Prototyping weeknotes #69

This week we welcome Rachel to our team. Coming from the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, she will be staying with us for two weeks and has been Blogging daily. Daynotes... Impressive.

After our weekly meeting on Thursday, Rachel was joined by some colleagues from Manchester E-Research Centre talking about sentiment analysis of tweets (which turns out to be hard, as we would expect) and from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) who showed us some fabulous visualizations of tweets, including one over a 3D map of London.

The RadioTAG team worked hard this week, with a number of runs though final design of the app site, and a number of presentations (of RadioTAG and VIS) to radio colleagues and other companies, in preparation for our user research. There was also a first: ChrisL and Kat registered a a radio with one of our online accounts.

Theo and ChrisN focused most of their week on The Programme List - finishing the UX revisions so we can complete this iteration of development and start testing with users next week. ChrisN, Theo writes "has worked wonders on the backend - packaging the server requests to improve UI response time and a whole host of small fixes. We've been 'high-fiving' as we clear the Agile Zen backlog."

The news linking team was immersed in numbers and formulas for most of the week: ChrisL, Duncan and Olivier were joined in animated discussions by Sean in looking for appropriate metrics to measure the rate at which visitors of the News site click on external link. We eventually settled on, and started using, a measure of Click-Through rate, and Chris built a mathematical model on which we can start basing our "what if" scenarios. Joanne, Olivier and Akua also interviewed two people from the news team: Jonathan with whom we learned a lot about news and blog culture at the BBC, and Clare, who gave us a lot of interesting information about her role as a Link Journalist - where she rounds up articles found on the web specifically researching links to good articles to be put into her daily news roundup.

The news companion project also made some progress, mostly through researching market. Kat noted why "companions" is our new favoured word for second screen devices. Second screen suggests they are the inferior and less important screen, whereas we are thinking of them as the controllers of primary content, rather than simply being complementary.

Links of the week:

• The ultimate research paper (according to Kat)
• The nytimes they are a-changin'
• BrowserID and how it differs from openid
• James Coglan's excellent 3-part series on testing javascript applications, the final part of which was posted this week.
• Two (funny, thought-provoking) pieces on the changing culture of online news: AP Finally Learns That On The Internet, You Can Link To Other Sites and Towards a Slower News Culture