In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

A great user experience isn't just about the user interface, but it helps a lot. While I'm not a regular Path user, today I opened it up and browsed for a bit. To like an item on Path, you click a little smiley icon in the top right. If you really, really like an item, you can make it a heart icon. There are three other options: a winky face, a surprised face and a sad face. So Path has cleverly created 5 different types of 'like' using subtle but obvious icons. This is something that Facebook hasn't yet cracked; it only has one style of 'like' and many people have argued for a 'dislike' option, at the very least.

2. Addictive

A nice design is one thing, but you also need to see value in it. It must either solve a problem for you, or be a pleasurable distraction. Time and time again. In other words, it must be addictive. One of the current trendy services on the Web is Pinterest, an online pinboard that has become an addiction for many. In a text-heavy social Web, Pinterest has nailed the concept of a completely visual user experience. It solves a problem, because it gives you a place to store images around topics - such as the very popular wedding dresses section. It brings you back every day, if you get hooked.

3. Fast Start

The Kindle Fire as a product is not as aesthetically pleasing as the iPad 2. The Fire is rectangular and small, looking a bit like the iPad's runty little brother. But what the Kindle Fire does better than the iPad is get the user started - and hooked - straight out of the box. With the iPad, you need to connect to iTunes or manually set up your account to get things started, which can often be a time consuming and awkward experience for newbies. But if you buy the Kindle Fire from Amazon, it comes pre-loaded with your Amazon profile. This enables most users to start downloading content as soon as they switch the device on for the first time.

Note that the rest of the Kindle Fire's user experience is not always pleasurable. But the start up is one part that is.

4. Seamless

With so many Internet-connected devices and screens nowadays, it's important to have a consistent experience. One recent example of this for me is the online music app Rdio. It only just became available in my country, but I was immediately impressed by the consistent user interface between Rdio's iPhone app and the desktop app on my computer. Rdio takes that seamlessness a step further though, in allowing you to download whole albums onto your mobile device so that you can listen to them offline. It would've been easy for Rdio to get that functionality wrong, for example by enabling download on 3G and giving you a huge cellphone bill. But by default, Rdio only downloads songs onto your mobile phone using WiFi (you can turn on 3G download if you think you can afford it). It's the little details like that which make a great user experience.

5. It Changes You

Arguably the most outstanding tech products are ones that revolutionize the way we do things. The iPhone and iPad are two high profile examples from recent years. Twitter is another. These are products that create a brand new user experience, or change old habits in a good way.

When I asked for examples of a great user experience over on Google+, Chris Brogan commented that FitBit has changed the way he manages his fitness. "The information it gathers is useful," said Chris, "plus the way it's displayed to me challenges me to do more with it."

Having an overall great user experience is difficult to pull off. Some of the products mentioned above only get part of it right, for example Kindle Fire and Path. I even said that the iPad, an otherwise glorious product, is slightly disappointing in the start up.

What products or apps have given you a great user experience recently? We'd love to hear about what's making you happy.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

The Shift From Watching TV to Experiencing TV

We often talk about the Internet of Things here at ReadWriteWeb. Over half of the devices at the recent CES were connected, and more than 60% of those were not traditional computers, but more mundane, typically unconnected devices like home appliances and vehicle accessories. Richard explores the trend with an emphasis on the user experience. While user experience is vital on a PC, it may take on even more importance when you are waving your hands in front of a refrigerator trying to see how many eggs are in there. Over the coming weeks Richard will talk to user experience designers to understand how this will impact you in your daily life. He started the series off with a look at user experience design and the coming trends in television.

From our readers:

Robert Weller - Intensive users, even with Apple TV, have had to make this experience work. Apple TV does not allow surfing. Users can go only to Netflix, YouTube and other designated sites. Devices are appearing that make it possible to connect wirelessly. Apple has a device that will connect Direct TV to a Mac. But what we really want is an Internet TV. I want to be able to watch live news on French, Russian and other nations. Al Jazeera should be offered NOW on cable TV 24/7. Tired of stringing HDMI cables/couplers around house.

More Must Read Stories:

Source: Next Xbox Won't Play Used Games [UPDATED]

An unnamed source is telling video game news site Kotaku that the next version of Microsoft's Xbox will not play used games.

