More detailed webinar information will be provided as the event date draws closer.

Findings will be presented by Philip Rhodes, Phd.

When/Where:

Thursday, September 23rd at 11 a.m. Eastern Time

Register for Free Using the Form on the Right

In a lot of my projects, the issue of naming/coding conventions comes up.  I am a big fan of PascalCase/plural for tables and views (e.g. dbo.CustomerAddresses, dbo.OrderDetails), PascalCase for column names (e.g. FirstName, HomePhone); and for stored procedures, I am partial to the Entity_Action naming convention (e.g. dbo.Customer_Create, dbo.Customer_Update).  I know some like to separate out their words with underscores, and with the exception of stored procedures, I find this tedious. 

One of the stickier points in several cases has been how to case short suffixes, such as the ID in CustomerID.  Let’s go back to what the ID is; an identifier.  I often liken it to an identification card, which usually contains either a visible or a bar-coded identifier of some sort (SSN, driver’s license #, etc).  While sometimes this card is called an I.D. and sometimes an ID, I have yet to see it called an Id or an id.

For short suffixes that are actually acronyms, I prefer all upper-case.  Most developers I’ve come across seem to like to lower-case the remainder of the acronym.  And in some cases they have to; e.g. in JavaScript you refer to element.innerHtml; if you try element.innerHTML you get an error message.  I can still tell what Html and Xml are when they aren’t in upper-case, but it can be cumbersome to read that way, particularly with the Id / ID suffix.  Because often “CustomerId” can look like “Customerld” - the difference is only slightly more clear in a fixed width, code-ish font:

CustomerId vs. Customerld

 
Among other things, using an upper-case ID ensures that everyone knows we aren’t talking about the customer’s “pleasure principle” (according to Freud).  And isn’t this easier to read?

CustomerID

 
The “I dee” part rings out much better for me when the acronym is upper case.  And when I find queries written by others where they have used their convention, I always re-write to conform to my convention.  And while it is as weak an argument as writing standards-compliant code for fear that you will ever port to a different RDBMS, I find it hard to justify leaving code as is when it will fail if we ever have to use a case sensitive collation.

Even when I will always name the database entities in this way, if you want to call it CustomerId in the application code, feel free.  Just be consistent.  And don’t expect me to leave it that way if you hand control of the code over to me.

What are your thoughts?  Are you a proponent of CustomerId?  In the application code only, or in both the app and the database?  If so, why?

OTOinsights, a division of One to One Interactive, Inc., a Boston-based digital marketing firm, is hosting a webinar on August 26th at 11 AM Eastern time, to present their latest customer experience research findings on consumer-promotional emails as solicited from the tourism agencies for all fifty United States.

“One to One’s deep experience serving travel-related brands provide us with unique insight into critiquing and designing engaging promotional email,” said webinar presenter Dr. Philip Rhodes, Managing Director for OTOinsights. “In this webinar we’ll be visiting the State Tourism Agency websites for all fifty states and then signing up for email; then offering expert analysis of the emails we receive over the following ten-day period.”

Our research goal is to determine customer satisfaction for email sign-up, frequency and quality based on these criteria:

• How does the layout impact user experience
• How intuitive is the layout
• What is the nature and quality of the content and offers
• How likely are users to respond
• Does the email engender trust in the user

This webinar will help email marketers, CRM marketers, permission marketers as well as brand managers improve the quality of the efforts, and will be of particular interest to destination and travel marketers. Webinar attendees will receive a copy of the webinar free of charge.

Presenter:

Dr. Philip Rhodes, Managing Director and Director of Research for OTOinsights

When/Where:

Thursday, August 26th at 11 a.m. Eastern Time

Click Here to Register

One to One Interactive has submitted two very exciting panels for SXSW Interactive and would like your support by having you vote for them.  Details for both panels and links for voting are provided below:

Please help us also by asking individuals in your own social networks to vote for these the above panels.  I want to thank everyone in advance for their support. 

Jeremi

While some of the new features seem to be a response to what other webmail clients already offer, Hotmail added some unique features to their inbox. This release specifically attacks graymail, or mail that a person legitimately signed up to receive, but may no longer want. The new release removes graymail from the inbox and focuses on email from family and friends along with social media updates.

