Recent Activity

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  First impression

  First impressions? Not sure I'm a typical user (I mostly don't have a lot of time to browse for media, and as such rarely see any, aprt from what I receive via email.), but I'll add my two cents worth anyway, and hope that an alternative perspective is of some value.

  The main box at the top holds no interest for me. As I said, I don't have time to browse. It's not that I wouldn't if I had the time, simply that I don't have the time. Groups on the other hand are something that draw me straight in. By looking at the name of a group I can make assumptions about who would be involved and whether or not they would have similar tastes to my own. For example my third click on the site (after a couple of random clicks to get my feet), is on the Web2 group.

  Straight away I recognise several members and know that the content of this group will most likely be somewhat relevant. The layout of the group landing page needs work though. At first glance my impressions are that are only 10 pieces of content to the group. Further digging reveals the more link, but since the link is contained within the same box as the content my eye is not drawn to it as something after the box. (not sure if that makes sense, but I can explain if it doesn't).

  There is a lot of empty space on the left, currently being used for the tag cloud. Like I said, my use may not be typical, but coming to Scouta for me is about finding media, and I would expect that screen real estate is primarily about getting me that media. As such, I'd be thinking that an alternative layout might involve media content and group members taking most of the screen, and the tag cloud smaller and to the right or even down below. Perhaps even smaller thumbnails would work, or alternatively maybe the text could be pulled into a lightbox or mouseover hint.

  I really like the content on the member page. This is something I've recommended for Tangler.I won't go into details, because I think you've got it pretty much spot on apart from use of space which again I think could be optimized a little. In the case of a member page I love the fact that all the stuff regarding a member is on the left, as that's what I cam e to the member page to see.

  Straight away after looking at Richard Giles, I find myself interested in quite a few of the groups he runs, and maybe 1 or 2 he is part of. I click through to entrepeneurs, and in a typical session this is where I would stop. I know that a large body of content that I am interested probably exists here, but I am unable to see it. I can't see anywhere on this page how many items have been marked as favourites of this group, and do not relish the idea of hitting next, next, next.

  So semantically, I love it - landing page to group to member to group etc. This kind of answers another topic posted regarding  how you discover things. I'm drawn around the site in the way I should be, but once I get to where I should be drawing on content I'm falling off the bandwagon. This is a good thing though - it's harder to fix the semantics and navigation paths of a site in order to make it sticky than it is to make simple layout and content changes.

  Even though I have read up on the site in quite a few places, and actually found Tangler via an article on Richard Giles and Scouta in Anthill (how many plugs in that sentence ???), I did not expect to be drawn in by it as I didn't think it would have anything to offer me. A quick browse around may have changed my mind, as I can see that this would for me be a good source of new podcasts, reviews, interviews and seminars which are by their very nature difficult to find. For me, knowing that a similar group found a particular piece interesting means more to me than tags placed by an author or metadata taken apart by a search engine.

  Posted 19 Jun 07

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  'tis busted :(

  I assume you already know, but Scouta is down at the moment. I am getting a generic connection timeout error. Hope everything is all good, and it's only something simple...

  Posted 20 Jun 07