The person, identified as a "reliable industry source" also told Kotaku that Xbox 720 will be able to play Blu-Ray discs, an option not offered on current versions of the Xbox. The next generation of Xbox is expected to be released later this year or early in 2013. (more)

[Infographic] Increase Click-Through Rates For Your Tweets

HubSpot's resident social media scientist Dan Zarella released a new report on how to get the highest number of click-throughs for your tweets.

Some of the information (presented below in a handy infographic) is stuff we already knew: Tweets between 120 and 130 characters tend to get retweeted more often than longer and shorter tweets and tweeting links at a slow rate gets more clicks, for example. But other findings - including click-through rates for tweets containing the word "daily is out" by paper.li users - were surprising. (more)

Who's Using Pinterest? Yup, It's Mostly Ladies

Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right. (more)

Could Jailbreaking Your iPhone Become a Crime Soon?

Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one's smartphone is a legal act isn't something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That's because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone. (more)

Today In Facebook Scams: Is Chuck Norris Dead?

Facebook scammers are spreading a vicious rumor on walls everywhere.

The headline reads: "[video] Chuck Norris dies at age 71! Not a Joke," and is accompanied by a video of the star. You may remember Norris from such films as "The Karate Kid" and "Karate Kommandos," and the CBS series "Walker, Texas Ranger." The Naked Security blog reports that this is in fact another Facebook scam, and that Chuck Norris is still alive. What's the deal behind this spam attack? (more)

Why Samsung's Galaxy Tabs Fail Against the iPad & Kindle Fire

One of the most entertaining aspects of studying the Android ecosystem is the fact there is just so much of it. It is overwhelming, especially for consumers that do not know what smartphone or tablet they are supposed to buy because a new device is released every other day.

Samsung is the largest culprit of the flood of Android devices to inundate the flood plains of the mobile coastline. Just look at its Galaxy Tab line of tablets. None have performed well on the market. (more)

Could You Ever Love An Ad?

Today, ads are something we skip. They coat everything we watch, read and listen to like a sticky film, blinking and shouting and shocking us into paying attention. Their value is measured in "impressions," how many people's eyeballs scan past them, and on the Web, a click on an ad is the holy grail. That's what passes for "engagement." (more)

There Is Opportunity In Diversifying Your Android Publishing Strategy

Mobile marketing company Tapjoy has had a tumultuous ride in the last year. It has been bounced around by Apple and its App Store terms of service, has gone to the Web to skirt Apple's policies, integrated mobile video ads and set up a fund for iOS developers to port their games to Android. It has been scattershot and frenetic but it appears that, finally, the company is starting to see some success. (more)

Angry Birds Crash Into Facebook

Asia Tech News reports that the smash hit Rovio game Angry Birds is coming to Facebook on Valentine's Day.

The release will happen fast, rolling out to all 800 million users at once as opposed to a slow Facebook feature rollout like Timeline, which first became available to New Zealand users, then to all - and now it's being forced upon everyone. The big launch takes place in Jakarta. Indonesia holds the world's second-largest Facebook population, trailing only the United States. With its entrance into the Facebook ecosystem, Angry Birds will transform into a social game complete with leaderboards so users can challenge their friends. (more)

Keep up with ReadWriteWeb by subscribing to our RSS feed or email newsletter. You can also follow ReadWriteWeb across the web on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Whenever the next big upgrade to iOS's look and feel may be, a few hints about what might be included can be found in one of Apple's latest hires. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student in Athens, Georgia announced that he was hired by the company as a design intern.

Cart also put together a video prototype showing dynamic icons on the iOS home screen. The redesigned icons include fluid animations and live data about recent activity from within the app. For example, rather than a static red circle showing the number of notifications, the Facebook iOS app might show what kind of notifications they are. Are they mentions? Wall posts? Messages? Friend requests? Dynamic icons can provide more context while still maintaining a fluid and simplified design.

These ideas apparently have enough merit in the eyes of the company to warrant their bringing Cart on board to help execute a few of them. It's not the first time Apple has hired people who have tinkered with their products and come up with viable ideas. The company famously hired known iOS jailbreaker Nicholas Allegra, also known as @Comex as an intern in August of this year.

Critics say that Seamless Sharing is causing over-sharing, violations of privacy, self-censorship with regard to what people read, dilution of value in the Facebook experience and more. CNet's Molly Wood says it is ruining sharing. I think there's something more fundamental going on than this - I think this is a violation of the relationship between the web and its users. Facebook is acting like malware.

