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Congrats to everyone involved in the latest improvements to Liveblog and especially cool that our #Occupy coverage is being highlighted here.
Pukin’ Punkin.
Anyone know who took this, tell us so that we may credit the genius.
Such an important series. I’m proud to be a part of an organization that has paid so much attention to veterans and veterans’ organizations like the IAVA whose founders and members found an early home for their message on our platform. While other media companies have ignored or marginalized veterans’ point of view, HuffPost has given them a voice.
I think we’re able to do this because we are not tied to old media news cycles. I also think our focus on bloggers has given a lot of people like Paul Rieckhoff, founder of IAVA (who met Arianna at an airport, carried her bags, and got into a conversation that lead to an invite to blog on HuffPost) a way to amplify their voice and message.
From Joan Williams on the Huffington Post
The Catalyst report takes aim at the claim — now almost taken for a truism in business literature - thatwomen don’t ask for promotions and salary increases at the same level as men. According to the Catalyst report, women were actually found to ask more than men for both increased compensation (63% of women to 54% of men) and a higher job position (19% of women and 17% of men) when they moved on from their first job. And yet, despite the popular wisdom that an employee willing to move to a new company has more negotiating power, women who moved around in their career earned an average of $53,472 less than their counterparts who stayed at the same company.
From a report entitled Penalities of Success: Reactions to Women Who Succeed at Male Gender-Typed Tasks
The results, which demonstrated that penalties for
success were exacted when the job was male gender-typed but not
when it was female gender-typed or neutral in gender type, made
clear that success is not in and of itself anathema for women. It is
only when the success implies that gender-stereotypic norms have
been violated that it induces social penalties.
1) get rejected more
2) climb the right hill
3) create an amazing toy
4) grow that toy into something big that transforms an important industry
Sure, I majored in the sciences during college but you didn’t have to be a scientist to participate in the social experiment, Jonathan’s Card. What started as a local project amongst friends quickly blew up to become a national barometer of generosity and collective sharing.
The man behind…
Most consumer-facing apps are not built with longevity in mind. Instead, they are built to engage enough people for the few months or years it takes to either lose the audience and flame out as a startup, or to succeed by selling it and its community to a larger company.
However, there is another form of app emerging—a life-spanning, or long-form app if you will—that is less focused on short-term high growth and inherently more demanding of the user’s engagement over longer periods of time.
These apps aim to change behavior over longer periods of time, and/or to capitalize upon habitual behaviors. Some, but not all, employ social pressure through a combination of social features like sharing status and progress on Facebook and Twitter; and overt or subtle forms of gamification such as passive stats, challenges, points, incentives, and user ranking.
The primary area in which these apps are beginning to emerge is in health. The reasons are obvious. Our health and wellness are things we are concerned about and therefore engaged with long-term.
The growing interest in personal tracking and self quantification has produced a whole list of ‘lifespan’ apps, some of which focus on niche audiences like runners (MapMyRun), dieters (LiveStrong) or recovering addicts (AAAStepsAway for iPhone and Android).
Another significant area in long-form apps is undoubtedly in response to the ongoing recession and people’s sense of ignorance and powerlessness in the face of the financial meltdown. Mint, Learnvest, and a few others combine financial management advice with pragmatic tools that enable you to track your financials, set goals, and prompt better decisions about your money.
Essentially, the surge in apps for health, quantified self, and financial management tells us that there is a need for longer-term thinking in product design. Apps that capitalize upon what is already habitual behavior on the part of the user are more likely to succeed, even if the app itself seems fairly unsophisticated.
The tricky part of creating apps like these has got to be the process of altering behavior and keeping people engaged long term. I mean, we’re all pretty entrenched in our habits. I know I am. :)
For example, I am by no means an athlete but it’s fairly easy for me to whip myself into shape if I’m feeling slovenly enough. My tendency is go every day and work my ass off (literally) for a month, modify my diet in some extreme way, and slim down a couple sizes fast. Once I stop feeling like a bloated waste of space, I stop going again. It’s sad how many gym memberships I’ve gone through in this way.
I have tried LiveStrong, various diet tracking tools like About.com’s Calorie Counter (surprisingly good), and in RL, trainers.
In my own self-analysis, I find that pairing up with someone who triggers my competitive streak and my guilt simultaneously is the single best motivator for me to change my lazy ways. My use of self-tracking tools tends to be supplementary to that actual relationship.
This is not unusual, and that’s why some dieting and exercise apps incorporate gamification and your personal networks to tap into those social motivators.
For me, self-efficacy effects the goals I set for myself. I attribute my low goal-setting behavior (in diet and fitness) to my upbringing which did not encourage engagement in sports or physical activity (but rather focused on intellectual and artistic development). The goals I set are in turn impacted by social environment. If I pair myself with someone with more self-efficacy and bigger goals, my goal-threshold is raised. This combination determines my success in behavioral change.
