Real Time Analytics, Urgency and Social Proof – The Monday November 14th Roundup

Quite a week for the roundup, especially with news coming down the line from Adobe that they are canceling flash player for mobile platforms. It just baffles me that they still think that Flash will be a meaningful platform without that.  Sure, I guess people could have flash on their main site then none on https://m. but are people going to keep staff with flash skill on hand if it’s not going to play into their mobile strategy? Interesting times…

Other than flash on mobile devices, we have boisterous commentary by Matt Cutts, real time analytics, and new ways to create urgency and social proof on web pages.

Create

• ‘Create’ opens up the week with the news from the Adobe blog that they are abandoning flash… on mobile devices. Mike Chambers also comments on a few reasons why, and explains how it just wont have the same ubiquity on mobile platforms as on desktop platforms, differences between rich content on mobile versus desktop, and difficulty producing to various phone specifications. Also – you know – HTML5.
• Next up, Forum One has 5 benefits of progressive enhancement.  For the non-coders out there (aka. people like me) this is the practice of developing in such a way that they progressively scale up/down content and effects based on available technologies (HTML versions, CSS restrictions, etc.).  Forum One argues that this produces sites that are: faster to develop, cheaper to maintain, have better design, better search, and are reactive. I have to admit, I don’t really see how this results in better design, search, or reactive design…

Attract

• Matt Cutts claims that spam links don’t even get counted in Google’s algorithm any more. Linkbuildr disagrees. I think I might take a mid point on this one and say that Cutts is right, but their algorithm isn’t as foolproof as he seems to suggest…
• Social Media Today writes that complaining is, you know, kinda the point of social media. Well, being social is the point of social media, but we just so love complaining that naturally that becomes a large part of it. That said, the article by emarketer, which they are citing, is a pretty nifty set of data on how infrequently companies are monitoring their social media channels for complains about their products.

Analyze

• A strange week for the analyze section. We start with Vandelay Design Blog and their list of options for real time analytics. I don’t know if this is as important as people might assume, as very few people will ever actually need real time analytics data (maybe certain social media people, which explains why so many of them are social media focused).
• Next up, Lies, Damned Lies on building display ad performance dashboards, which starts off by developing a measurement frameworks.

Optimize

• UX Matters again (am I relying on them too much for the roundup? I’m relying on them too much) with more on user research, specifically how user research can go wrong. You can get the wrong people, ask the wrong questions, and come to the wrong conclusions, but of course none of it is as simple as that (and that’s why this post is nearly four pages long).
• Finally Linda over at GetElastic has my kind of post: new way to create urgency and social proof on product pages. Specifically, a brilliant little addition from Ruby Lane marketplace that bolsters both social proof and scarcity.