The Way it Works Now is Wrong

Facebook's seamless sharing doesn't just happen without notice. The way it works is that the user logs in to Facebook and finds news stories or other links from off-site posted to the top of their news feed. If they click those links, they are prompted to add a Facebook app from the publisher of the story so that their activity on other sites, be it the Washington Post, Yahoo News, or somewhere else, will also be posted back onto Facebook.

There are options available right away, like limiting who can see all those posted links, or opting to cancel addition of the app at all. If the user clicks cancel, they will be taken to the link they intended to click on anyway - they'll just opt-out of adding the seamless sharing app to their Facebook account.

Got that? In order to do what you originally wanted to do when you clicked on a link, you have to click cancel on the menu that popped-up when you clicked on that link. That's not unintuitive, that's counter-intuitive. That it's proven so wildly effective and feels like it caught people unaware makes it feel like an action taken in bad faith by Facebook - like you were tricked.

These options are no doubt skimmed over quickly by hundreds of millions of people who aren't even familiar enough with their own computers to enter Facebook.com into their browser's address bar without Googling for it and clicking on the link.

Violation of reasonable user expectations is a big part of the problem. When you click on a link - you expect to be taken to where the link says it's going to take you. There's something about the way that Facebook's Seamless Sharing is implemented that violates a fundamental contract between web publishers and their users. When you see a headline posted as news and you click on it, you expect to be taken to the news story referenced in the headline text - not to a page prompting you to install software in your online social network account.

That hijacking of your navigation around the web is the kind of action taken by malware. It's pushy, manipulative and user-hostile.

A Loss of Opportunity

In the near-term future, almost every action that you take at home or out in the world will be tracked and measured. Hopefully it will happen in aggregate and anonymously, with extensive privacy protections in place. In exchange for the instrumentation (making measurable) of everyday life, the world will be able to be managed in ways that are more efficient, hopefully more just, and more conducive to new innovations. When the traffic on every road is tracked in real time, for example, then new applications will be created to help drivers select the best route to work and for cities to manage vehicle emissions. Billions of devices will be connected to the network in the future and publishing data into a platform for application development - it's important that those systems be built in a way that people can trust or else the whole scenario is going to be ugly and under-utilized.

Likewise, our activities online are already being tracked all the time - but in most cases it's not our social selves that are attached to that data. We're just numbers tied to history that gets referenced when it's time to serve us up a personalized advertisement. Though some people find that frightening, I don't think it's a very big deal.

Where the new developments come in online is when that data is used to offer us value, not just advertisers who would track us. It's nice when our music social networks, for example, can easily surface the albums that we listen to the most so they can be played with a click. It's cool that music popular with our friends is surfaced as well. It might not be quite so cool when every song we listen to is pushed out to all our friends with our names attached. It is even less cool when those are articles we're reading around the web, pushed out without our choosing to share a particular item. I'd like to see what articles are popular among my friends, but I don't want particular friends self-censoring what they themselves read out of fear they'll be associated with all of it individually.

"I'm afraid to click any links on Facebook these days," says CNet's Molly Wood. That's one of the world's top technology journalists talking; even she seems unclear on how the system works and would rather just avoid the entire thing.

There are good ways and there are bad ways that our "data exhaust," the cloud of data we emit when we engage in everyday activities online, can be used to our own benefit. That data could be used to deliver us new recommendations for discovery, analytics showing us things about ourselves we never knew before because we couldn't see the forest for the trees. When a giant social network does it wrong though, that puts the whole opportunity for everyone to do it well at risk.

I don't know why the world's leading designers on social media user experience would have made something as creepy feeling as the way this new seamless sharing was instituted, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's because behind the scenes Facebook is built by arrogant young people living charmed lives and sure they know what's best for the rest of us. There's something about new features like this and the way the company talks about them that feels fundamentally patronizing. Looking at the user comments that get posted on Facebook announcements, it's not hard to imagine why, though. (They are really dumb.)

I think Facebook ought to put a greater emphasis on acting in good faith and helping its users make informed decisions, in line with their reasonable expectations, as the company seeks to experiment with building the future of media.

Today Gross launched a big, ambitious new social network called Chime.in. The service aims to offer the best of all the other social networks, plus a better experience for users and an advertising revenue split based on user interests. Unfortunately, the site is not good so far. UX is particularly important if Chime.In is going to create a thriving network with a revenue split. We talked to three different User Experience professionals who took a look at Chime.in and said it needs a drastic overhaul if it's going to be a contender. I think it's occasion to remember just how important and non-trivial the interface work on successful social networks has been.

