Mobile Website Traffic

I recently wrote a mobile website for my library using jQuery Mobile. While building the site was simple thanks to the straightforward framework, I'm taking much more time to contemplate how we will push mobile traffic onto the mobile site. As I see it, there are three options:

A link on the main site, no redirect

Essentially the "do nothing" solution, because obviously I'll put up a link no matter what, but users will have to opt-in to the mobile site. Savvy users might know enough to append "mobile" to their search terms when they're looking for the library site, or to "save to home page" the site for repeated use.

Example: the University of Illinois

Pros

• Doesn't force users onto a particular site
• Takes a second to do, zero maintenance (this is huge!)

Cons

• Least effective in terms of driving traffic to the site
• Users might never notice the mobile site exists
• Slow experience because desktop page still has to load
• Especially hard to see & select single line of text when using a mobile device on our desktop site, frustrating intial experience

Redirect Mobile Devices to Mobile Site

using a script such as Detect Mobile Browsers, push users over to the mobile site without any prompting.

Example: North Caronlina State University

Pros

• Best in terms of increasing traffic on the mobile site
• Most efficient, least resources downloaded to user's device
• Fills in gaps in marketing, users who don't know about the site still end up using it
• Seamless experience; users can search for our regular site & still end up on the optimized verison

Cons

• Maintenance: the user agent list of mobile devices is only growing & would need constant updating
• Relies on user agent sniffing, flawed approach for many reasons
• Mobile site doesn't recreate all functionality of the full site so users lose out
• Need a hard link back to the full site somehow without being redirected back to mobile version. I actually had trouble implementing something like this on my resume website using PHP's $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] value but it's probably not too hard to figure out.
• Could a user permanently opt out of the redirect if they so desired?

Pop-up Prompt

A compromise between the two above, a script detects a mobile device user agent & then offers a prompt (either a JavaScript dialog or an HTML element placed on top of the regular site) telling users about the mobile site. Ideally, users could close out the dialog such that the script would remember their choice & not repeat the prompt during subsequent visits.

Example: ??? I don't know of any library examples but I'd love to see one, so let me know if you find a site that does the above.

Pros

• Pushes users towards the mobile site without forcing them onto it
• Users who want to access to desktop site on their mobile device wouldn't face any additional hassle
• No need to bookmark the mobile site or search specifically for it

Cons

• Same maintenance & user agent sniffing concerns as a hard redirect
• Some devices might slip through the cracks & users would still be unaware of the mobile site
• While not as obnoxious as a redirect, users seeking the full site would still be annoyed
• Slow experience because desktop page still has to load

What do you prefer on your mobile device? Do you like the convenience of being automatically redirected, or is it more often a nuisance? Another option, of course, would be & see how effective they are. Traffic figures could easily show which methods work the best, while feedback can speak to the UX.

Open Letter re: Library Hiring

tl;dr – applying for library jobs straight out of LIS school is bleak & libraries/librarians could do a better job of supporting applicants as opposed to crushing their spirits.

I'm among the lucky few that landed their dream job straight out of library school. But a number of my peers–every bit as competent as I am–have struggled mightily. This post is for them, because they obviously cannot express these concerns in a public forum.

You're Being Rude

I meticulously tracked my own job applications & while the sample size is small (I was a math major in college...can you tell?) the results are discouraging: precisely half responded in any manner. That percentage is higher than I thought it would be, but there is little reason why it couldn't be 100%. Furthermore, for several applications I am certain I was notified after the position had been filled & not after I was removed from consideration. One friend of mine took a day off work for an hour-long phone interview only to be informed at the end that the library had already filled the position. Here is why that is unacceptable practice: we are human beings. We are about to graduate, we are trying to figure out where in the country we will be moving, we are making plans. It would be immensely useful to know ASAP after we are out of consideration, so we can move on.

Another friend of mine said it best: “Part of the disconnect in job searching is applying and never hearing back, when as a librarian I was taught to not be dismissive to people.”

Your Requirements are Inane

Here's a tip: try filling out your own job application. Does it make sense? Or is it horrendously vague? Does your web form work or does it crash in every browser except Internet Explorer 6? Better yet, does the web form require repeating every single item listed on my resume? Does the position truly require "2-3 years of experience in a [insert your specific type of] library"? That last one is the killer. There are apparently no entry level jobs in librarianship, who would have guessed? As a new librarian, I beg you to consider what is more important to your institution: do you want someone with a nominal amount of experience? Or someone new to the profession, eager to learn, & devoid of assumptions? Many positions demand experience: it is impossible to be prepared for systems librarianship in LIS school, or for major management roles. But the vast majority could use a bright recent graduate as much as a bright greenhorn with two years of experience. Give us a chance to prove that to you.