Self-efficacy influences the effort one puts forth to change risk behavior and the persistence to continue striving despite barriers and setbacks that may undermine motivation. Self-efficacy is directly related to health behavior, but it also affects health behaviors indirectly through its impact on goals. Self-efficacy influences the challenges that people take on as well as how high they set their goals (e.g., “I intend to reduce my smoking,” or “I intend to quit smoking altogether”). A number of studies on the adoption of health practices have measured self-efficacy to assess its potential influences in initiating behavior change (Luszczynska, & Schwarzer, 2005).
I would hazard a guess that self-efficacy and social factors are the primary motivators of people under 30, while people 30 and above may require additional motivators (such as a severe illness and/or decline in health) as a result of habitual behaviors.
This is problematic when you consider that mobile apps—which are arguably more effective in monitoring behavior (because they potentially require less input)— are consumed more widely by young people. Young people’s motivators are different and their behaviors are less established. Older people, by contrast, are more likely to require behavioral change, but less likely to download and in turn use mobile apps. In fact:
while 43% of adult cell phone users have apps on their phone, significantly fewer (29%) have actually downloaded an app. The remaining 14% only have preloaded apps on their phone.
It’s worth looking at this breakdown from the Pew Internet report:
To me this suggests that an initiative towards pre-loading health apps on mobile phones might be worth pursuing. Perhaps corporations that pay for their employees’ cell phones might consider it a worthwhile addition to their agreements with cell phone service providers to offer pre-loaded health apps or incentives to their employees to download them.
The other challenge to long-term tracking and behavioral change apps is the data on repeat usage. According to Localytics 26% of mobile apps downloaded in 2010 were used just once:
This in turn suggests that long-term behavioral change apps targeted towards adults should be tied to RL motivators. Doctors prescribe medicine. Why don’t they prescribe or at least suggest apps? By the same token, financial advisers should recommend apps like Mint—and perhaps app companies like Mint should create ‘financial coach’ accounts and/or family accounts to increase social motivators.
Adult behavioral change is harder. Incorporating financial, professional, and health-related incentives may differentiate a successful app from an unsuccessful one. Coming up with ways of partnering with corporations, cell-phone providers, health providers, and insurance companies to provide pre-loaded apps, prescribe them, or offer incentives for their use might be the way to alter adult app usage behavior and in turn, their lifestyle.
Dude. I don’t know what’s wrong with my name (because I think it’s awesome!) but you have great insights into the design community and obviously understand the antispec perspec. So thanks for engaging in ye old diablogue. I hereby link out to you in good faith.
And for those of you without principles…you know where I am. ;)
I am constantly struck by the fervor with which media outlets pick up anything that remotely resembles a story about The Huffington Post. Take the latest HuffPost tempest in a teapot.
Check it out! Apparently, as a part of our overarching plot to get everything for free, we’re trying to exploit designers. Never mind that Business Insider hosts caption contests on a regular basis. Good Magazine’s in the game too! You don’t see AdWeek all up in arms about their contest but I guess being featured in the magazine and getting a t-shirt for completely re-imagining food labels is more palatable.
Or how about The Washington Post’s next pundit contest? The prize there was $2,600 for a string of blog posts WaPo could publish at their own discretion. I see Poynter had no problem with that one. At least Poynter sends the winner of their contests a book or something in its frequent writing contests. Then there’s these guys, and this guy…but those aren’t media companies so they don’t count.
Maybe designers are different from writers. I mean it’s really easy to write good content and any opportunity to get your work up there is a good one. That must be why Mediabistro is covering this even though they host their own and make a point of covering contests like this one (with apologies to the anti-spec crowd of course). Speaking of, here’s the post that ignited the controversy and the response by antispec.
In all honesty, I’ve got nothing in particular to say to the antispec group that has not been said in their own comment section:
Whilst I’m not in favour of large enterprises trawling for free creative work, the Huff Post appears to be inviting anyone who wants to design an icon for their Politics tweets to send them ideas. They’re not asking people to rebrand HP or AOL. Perhaps this is an opportunity for someone who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to work for a large company to gain some recognition, which could well result in some (well paid) work further down the line. HP could, alternatively, hire a big agency with their big bucks and let the agency take the money and credit for the work of an intern designer.
I feel privileged to be on the HuffPost tech team in the center of the storm because (and I mean this quite earnestly) it is truly a rare opportunity to be so envied and reviled. At the end of the day, attention is paid to the companies that most interest us— that fire us up one way or another.
The Aol-HuffPost drama will continue in the press because it is fascinating stuff. It’s what HuffPost does that matters in this industry because like it or not, it’s HuffPost that sets the trends. Like it or not, we influence the ongoing debates about the equity of crowd-sourced design, what constitutes original content, and the role of moderation in scalable UGC.
Can we act as a shepherd in these debates? or just a lightning rod? I personally hope we can be both, because they need to happen.
In the meantime, watch the throne because, like these two guys, we’re doing some crazy shit!