The gist of Chime.in is that it allows users to follow and discuss streams of content about particular topics. Sometimes that content comes from topic feeds, sometimes from individuals who tag updates with certain topics. Like I've tagged a bunch of mine "existential dilemmas" - and you can just follow that topic from me.

There are big previews of links, lots of images, different types of media sharing, profile pages, organization pages, communities. There's a lot. Maybe too much.

"The interface is really disruptive for easy scanning or reading," said Thomas Vander Wal, the man who coined the word Folksonomy (popular classification through tagging). "The UI needs a drastic rethink."

Vander Wal's perspective is one that many other UX professionals articulated to us independently. Upon sharing the feedback below with CEO Bill Gross, the site founder's response was as follows:

"Thanks very much for the feedback. We did do a lot of testing, but this input is very valuable, and we plan to adapt and shape the product greatly based on what we learn in the coming days, months and years. Thank you for sharing this, and we can't wait to see what people think of the product as we iterate through beta."

Unfortunately, the feedback was pretty brutal. Other tech news sites have focused on the gimmick of revenue share for ads next to content on the Chime.In pages, but that's unlikely to appeal to users (brands, sure) and the service is aiming to do much, much more than that.

"It suffers from a malady that many sites suffer from - trying to do too much," says Olivia Hayes, Senior Creative & UX Designer at Ignite Social Media.

"The most usable sites and platforms are the ones that have only a few goals for you to accomplish, and they lay them out in a very clear, hierarchal way to indicate which is the most important goal.

"In this case, there's no visual hierarchy to help the user innately understand what the goals of this site are. You shouldn't have to read the 'About' section to find out what a site does. You should be able to land on the homepage and undersand in a few moments what the site does and what action you should take first. This site has a lot going on with no clear visual hierarchy...I'm still not even sure what it does."

Below: A topic page for the Web 2.0 Summit, where Chime.in is launching. The Chime.in community manager didn't bother to change the description of the page from the description of the conference he copied and pasted in. That seems kind of lazy and inauthentic. Did I mention there's a revenue split on ads though? It's like you can be paid a few bucks for Tweeting! Isn't it about time you derived some value from this otherwise worthless medium?

Jim England, Director of User Experience at Infochimps, feels much like the others.

"Chime.in's user experience is best described as distracting and clunky.

"Individual posts are difficult to read. Unnecessarily loud visual elements such as box shadows and bold colors distract the user from the content. Actions such as reply or favorite are shown for every post - compare that to Twitter's interface which only shows actions on hover. My eyes never got a chance to 'rest' on the content; they felt overly-stimulated.

"There is also no visual consistency. For example, the 'share what interests you' box has a larger margin on the left than the right and doesn't line up with the rest of the page. Certain elements feel out of place - the 'invite your friends' box sticks out like a sore thumb. There is a notable absence of polish in the interface.

"I really like the idea of Chime.in (reminds me a bit of Friendfeed!) but unfortunately the user experience leaves much to be desired."

"It's great to see the team releasing a complete geo-data website-in-a-box," leading data hacker Pete Warden said about the release. "Traditionally it has required a lot of specialized knowledge to create something like this, so open-sourcing a turnkey solution that's approachable by ordinary Ruby developers is a big step in democratizing geo technology."

You can see CartoSet in use on the sites UNESCO Sites (which is awesome) and methanegashydrates.org.

CartoSet was unveiled to positive reviews at this week's Free and Open Source Software For Geospatial conference in Denver.

What does that mean? It depends on how exactly the company lets users manage and receive their notifications, but it's not too early to start thinking about how push could change the Twitter experience. We asked a number of experts in the field of User Experience design what they thought about Twitter push notifications and several of them predicted it will be a game-changer for mainstream users.

Let's look past the risk of information overload for a moment, though, and assume that Twitter implements the feature well. What might that mean?

Right: screenshot captured by Nick Starr.

For me, getting replies and direct messages sent to me by push notification (I've been using Notifo) has been really nice. Twitter can be both synchronous (a real-time exchange) and asynchronous (I'll see your posts when I get around to it) but the addition of push notifications brings the personal communication of replies and direct messages firmly into the synchronous experience, even when I'm not at my computer or looking at a mobile app. It really adds to the flow of using Twitter. The asynchronous part of Twitter is most suited to non-personal messages broadcast by the people I'm following; I'd like the messages intended for me personally right away, please.