Hotmail has five new features that you, as an email marketer, need to be aware of:

• Sweep
  The Sweep feature moves all emails from one or more users to either a specific folder or the trash bin. The sweep easily eliminates graymail for the user, without having to build complicated filters.    If a user sweeps your email into a folder, Hotmail will remember this setting and continually send your messages into folder purgatory, without even tempting the recipient to take a glance at your compelling content.
• Filter Power
  When a user logs into Hotmail, they’ll be greeted with Hotmail Highlights, a dashboard showing new email from personal contacts and social networks. Once a user dives into his inbox, he can filter his messages with a single-click to show only email from personal contacts, groups, or social alerts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn).    These filters push a marketer’s email further away from the user’s eyes, changing the last message on top priority of the inbox.
• Prompted Unsubscribe
  If your contacts are consistently deleting your messages without reading them, Hotmail will prompt the user to unsubscribe. This feature most likely will help move unengaged users off your list using the “unsubscribe,” rather than them lazily hitting the “Spam” button.
• Sender Reputation
  Hotmail now uses the Trusted Senders logos from email sent from specific legitimate senders that are targeted for phishing scams (e.g. banks). Microsoft uses a combination of properly setup email domains and sender reputation to validate these trusted senders. Also, if you balance on the edge of deliverability, and Microsoft deems you as a spammer even though you comply with CAN SPAM regulations, Hotmail will retroactively remove your emails from your customers’ inbox and place them into the spam folder. Your reputation now affects not only your future email campaigns, but also your previous sends as well.
• Active Views
  Active Views provides more dynamic interaction for the user in the email itself. For example, a user can view photos from Flickr galleries, watch YouTube videos, and find updated shipping information directly from the email.

This new partner platform gives businesses the next challenge of embedding more Web functionality where contacts can interact directly within the inbox, instead of being redirected to a website to find this information.

What this all means:

If your content is engaging and your lists are targeted, then your contacts will pull your email out from the bowels of Hotmail functionality and back into their inbox. The customers you truly connect with will miss hearing from you. And as an added bonus, you don’t have to compete with as much clutter to distract your user once you get into the inbox.

Before the new version is fully released, you may want to consider adding a link to your emails that provides instruction on how to add you as a safe sender. This should also prompt you to look deeper into your Hotmail contacts’ actions over the next few months. If their engagement takes a turn for the worse, you should consider finding another medium to contact them. Some sophisticated ESPs and contact databases provide you with the ability to manage alternate channels to contact your target with, and you can use these additional channels to reengage your users (e.g. iPhone applications, Facebook, or Twitter).

I’m also excited to see how we, as marketers, can begin to leverage Active Views and similar functionality in other web clients. Now not only can you segment your list based off personal data, preferences, and message history, but now you can separate a contact list based off features the webmail client may have.

All in all, the new Hotmail release reminds us that we must work to engage our users within different channels (email, social, etc.) and to provide them with the relevant content to allow us to be invited to contact them in these different channels. For more information on Hotmail’s new release, visit the Windows Team Blog.

The ASPCA® (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals®) launched ASPCA ScreenMate, a new desktop application that allows supporters to stay even more connected to the animal welfare cause.  

ASPCA supporters now can receive desktop news alerts throughout the day that range from useful pet tips to inspiring pet stories to ASPCA rescues. ScreenMate users will also receive ASPCA Advocacy Alerts to stay informed and updated about legislation that affects animals and how supporters can take action to help strengthen animal laws.

“We are thrilled to launch this exciting new desktop application for our supporters,” said Betsey Fortlouis, Vice President of Member Communications for the ASPCA. “With the ASPCA ScreenMate, pet parents and animal advocates alike can easily access valuable information and updates about the ASPCA’s vital work right from their desktop.”

Dashboard features of the ASPCA ScreenMate include a look at the newest ASPCA products and information as well as the work of various corporate partners who are helping improve pet health and safety.  For example, because 30,000 car accidents per year are caused by unrestrained pets, the ASPCA, with the support of Red Lion Hotels and Bergan Pet Products, is offering advice on enjoying safer car rides with four-legged friends. Users can control the various updates through the desktop dashboard.  
 
ScreenMate Users can also select a virtual dog or cat to name and play with on their desktop.  Whether playing fetch with your virtual pet or rewarding them with a treat afterward, the pet will stand in as a loyal friend when users are away from their faithful companions at home.  Virtual pets can be hidden from the desktop or “fall asleep” when users aren’t playing with them.
 To support the ASPCA from the convenience of your desktop, go to www.aspcascreenmate.org.

The ASPCA is dedicated to providing effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Whether fighting against animal cruelty, promoting pet adoption and spay/neuter, or helping change laws to improve our pets’ lives, they are the acting voice of our pets.
About the ASPCA^®
Founded in 1866, the ASPCA® (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals®) is the first humane organization established in the Americas and serves as the nation’s leading voice for animal welfare. One million supporters strong, the ASPCA’s mission is to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States. As a 501 [c] [3] not-for-profit corporation, the ASPCA is a national leader in the areas of anti-cruelty, community outreach and animal health services. The ASPCA, which is headquartered in New York City, offers a wide range of programs, including a mobile clinic outreach initiative, its own humane law enforcement team, and a groundbreaking veterinary forensics team and mobile animal CSI unit. For more information, please visit www.aspca.org.

