Tablets have been around for a while, it's time we finally learn how people use them.

Well, SND STL was amazing and is finally in the books. After a little recovery and catch-up-on-reading time, I’ve found my next side project: The Poynter Institute’s new eye-tracking study, focused on tablet design and user experiences.

I remember when the previous eyetracking studies were released it was kind of like this kid on Christmas morning. I’ve regularly referred to them and re-read them throughout my career and now to be involved in the project now is amazingly humbling and exciting. The group involved in this round of research is like my fantasy journalism design team: Sara Quinn, Dr. Mario Garcia, Jeremy Gilbert, David Stanton, Rick Edmonds, Regina McCombs, Roger Black, Rusty Coats, Andrew DeVigal, Jeff Sonderman, Jennifer George-Palilonis, Michael Holmes, Damon Kiesow, Miranda Mulligan, Tor Bøe-Lillegraven, Nora Paul, Robin Sloan, and Matt Thompson.

Our focus this time around, tablets, are an interesting beast because they seem to marry dynamic and interactive content of the web with the portability and “lean back” nature of print or even TV experiences. Often lumped in with mobile devices, tablets are similar, but very unique in many ways. Mobile is always with you and very utility, speed-driven; tablets tend to be portable within the house and workplace, and early research shows that people tend to consume more content and for longer periods on them than either mobile or the web.

We’re going to look at design challenges such as which view do people people prefer to consume content in most frequently – portrait or landscape.  Even in those two options, I suspect the behaviors from users on an 10-inch, letter-box shaped device like the iPad may differ greatly from those on a 7″ tablet, like the Kindle Fire. Or the type of content they’re consuming will likely also change the results, from my personal anecdotal experience (and what I’ve observed in others), I tend to read text more frequently in portrait mode and video in landscape no matter what device. But that’s just anecdotal.

There’s lots to learn and this research will offer ‘more than a hunch’ solutions to help us all improve our products. Specifically, we’ll focus on some of these issues and questions, which Sara spelled out in her original announcement post:

• Tools and tasks: How intuitive can tablet navigation be and how long does it take to successfully complete a task?
• Satisfaction: How happy are users with an overall experience and how does that impact their perception of the credibility of the source?
• Comprehension and retention: Which forms help people to understand and remember what they have seen or read?
• Business and revenue: What strategies might work for news organizations? For advertisers? For consumers? How might editors set up a newsroom to create content for a tablet product?

How you can help right now

• Your questions - Share your thoughts, comments and suggestions on the Poynter Eye-Tracking research page on Facebook and follow along there to learn more about what we’re learning.
• Funding – The Knight Foundation and CCI Europe is helping kick in money, but the more funding, the more extensive research we can do. Please contact Sara about this at: squinn [at] poynter.org.

This Oct. 27, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the razzle-dazzle of mobile and tablet apps when we think about new products, audiences and revenue opportunities but, we shouldn’t neglect or ignore the potential that e-books can offer also. Apps are great for providing utility and new technical products and functionality and e-books can compliment that by leveraging our core strength or what Jim Collins calls the “Hedgehog concept” in his book “Good to Great” by creating accurate, detailed, engaging local narrative content. E-books offer us the opportunity to repackage and resell a lot of our deep and valuable information in a digital format for rabid readers.

The Kindle platform, which works on just about every mobile, tablet or computer device, is especially intriguing, including their special category of “Kindle Singles” which Wired writer Charlie Sorrel described as, “one-off pieces of non-fiction and journalism which are typically much shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article.” The content can vary largely from single long-form narrative articles to combining a series of columns from a popular columnists into one digital document, or even a full-fledged narrative book built around a local topic, person/team or issue in the area (from the local mysterious murder case to the local team’s Cinderella climb to the championship).

Here are a handful of reasons why we should take a closer look at e-books and Kindle Singles for spreading our content:

• E-books enable and create rabid reading habits, like crack addicts. The Wall Street Journal sites a study that says 40 percent of e-reader owners said they read more now than they did with print books. Anecdotally, I know this is true with myself and people I know who use e-readers, but even beyond e-reader users, the ability to always pick up any book I’m currently reading at at my current place on my phone, computer or tablet in any idle-time moment really helps feed a bibliophile’s addiction.
• E-books are continuing to grow (up 153 percent in the past year). This will only grow exponentially as Amazon is launching the Kindle Fire tablet, the first what some are calling a serious competitor to the iPad. Their OS software is modified to showcase and feature your media content including books and movies. Amazon is actually selling the Kindle Fire at about a $10 loss per unit, hedging that the users will buy so many digital goods through them that they’ll make up the difference. Read Write Web declared eBooks as one of the top trends of 2010, pointing out: “At the end of October Amazon announced that for its top 10 best-selling books, customers bought the Kindle edition twice as often as the print copy. According to Amazon’s VP for Kindle, Steve Kessel, Kindle eBook sales also topped print sales of hardcovers and paperbacks for its top 25, top 100 and top 1,000 bestsellers.” Even the traditional university book presses are starting to publish ‘singles’ to take advantage of this new market and technology.
• Potential audiences are huge; rather than just creating content for desktop users, or iPad or iPhone users, Kindle singles and e-books are available on almost all platforms so the potential audience is much larger.
• Revenue can be substantially larger. Robert Niles illustrates this perfectly on the Online Journalism Review:

Here’s why you should consider amplifying your investment in eBook development. Here are the prices of the top 20 paid apps in the iOS app store, as of last night:

$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$2.99
$0.99
$0.99
$1.99
$1.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99

Now, here are the prices of the top 20 paid eBooks in Apple’s iBooks store, for comparison:

$9.99
$14.99
$12.99
$2.99
$12.99
$12.99
$0.99
$9.99
$12.99
$1.99
$12.99
$11.99
$14.99
$14.99
$12.99
$3.99
$14.99
$9.99
$12.99
$14.99

In which market would you rather try to make money?

Let’s sharpen the focus a bit. In the News category in the app store, most expensive paid app in the top 20 is Instapaper at $4.99. There is no News category in the iBooks store, but let’s use Politics & Current Events as the closest approximation. Of the top 20 paid eBooks in that category, 19 of the top 20 sell for $4.99 or more.

Clearly, the public is willing to – and does – pay more for content in eBooks than it does in apps. That fact should encourage any serious news business to take a serious look at eBooks.

• E-reader owners also tend to be regular newspaper readers according to Scarborough Research, so they’re familiar with and trust our content and brands. So they will be easier to market new e-book products to through our existing properties.
• E-books can help reach and target different audiences, a recent consumer research survey of 26,000 respondents found that women are 52 percent more likely than men to own an e-reader, and men are 24 percent more likely than women to own a tablet.
• Save on publishing costs compared to traditional book publishing. Rather than having to go though book publishers for all the raw materials, e-books don’t cost any glue, paper or ink and depending on your product price, with Kindle eBooks up to 70% of the cost can go straight to the author/publisher.  (Apple’s iBook store is another option, but it is much more restrictive, requiring an ISBN number for the book, which can cost more than a hundred dollars to register.)
• Incredibly simple publishing process. Any block of text has the potential to become an e-book. The Kindle store can take formats from PDF, to Word Document, to ePub, to HTML and more. So any series of articles, or even a big Sunday feature story could be turned into a Kindle Single.
• Added functionality and sharing are growing user benefits, from book sharing to note-taking and sharing to Amazon’s new HTML5-based format that allows for much more design and interactivity in e-books.

Here’s a handful of media organizations that have started to experiment with E-Books and Kindle Singles for various content types:

• The Guardian has started offering Kindle e-book “Shorts” from some of their series/issue coverage, including breaking the News Corp phone hacking scandal for £2.29
• The Chicago Tribune published the “Chicago Bears 2011″ which is literally a series of their training camp articles organized into topics for The Monsters of the Midway.
• Ars Technica sold a 19-page, $5 Kindle e-book of their OS X 10.7 Lion review, and eclipsed 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours of the sale (Thanks to Chris Keller for the tip!)
• The Boston Globe produced a series of books about historical crime and gangesters from their region, the most recent about Whitey Bulger.
• The Washington Post created a $2.99 e-book about The Hunt for Bin Laden after his capture

Apple's Siri voice assistant offers the meaning of life

This Oct. 19, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer, where I blog about mobile, tablet and other emerging tech. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

One of your most basic reporting tools just got a whole lot more powerful with the help of your mobile phone: your voice.

Voice tools on mobile phones are exploding and offering new ways to communicate, multitask, interact and organize your life and work. Whether you’re running between assignments and need to send quick email or text message to your boss, get an address for your source’s location, checking the weather to know if you need rain gear for your lenses, Tweet news tidbits or one of the many other actions, your voice’s power just got amplified.

The new iPhone 4s offers a tool called Siri has a great number of commands it responds to. Unfortunately, the Siri program is only available on the iPhone 4s. Someone has hacked it to work on an iPhone 4 but it requires jailbreaking and might get shut down by Apple.

Google’s Android mobile operating system has been the pioneer in the voice conversion arena from their launch of Google Voice automatically translating voicemail-to-text to their Android keyboards which always include voice-to-text buttons. Available on all Android phones, Google also offers a handful of voice actions available natively within the phone.

There’s also a handful of third-party apps available to get more robust “Siri-like” personal assistant options (Vlingo is my personal favorite on Android, although I use the stock Google voice commands most frequently.)

Somewhat related and very interesting and useful for those of us that cover multi-cultural beats — there’s a new version of Google Translate with an enriched “conversation” mode (currently in Alpha, so it’s not perfect) and additional language support. The app can both listen and speak for you, translating the message on both sides. It’s breathtakingly amazing. So if you’re out on assignment and find yourself trying to communicate with someone who’s not a native English speaker, you can use this tool to help communicate in more than 50 languages from Afrikaans to Yiddish.