That's my take on it, here's what some more UX pros have to say.

Push as SMS Replacement

Cindy Alvarez, author of the San Francisco-based blog The Experience is the Product, thinks push notifications could supplant SMS and win some new users to Twitter:

The non-Twitter-users I know say, 'If you want a reply, you text or email [a recipient]; if you don't need a reply you post to Facebook, what is Twitter good for?' Bringing a more SMS-like experience to the desktop (where you don't incur $0.05 per text charges) might win over a different audience.

Twitter and SMS coming together again, just like the product's creators originally envisioned? That could lead to some truly far-out use-cases, too.

"[Push notifications] really start to blur the lines between what we traditionally think of as a Twitter client and SMS," says Dwayne King, User Experience Strategist at Portland, Oregon design firm Pinpoint Logic.

"Not knowing for sure what options they'll open up for push, it could expand beyond the bounds of what something like SMS could do. Where SMS requires some sort of pre-existing relationship between the texters, Twitter and push via hash tags or geographic location opens up a new avenue for meet-ups, flash mobs and such."

Bringing Celeb-Tracking Mainstream Users Back to the Good Old Days of Twitter

The most compelling take on the User Experience implications of Twitter push notifications may come from Aviel Ginzburg, UX guy at Seattle-based Untitled Startup, makers of Twitter bulk-conversation analysis tool RowFeeder. Ginzburg thinks that the addition of push notification tools could help make mainstream users, who have been introduced to Twitter as a way to passively consume updates from celebrities, aware of the service's incredible potential as a communication tool.

"Those of us who have been using Twitter since the days that it was largely (entirely) text messaging driven perceive Twitter much differently than mainstream users.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform..." -Aviel Ginzburg

"Two days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine, who has been on Twitter for a little over a year (tweets everyday, DMs, @replies people, and even owns an iphone w/Twitter for iPhone) and as my phone beeped over and over again, she asked me if something was wrong. I said no, I just get my DMs text messaged to my phone. Her response was, 'you can do that?!'

"She has been using Twitter like people use Facebook, as a way to consume (mainly) and share content in a 'on your own time' fashion. When she uses Twitter, she really uses it, but in controlled bursts when she is physically engaging.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform that will one day replace text messaging, email, and even phone calls. Just look at the Twitter homepage... it's a text media consumption site.

"With the announcement of push notifications, they're bring the messaging platform core value proposition back to the forefront, and pushing the mainstream, who joined Twitter for entirely different reasons, to experience Twitter in the same way us early adopters do -- as a real-time communication channel that you never disconnect from. The concern of course is: have these users really signed-up for entering a service where the are expected to be available and engaged at all times?

"It may seem like a small and logical update (cut out the text messaging middle-man), but really, Twitter is going to be dramatically changing the way its mainstreams users experience and use Twitter."

What do you think the implications of push notifications in Twitter's own mobile applications will be? Are you looking forward to it? Do you think it's something only power-users are really interested in? Do you think it will change peoples' SMS habits?

It's a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization.

Developers were recently given permission to ask app users for their email addresses, which they can use to email app notifications directly. (Granted, that could get annoying too, but at least it's opt-in.) The creation of a special Applications and Games Dashboard offers another place for app notifications to be delivered.

Some developers may complain that they are being further pushed out of users' line of sight with this decision. Facebook is most likely to respond like this: build a good app that people will use and share by choice and you'll be just fine.

It's unclear whether this will affect the Facebook Newsfeed, but the algorithmic method behind selection of which notifications to publish to the newsfeed and in what order is so central to the Facebook experience that the company was issued a controversial patent for it yesterday. As the newsfeed paradigm takes over the whole web, though, figuring out how to balance human with automated signals, and communication with marketing in the stream, is no trivial matter. These are the decisions upon which the future of the social web is being built.

At first blush, this looks like a good UX design decision that will improve the way everyone using Facebook feels about the site. Look for the change to go into effect on Monday.

Become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and we'll deliver you the best tech news and analysis online right into your newsfeed so you can discuss it with friends.

Much like last month's summit on Activity Stream standards, we believe that yesterday's meeting was of historic proportion.

