BarCampLondon7: Alternative Input - Striking a Chord

Stephen Nicholas

3rd year project

• Stephen works with Dale Lane @ IBM on microbroker & GUI testing
• multitap & mini-qwerty not really suited for mobile input…
  • qwerty not really suited for desktop input either :-)
  • multitap gets up to 20 WPM
• braille keyboard has one key for each dot
• can get faster than qwerty keyboard input
  • qwerty 80 wpm
  • stenographers much faster: 200-300 WPM
• can possibly reduce RSI since not moving your arm quite so much
• drawbacks:
  • have to use non-obvious input schemes (no hunt and peck)
• microwriter, introduced in 1978
  • got speeds up to 40 WPM after 7 months practice
  • had great mnemonic method for encoding
  • recently been redeveloped as the CyKey
• twiddler
  • has 3 x 4 keys, might work well on mobile keyboard
• ChordTap for phones:
  • has three additional buttons on back of phone to distinguish between multitap letters

BarCampLondon7: Social Manipulation on the web and in person

Tim Nash

Social Engineering is still just as valid as ever…

• If asked for photo ID, people will give it up willingly
• given a photo ID with details, you can call up somewhere and say you’ve forgotten your ID
• often the front desk will give you a new ID…
• people are more likely to buy when there’s an official badge…
  • doesn’t really matter what the badge is
  • virtually no-one who clicks on the badge actually purchases
  • but buy rate will increase anyway
• paypal did an experiment about a year ago
  • to see if it made a difference to not use the word PayPal on their “paypal verified” badges
  • made no difference to sales conversions
  • click-through rate to paypal went down
• certain colours affect buying moods
  • brain doesn’t like bright colours
  • big red “buy now” button does not attract people — your eyes will avoid it
  • instead have a big grey “buy now” button with two red arrows on either side
  • eye tracking study shows people look for price and “buy now” button
  • sales rates go up when the price is just above the buy now button
• best place for comments on a blog:
  • new comment box just under post
  • other comments can be down the side
• use the word “reply” rather than “submit” comment
• scienceforseo blog
  • highlight a part of the text and the comment will appear alongside

BarCampLondon7: Project Lombok - the end of Java boilerplate?

Reinier Zwitserloot - @surial

Project Lombok is an extension to Java that allows you to write less boilerplate code by using annotations.

• examples:
  • @Data to provide automatic getters and setters for private fields, equality and hashCode, and a constructor for final fields
  • @Cleanup to tidy up inputstreams when block ends
  • @Synchronized to lock on private Object instance rather than this
  • @SneakyThrows() hides a checked exception from javac, but leaves it for JVM
  • (in JVM all exceptions are unchecked)
• integrates with Eclipse (e.g. getters/setters provided without you having to type)
• does mucking around through its jar, so can work easily with Ant & Maven etc
  • use com.sun...ProcessingEnvironment to
• Java Posse — podcast
  • inventor of annotations happy that lombok exists, but not so happy that private APIs being used…

BarCampLondon7: Supporting the masses

Tony McCrae

Experience from squadlist.co.uk — an online tool for organising rowing outings. Set up during a Guardian employee’s spare time for his own rowing club, but suddenly getting over 1000 users. He needed to support the users of the site without spending time on them.

• sort out forgotten logins
  • though have to be careful about security
  • generate nice passwords using pwgen
  • facebook isn’t permitted in some firms (so no facebook connect)
  • prompt end users to talk to someone else other than you!
• can your users be divided into groups?
  • form a relationship with one member in each group
• demo as documentation — install a full demo system with sample data and let them play
  • reset its data regularly (but make sure you tell people!)
  • Jira now has jQuery-based inline popup help
• invest in getting your domain unblocked
  • put SPF in your DNS
• even if you send from noreply@, check the volume going to it!
  • a spike may indicate something going wrong
• don’t tell everyone when changes happen
  • just senior users
• introduce new features to a smaller test group
  • enable beta group
• allow users to export their data automatically
• http://uservoice.com and http://getsatisfaction.com
  • with a forum on-site, people keep on requesting the same new features, even if you provide a roadmap
  • moving to these customer satisfaction sites means that existing feature requests no longer generate complaints!
  • instead, people vote up the existing requests
  • of course, if the requests never get monitored or picked up, you’ve still got disgruntled users
• really loud heavy users can be very powerful for good or bad
  • hire them! or at least make them happy
• gmail labs has “canned responses”
• open source core product to ensure continuity
• provide “paid for” additional capabilities