Apple IOS5 devices now offer a new quick way to win a photo shootout or capture a breaking news event at a moment's notice.

This Oct. 13, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

If you’re an Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad owner who uses their phone for mobile reporting, I’d highly encourage you take advantage of their free software update to the new version of iOS 5. There’s more than 200 changes in the software, one of the most basic benefits for mobile reporters is the ability to snap photos and video much quicker from the lock screen.

With the new software update, here’s how to quickly access the camera from sleep mode:

1 – Double tap the home button and a camera button will appear in the lower right corner. (Music controls will also appear at the top, if you feel the need to put on some motivational mobile reporting music.)

2 – Tap the camera button and you’re launched straight into the phone app.

3 – Shoot away!

This is much faster than having to swipe, type in your unlock code, navigate to the photo app, tap that icon and launch, saving at least 7-10+ seconds (depending on how quick your fingers are typing in your code). The time saved could mean the difference between catching the “decisive moment” or not.

Another bonus feature for mobile reporters: With the iOS 5 update, the hardware volume up botton can act as a shutter for the camera! That also includes the white earbuds with the volume rocker that come with the device and some Bluetooth headsets also activate the shutter by pressing the increase volume button.

Another double bonus feature for mobile reporters: With the update, the camera app also offers basic editing tools built in now. For photos, cropping, red-eye removal and “enhance” are available … although the enchance isn’t what you’d hope (it seems to do some color correction and toning, but can be really funky at times). On videos you can trim and preview the clips. Having these tools in the camera app can help you get basic editing done before you send the media in breaking news situations. To find these new features, in the Camera Roll click “edit” to get these features.

To upgrade your software, just plug your iOS device into your computer, open iTunes, and iTunes should prompt you to update your software and take it from there. Just a heads up: It’ll take a LONG time to update, the files are almost 1 gb in size, so don’t do this at the last minute before you head home from work.

The iOS 5 upgrade is available for free for all iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S, as well as the iPod Touch 3rd & 4th generation and iPad 1 and 2.

For the Carnival of Journalism this month, we’re looking for productivity tools and info/work hacks. Besides the 18 or so tips I offered to kick start the conversation, here’s 5 more that have been especially helpful for me this year managing all the projects I’ve been working on (ONA Board, SND St. Louis, Multimedia Immersion, speaking and consulting gigs, etc.):

1- Android
I’m sorry all you iPhone folks, I’m not trying to start a civil war here, I’ve used both the iPhone as a personal phone and it’s good, but Google’s Android integration with all Google’s products has saved massive time and frustration this year, especially with all the travel I’ve been doing. Specifically:

• Google Calendar (be careful with time zones though, change them manually to be sure)
• Google Voice (Saved me massive amounts of cell phone minutes because I can use Voice seamlessly as my phone’s native calling service — no app opening, my phone can just default to always use Google Voice. Also loved being able to direct my calls to where I was, auto voicemail transcriptions and mp3′s of voicemails are awesome)
• Gmail (one email archive, easily integrates with other services)
• Google Docs (especially with the awesome new Android app, great to use a personal Dropbox with their ultra cheap storage space – $5 fo 20 GB!)
• Gtasks (Google Tasks third party app, that allows me to sync my desktop tasks with mobile tasks, I use it for my to do lists.)
• Free Android tethering also rocks (while it’s more up to your carrier this has saved me many times avoiding $13.99 a day hotel wifi charges.. or even free “wireless broadband” at hotels that isn’t broadband at all… not even DSL speeds.)

2- Boomerang for Gmail

Taming and managing email has been a critical skill I’ve tried to master over the past year and this tool has been a godsend. This tool for Gmail is fantastic for sending email reminders to yourself (especially if people haven’t responded to previous messages — critical in project management) as well as sending scheduled email messages. They’ve also created an interesting game to learn and practice better workflow (who would have thought email could be a game?). Fyi, Don’t worry about the Boomerang website (the design is a little weird, especially the font on the customer testimonials, which made me nervous initially) but I’ve been using it and this tool is the real deal. If all of Android’s brilliance has made me admire Google, the fact that they haven’t bought up this company and integrated it into Gmail makes me question if they really are in it to win it.

2- Gmail prioritization management and filters
There’s no quick and easy tip for this, but I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing my email to do pre-sorting before I see it. It can be dangerous though if you have a filter being a little bit too aggressive and deleting things automatically. So I’ve started to clean this up and move them to a “possible junk mail folder” that I go through occasionally.

4- Google Reader plugin from PostRank
This helps you dive through your RSS feeds quickly and see what the most popular posts are. You must keep in mind, that this is popularity, not interestingness to yourself though.

5- My 6 Sense
Awesome tool that learns your interests and customizes feeds for your preferences and it only gets better with time!