A big thanks to Plaxo's John McCrea for taking the photos below, giving them with a permissive Creative Commons license and for live blogging the meeting so extensively. All the photos below are his, with the exception of the photo of McCrea himself, which was taken by Will Norris. McCrea has covered the meeting in far more detail than we have - we just thought the event was striking enough that we wanted to post some pictures and make brief introductions to a handful of the players present. These are some of the folks most instrumental in building the web of the future, right now.

Brian Ellin, of JanRain, went through the history of OpenID user interfaces. He shared some of the things people currently type into the OpenID field of existing interfaces, like "elderly," "I HATE YOU LADY GAGA," "Hotmail," and their email addresses.

Vidoop's Chris Messina discussed the differences between identification, as in for blog comments, and authentication, as a method of gaining verified access to user data. That's something that people are increasingly looking to OAuth to accomplish, or an OAuth/OpenID hybrid.

Google's Breno de Medeiros said there needs to be a neutral 3rd party method of figuring out who users' identity providers are without asking them explicitly, something like how the DNS system works.

MySpace's Max Engel, the 8bitkid, says that MySpace users were generally comfortable with sharing data between AOL and MySpace but showed some confusion about which direction the data was flowing. He also said that "OAuth is the condom of the Open Web," and noted that "Facebook has free beef jerky!"

Facebook front end designer Julie Zhuo said she believes that 3rd party authentication implementations should keep the first screen really simple and delay things like extended permissions to later flows, in context.

Plaxo's John McCrea spells out what it's all about - free love between social networks. HeHis co-worker Joseph Smarr also presented the most impressive data of the day, a 92% success rate in user completion of Plaxo's new OpenID login process. That process packed more into a short space than Zhuo seemed to argue was ideal, but in this case it worked. Does Plaxo's new solution put too much emphasis on established big players like Google? It might, but it might very well be able to use some kind of neutral 3rd party cookie sniffing method like the Google team brought up yesterday to solve that problem.

There are lots of questions unanswered but things are progressing quickly. We expect the web to be a very different, and hopefully more exciting, place in the next few years. The people above are some of those we'll have to thank if these dreams for the future come true.

Titled "Living and Learning With New Media," the study articulates the value of social networking, text messaging and other forms of new media use better than anything we've seen yet. It's a major contribution to our understanding of the new web and the way it impacts the world at large.

Leading education blogger Will Richardson pulls out some of his favorite parts of the study on his blog, some of which we excerpt below as well.

Self Directed Exploration Uniquely Motivating

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in classroom setting. Youth respect one another's authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.

That makes sense, of course, but is it effective?

New Forms of Learning Essential to Participation in Contemporary Society

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access "serious" online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions.

What kinds of rolls can adults play in this?

Adults Should Help This Process

Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of "peer pressure." Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting "learning goals," particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

It's a new world for those privileged enough to have access to the web. The consequences of these changes will unfold in years to come. Do schools need to adapt to these new forms of learning in order to keep functioning well? Perhaps. But perhaps for some learning subjects in particular traditional schools have never worked as well as they could in the future if they support these new collaborative styles of learning.

This report is the end result of work done by 28 researchers over 3 years, based on interviews with 800 young people and 5000 hours of online observation. Check it out in full for yourself and let us know what you think.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

Joshua Porter's three-part series from last summer is the best overview of UX design focused on social websites that we've seen. It's framed in terms of things not to do, but there's great advice here like don't focus on too many different features, don't overfocus on the social value without delivering direct personal value (what Porter calls the "Del.icio.us Lesson" - personal value precedes network value) and don't fail to archive knowledge for re-use so your community manager doesn't have to spend all their time answering the same elementary questions from every new user.

This series is a great place to start and it alone should give any company a lot to think about and implement.

Trevor van Gorp, Boxes and Arrows
Design for Emotion and Flow

Trevor van Gorp wrote an article in this month's issue of Boxes and Arrows about "flow." We're most familiar with this concept from Kathy Sierra's discussion of it.

Van Gorp defines flow as an experience characterized by users feeling:
* Total concentration and focused attention
* A sense of control over interactions
* Openness to new things
* Increased exploratory behavior
* Increased learning
* Positive feelings

That's what we want from the apps we use! That kind of experience will keep us engaged for long enough to invest time and other resources that we'll want to come back to and it will give us the emotional incentive to do so, as well.