To become a fan of the ASPCA on Facebook, go to http://www.facebook.com/aspca. To follow the ASPCA on Twitter, go to http://www.twitter.com/aspca.

As you can imagine, clicking on the plus sign (+) will expand a group’s items (let’s call this a sub-grid), and clicking on the minus sign (-) will collapse the sub-grid.  When this interface was first developed, it used eager loading - meaning it loaded up all of the data for each sub-grid, and kept it hidden.  This would prevent rendering delays when users expanded any group.  We quickly realized, however, that users would typically use only one or two groups in any typical session, so loading the data for all groups was wasteful.  So we changed the implementation to use lazy loading - we would not request the data for any sub-grid until it was actually expanded.  This sped up initial rendering of the page, with the trade-off obviously being a slight delay when a sub-grid was loaded.

Not being an integral part of the UI team, I recently discovered that the data is not cached within the page after it is lazy loaded - if a group is collapsed and then expanded, the database is called again.  I understand why we wouldn’t necessarily do this - why keep all that data in memory in JavaScript, hampering the client, when we could just discard it. I don’t believe that this was a conscious decision; rather, I think this is just the default behavior of the grid control we are using (jqGrid). In any case, users are not typically playing the expand-collapse-expand-collapse game for fun.  But on the flip side, I started thinking that in cases where people are hitting + / - multiple times for valid reasons, this could be very wasteful in terms of resources.  And then my thoughts started snowballing, as the “best” solution really requires careful consideration of several factors:

• How volatile is the data?  While the user is on the page:
        - the name or other properties of a template may have changed
        - templates may have been added, removed, or migrated to a different group
        - the user’s permissions on any or all items may have changed
• How expensive is it, really, to call the database every time?  And is it a direct database call, or does it use distributed caching in some way?  If the typical group contains 10 templates, we might have a different answer than if it contains 1,000.  Similarly, we might not be too worried about pulling items out of cache versus calling an already over-burdened database server.
• Does the next step (e.g. editing a template) rely on the state of the previous page at load or expand time?  One would hope that dynamic properties of an entity are not simply passed along in their current state, and that the next page loads them directly.  

Thankfully, the data in this case is rather isolated, the groups are rather small, and we program with the intent of checking validity of an action at the time of the action, not before.  So it is unlikely we’ll have a case where the user’s data has been changed underneath them, and it messes them up… or where the resource drain from expanding and collapsing groups will bring our servers to their knees.

Still, regardless of the type of loading you use, synchronization can be an issue.  Unless your application has a very sophisticated eventing mechanism, the data can change while the user sits on the page, and he or she will not find out about it until they try to perform some action.  Or maybe much later - imagine the following scenario:

1. user A expands a group;
2. user B expands the same group;
3. user A renames a template (say, from “foo” to “bar”) within the group; and then,
4. user B renames the same template (say, from “foo” - or so they think, because that’s what they still see - to “splunge”).

User A will be confused when they come back the next day, or two months later, and can’t find their template named “bar.”  This is not extremely likely to happen in our situation because of the factors mentioned above and because of the way we currently perform lazy loading.  But there are other scenarios that are even more likely to happen as long as multiple users can manage the same sets of entities:

1. user A expands a group;
2. user B deletes one of the templates in that same group; and then,
3. user A - since they can still see it - tries to edit the template that user B deleted. 

The next page will simply return an error that the template doesn’t exist, but user A might be confused about why an item they just saw on the previous page no longer exists.  If you are logging the activities of users, you could add those details to the error message, so that user A can go talk nicely with user B to determine why their template disappeared.  In a lot of cases, this extent of logging just doesn’t exist or isn’t exploited.

So, what is the best balance?  What other factors have I missed in determining how best to present this data to users?  What mechanisms do you use to mitigate the risk of conflicting user actions? I’m particularly interested in knowing whether your answer changes if time, money and effort are non-issues.  If you have unlimited budget and resources, what is your ideal solution?

OTOinsights presents our latest customer experience research findings for several of the most downloaded iPad magazine applications including Wired, PopSci, GQ, Dwell, and Time.

“Digital publishing has changed consumer magazine consumption; in the past three years over 1,000 have ceased publication,” said webinar presenter Dr. Philip Rhodes, Managing Director for OTOinsights. “The iPad offers magazines a new digital publishing platform that allows them to better present, control and monetize their content.”

