after the drama was over, the post was eventually deleted and people continued on with their lives like nothing ever happened.

Auto Share Blog Updates

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Blogs need visitor love sometimes and one way to show people that your blog is alive and well is to post updates to a wide variety of social networking sites. However, you can use your RSS/Atom feed to link it up with other places around the internet.

It is a tiresome practice to log onto each social network and post a URL straight to your latest post after you have published it. Unless you use an enterprise-level paid social networking suite, the individual blog posters are relegated to free or limited services.

Ben Woelk asked me a couple of months ago if I am posting my new entries on Twitter and Facebook. Currently I am advertising WriteTechie on Twitter but not Facebook yet. I’m looking at testing a  couple of services before committing to one.

The other place I advertise my blog is on LinkedIn and MySTC. I added the RSS feed into my profile and it automatically updates new posts on the bottom of each profile. These two profiles are where visitors can easily visit and read my blog.

It may be slightly dangerous to have a service automatically tweet and post blog updates on social networking sites beacuse the services rely on  RSS feeds to update. In addition, there appears to be little personalization to automatically tweet the post but it is a start to bring in new and returning readers here.

Quick Usability Testing

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At work, I was asked to create a map to guide our clients to specific workstations that have Kurzweil optical character recognition (OCR) software. Students use the OCR reader to scan in documents and use the computer read the text for them. Given the task, it had to be simple to read and understand quickly by anyone who doesn’t know where the workstations are at.

Kurzweil Location - SRC 120

Location for Kurzweil Software

Kurzweil Location - SRC 2nd Floor

Location for Kurzweil Software

When I finished drafting up a couple of maps, I surveyed two of my co-workers. I picked two people who have a wide varying degree of knowledge with regard to locations on campus. It was smart for me to pick  two individuals, one who is unfamiliar with the area and another who knows exactly where to go.

My first tester was one of our student workers in the department. Since she is a freshman and new to our community college, she was very useful to develop my maps to help our clients who may be unfamiliar with campus. The second person I tested the maps with was one of our department secretaries. I included one our secretaries in my quick usability testing because they are very familiar with campus and they can add details that I may miss that could be important.

My results were positive. Both testers quickly understood the map for SRC 120; however, they had difficulty understanding the SRC 2nd Floor map. The problem with the 2nd Floor map is the complicated layout of the area and my map made it look far less complex. For example, each of those ovals has 6 computer workstations. Out of 72 computers, there is only one machine that has Kurzweil. I quickly added a few more details to the map, such as desks and rooms to make it easier to read.

The take-away from my task was that it’s important to test users who have different kinds of knowledge about their surroundings. While I understand these maps are very rudimentary, my usability testing helped improve the maps for a specific audience. When you don’t have much time to test a final product, finding two individuals from the office works very well.