Learning is Change

I have been playing around with http://ifttt.com for a while now, but I hadn’t used all that many of their channels (their inputs and outputs for creating amazing workflows). Today, I found one that I REALLY like.

Imagine this:

You are managing a Twitter account with a bunch of different people, whether they are all a part of an event team or the same organization. You have run into three distinct problems in managing this twitter account:

1. People tweet overtop of one another, meaning that there are periods of time in which there are a lot of tweets bunched up on one another.
2. People tweet when it is convenient for them rather than when the tweets will actually be seen and consumed by real people.
3. There are long stretches when there are no tweets. No one is really sure who should be handling the twitter account right now, but no one has tweeted for a few days and it becomes clear that no one is taking ownership for the account.

While there are a bunch of highly useful but overly complex tools to manage these three problems, I think that IFTTT does a much better job of making this task easy and putting it into a workflow that is already in existance.

Do this:

1. Create a new Google Calendar called something like “Our Twitter Calendar”
2. Share that calendar with everyone who is managing the twitter account.
3. Have one person use this IFTTT recipe to connect their Google Calendar to the twitter account.

Note: you should change the hashtag that you would like to use to trigger the tweets to something that you would like to use rather than the #LiC that I have in there now.

Once you have set this up, anyone who adds an event to the calendar with the hashtag you have chosen will automatically trigger a Tweet within 15 minutes of the calendar event. That means that you can set up a schedule of tweets months into the future. You can put events on the calendar and have them tweeted out. You can make sure there are no long gaps between tweets. You can make sure that no one is “tweeting on top of one another”. You can also make sure that everyone can tweet without leaving what they are already doing and logging in to twiter or pulling up their applications. You could even schedule tweets from your phone or anywhere else you have access to your calendar.

While this may not seem like a giant leap forward for mankind, I believe that it solves a bunch of problems that organizations have with maintaining their Twitter accounts and updating them with important information in a timely manner.

I have been doing a little exploring this morning on Readability, which is a platform to save web articles and blog posts for later reading (without all of the ads, images, and other clutter). Formerly, it was a paid service so I hadn’t used it very much. But, they just went to a very interesting model  and launched an iPhone and iPad app. Essentially, what they have done is made a universal platform for creating a reading list that crosses all platforms (web browsers and mobile). This is interesting to me for two reasons:

I have been looking for a number of ways to do usability and design testing today so that I can validate the direction I am headed for a few sites I’m working on. It is my opinion that the more eyes I have on the things I am working on, the better they will be for all learners and users. Iteration can only happen when you are actively engaged in listening.

Here are the sites that I am using:

• http://usabilityhub.com/ – Really great for doing quick tests and laying out exactly what you want people to be looking for. The 5 Second test is my personal favorite. It really shows what people actually look at in the amount of time that most people spend on a page to decide if they want to be there or not. The best part of the site, however, is that you can participate in other people’s tests and sharpen your own powers of observation (and the more tests you do, the more you can ask of others because you are amassing Karma)
• http://usabilla.com/ – I think this one could be really useful because of the way that the tests are structured. There is a good mix of design and usability (click) testing. You have the ability to customize the tests as well, but the one drawback is that there doesn’t seem to be a large community of people that are actively taking these tests so you have to promote them yourself.
• http://openhallway.com/ – I haven’t tested this out a whole bunch just yet, but I really like the idea that I could send out a link to my site and then record how they interact with it, seeing exactly what they are doing. Really great concept, but you still have to get testers yourself.

You may not think you have the time for this level of testing, but after getting the first few sets of feedback from objective perspectives (not your twitter followers) will change your mind.