OTOinsights’ task-based analysis focuses on the homescreen, navigation, layout, advertisement placement and overall user satisfaction based on these criteria:

• How does the layout impact user experience
• How intuitive is navigation
• What is the nature and quality of the content
• How efficient is it to use
• How likely are users to revisit the iPad magazine
• Does the application engender trust in the user

This webinar will help brands and publishers participating, or planning on participating, in iPad magazine applications as developers, advertisers or content authors.

Join us for this free webinar where we discuss this latest customer experience research and conclude with a best practice guide on how you can create the best experience for your customers. Webinar attendees will also receive copy of this presentation free of charge.

Presenter:
Dr. Philip Rhodes, Managing Director and Director of Research for OTOinsights

When/Where:
Thursday, July 29 at 11 a.m. Eastern Time

Click Here to Register for Free

Dr. Philip Rhodes, Ph.D.

Philip holds a Ph.D. in Information Design from the University of Portsmouth. He has extensive research and teaching experience in hypermedia design and information architecture. He speaks fluent Portuguese, having lived and worked in Brazil. Before joining OTOinsights, he worked with US solution providers Rare Medium and Sapient, as Director of Information Architecture. Specializing in offering user-centric online solutions within the banking, education, and telecommunications sectors. He also taught at several universities in Brazil and the UK, and has been widely published. Philip is both the Managing Director and the Director of Customer Experience Research & Design at OTOinsights, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

OTOinsights Overview

Technology innovation continues to create increasingly sophisticated and complex interaction touch points between brands and their customers. A customer’s experience with these touch points define what a brand means to them and their continuing engagement with the product or service. OTOinsights helps brands succeed in today’s rapidly evolving landscape by providing customer experience research, brand research, neuromarketing research and user-centered design.

Two social media campaigns, or call them stunts, last week illustrated the value and power of experience in a social media campaign. They’re both well planned, well thought out, and well monitored and well engineered to be social. One draws people into an experience, one creates unique shareable experiences.

1: Funny or Die + Karaoke + Jewel: Ok, yes, II said Jewel. But watch the video.

What makes this video good, sharable, watchable, isn’t the celebrity, it isn’t even the concept, it’s the way the execution focused on personal experience. Audience members tell about what they saw and share their emotional response. We see Jewel’s real reaction to the experience, and like any good story, we’re drawn into it. Compare it to The Best Gig Ever Stunt from Improv Anywhere a group who creates unique experiences for their own sake. No celebrities, but a great emotional experience.

Granted, nothing is for sale here except the content that drives the sponsorships and advertisements that run on the Funny or Die site. But by focusing on the experience, in this case, they sell it very well.

2: The Old Spice Guy: Yeah, the half naked charming dude who’s manly smell women crave and men covet. What’s cool about the latest campaign isn’t that it’s clever and funny, it’s that it customizes the content to individual users in novel ways that results in a cool experience. Check it out:

It’s not just a retweet, or a comment, or general social media interaction which we know makes people feel good and leads to increasing levels of the hormone Oxytocin, it’s a fully customized, scripted video response with a paid actor! The experience of getting one of these responses, and the process of sharing it with friends and interacting around it has got to be very rewarding from a psychological standpoint. The assumption is that the reward is attributed to Old Spice and translated into a good opinion of the brand. Whether that makes you like the scent, I can’t say. I would like to know what kind of chemical brain response is produced when experiencing Old Spice…

When crafting a social media campaign, the experience and emotion connect it with the audience and make it successful, and the strategy, goals, objectives and analytics connect the campaign, it’s value and its success to your brand. Without the former it won’t work for your audience, and without the latter it won’t work for your business.

Paul Adams (User Experience engineer at Google) knows this and has released his findings about how we connect with our “friends” using popular social media sites. Turns out it’s not as simple as you’d think. His presentation is a must-read for anyone who is designing user interfaces and works in the social space.

Weighing in at 216 slides, it’s a bit of a biggie. Hang in there, the research that The Goog has done with regards to social influence, online and offline friends, strong vs. weak ties is information that you must be armed with.

Here are some of the highlights…

• People have multiple independent groups of friends that form around life stages and shared experiences. (Example: College friends, work friends, family, hobbyists.)
• There are three types of social ties: Strong, Weak and Temporary.  
• The stronger the social tie, the higher they influence us to buy products and services.
• Our brains can only keep up with a limited number of weak tie relationships.  For most people, that number is 150.
• People are increasing their reliance on social networks to make decisions.