How can you help your users get into such a mode? Check out van Gorp's post and the conversation in comments.

Steve Psomas, UXMatters
The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

The above tips and perspectives are a great start, but if you can swing it it's a good idea to hire someone who specializes in UX work. Whether you're interested in evaluating prospects for that hire more intelligently or looking for more information about the field for yourself, Steve Psomas's article on UX competencies really helps the reader understand the details of the field. Read this one and you'll be much better informed about the world of UX.

Also worth reading for anyone is Luke Wroblewski's October post on UXMatters titled Scalable Design, where you can find tips on planning your product and site design today to enable easier growth and change in the future. Who wouldn't want to do that?

Next Steps

Case studies are a great way to learn about anything. After an initial exposure to the resources above, we recommend checking out the following:

• Garret Dimon's in-depth analysis of the excellent design at GetSatisfaction.com. Satisfaction is a model service and Dimon articulates the thinking behind it and its impact on users beautifully. This is one of our favorite case studies, but you can keep find a running list of others in places like http://delicious.com/tag/ux+casestudy.
• Ready to make yourself a case study? SilverBack is a new Mac app that systematizes usability testing. The service records your testing users' reactions to various parts of your service. Dimon again, from above, provides a really deep walk-through of the service in his latest post. SilverBack is getting good reviews, but we'd love to know what you think of it, too.

Conclusion: UX Matters

The above are some of our favorite UX resources and we can't emphasize enough how important this kind of thing is for new startups. You can have the most wonderful idea in the world and if your site suffers usability or user experience problems then your odds of survival are not good. We want you, friends with startups, to survive and thrive.

Let us know about your favorite User Experience resources in comments below.

Image: "Forever Flowing" Creative Commons licensed by Lisa Ruokis

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?

Video via a post at the wonderful design blog FreshCreation, the inspiration for this post.

The expectation that something like this will be the interface of the future is pretty widespread, but let's look at some alternatives.

Shadow Play

While that touchscreen looks very cool, it's got its issues too. The video below is from the University of British Columbia and points out some of those issues. I'm not sure if the shadow pointing option is going to work in very many circumstances outside of a classroom.

Via one of the researchers' comments at FreshCreation. See also this version at a home computer.

Just Like Your Real Life Mess

That last video might seem a bit dorky but at least you can imagine some good uses of such an approach. The other end of the spectrum, stunning but a challenge to imagine really using, is BumpTop - a prelaunched, much hyped 3D desktop thing.

Via Metafluence on Twitter

Thought Control

The keyboard and mouse may end up looking like sad relics from a time in history when only a fraction of human capacity to manipulate information was leveraged. Hopefully that won't mean internet brain implants, but for some people it probably will. The following video goes in the "no thanks" column for me. It's called Brainloop and it's from Austria.

Via FreshCreation again.

How About Something More Familiar

One of the reasons we're excited about the launch of Adobe's AIR platform and in Rich Internet Applications in general is their potential for powerful, beautiful new interfaces. It's a lot more accessible for larger numbers of developers than any of the above ever will be. Innovation on AIR in new Twitter clients alone is a fun field to watch.

AIR, Flex and the forthcoming Thermo join Photoshop to make up the newest suite of Adobe tools for interface design. Check out the following video demonstration of the AIR and Flex at work on a Sony Ericsson website. The demo is from Raghunath Rao of Adobe in Bangalore, India.

Throw that onto a touchscreen interface, make it all bigger, and then we're really talking.

2D/3D Gaming

You know what I really want? I want a web experience like the soon-to-launch game Fez. Check out this video, it gets particularly interesting at :30.

Via gaming megablog Kotaku

I want my RSS reader to work like that. Combine some hand motion/touchscreen with some AIR/Flex/Thermo action with some 2D/3D viewing of related documents and I'm going to be in heaven. Make that song in the Fez demo play all the time, too.

Conclusion

Always-on access, the proliferation of publishers, content syndication and an inevitable shift in advertising dollars are all forces contributing to a growing demand for better interfaces. The iPhone's multi-touch interface is also moving things heavily in that direction, which may or may not be good for the web at large.

Other efforts to tackle the same problems include better filtering systems or recommendation engines. Those will make some sense in some cases but day in and day out, we need new interfaces to deal with the explosion of information underway. How do you want to interact with a world drowning in data?

(Maybe all of this is silly and the image below is all we need to know!)

via >> via >> via >> via