Your Advice is Condescending

I read a lot of application advice on library blogs when I was a free agent. And the most common tips were always along the lines of: use spellcheck, address the position requirements, read the job ad, don't just cut & paste, make sure you're qualified. This is not advice, it's whining from people who read poorly written applications. I don't doubt that libraries get lots of crummy cover letters; I do doubt that the people who submit these flawed applications are scouring the Internet for advice that they're clearly not following. So my point is: as a competent young job searcher wracked by fear of homelessness, repeatedly seeing appeals to use spellcheck while simultaneously being silently rejected is awful.

Here's the paragraph, over at Attempting Elegance, that inspired me to write this post:
"Fourth, seriously, just stop with the cut-and-paste jobs, already.  We can tell. We’re more experienced at this than you are, we’ve just read 75 cover letters, and you’re not fooling us.  We know that you’re tired of applying for jobs and eating ramen and suffering under your terrible current boss, but the fact that your cover letter is a cut-and-paste job from the fourteen jobs you applied for last month shows. And we hate you. If you can’t be bothered to match your fonts, get the name of our institution right, list our job position title correctly, and write something that indicates you read the ad… Just no. You just wasted our time, and you’re out of the running."

Do you have any idea how insulting & discouraging that is to me as an applicant? I am eating ramen, applying to dozens of jobs, & suffering. It's not some funny, rhetorical flourish, it's my reality. I'm doing the right things & have nothing to show for it.

OK, this may be the first post I regret writing. It's a bitter reaction to bitterness. I'm sure search committees are frustrated with the quality of applications, but I struggle to see how that frustration could even come close to the anxiety of someone job searching. Please think of that while you write your job ad, reply to applicants, & write contemptuous blog posts.

Cloud Aggregators

I discovered most of these via Gary Price's Best Betas presentation at Internet Librarian. As web apps are exploding and replacing desktop ones, I foresee that services that enable cooperation and aggregation amongst web services will be increasingly in demand. Here's my first taste.

Hojoki

Updated: 3/11/12

I just discovered Hojoki so I thought I would update this post & include it. Hojoki isn't terribly different from the other cloud aggregators here; you can add accounts, from Google Docs to Mendeley (which is a cool bonus for researchers who use that service) to Github, and all updates appear in one place. You can create "Projects" which function as folders and can share folders with people. Updates from any service appear rapidly in Hojoki's equivalent of a timeline, making it a great real-time collaboration tool. Right now, the list of services supported is moderate but interesting. It's particularly cool to see Github & Beanstalk support, meaning that this could make for a better code-collaboration tool than the others on this list. However, lack of FTP/WebDav support makes it more limited than, say, Otixo, which is still what I would recommend as a singular desktop for all your files in disparate cloud applications.

Greplin

Named after the Unix grep command that searches for regular expressions, Greplin is less of an aggregator than a personalized search engine. Not personalized in the way that Google, Bing, and some (but not all...see Blekko and DuckDuckGo, which I believe don't alter results based on personal information) other search engines are these days, but in that you give it access to accounts like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and it indexes the results. The list of services you can index is fairly large. The user interface is minimalist and slick. Overall, it looks well-done and has the largest chance of making it into my everyday Internet usage of anything on this list.
My only gripe with the service thus far is how it orders search results. First comes Mail, then Events, then People, then Files, and finally Streams (Twitter/Facebook accounts...not much different from People, actually). That's almost precisely the opposite order I'd like to see. When I imagine the utility of something like Greplin, there are two basic use cases: "Damn, what was the cool link I saw somewhere but didn't save?" and "Shoot, where is that document I wrote, in Google Docs or Dropbox?" Neither of those use cases involve my Gmail contacts or Calendar events, yet those are the search results that rise to the top to the detriment of more useful items. I figure Greplin is still young and custom result ordering is probably on the way, so I'm not too concerned. But it does point to perhaps a fundamental misconception of what the service is for.

Otixo

Combines my Dropbox and Google Docs in the same place, a great answer for use case #2 above. This service has, by far, the most limited set of third-party sites it can pull content from, but it might be able to focus in on a single task better because of that. A service that tries to be everything to everyone usually becomes bloated and fails (cough...Facebook...cough). You can also add FTP or WebDav sources, which makes it pretty customizable. I could see this becoming a single source for my scattered web design projects.

Primadesk

This is the only service which I ruled out pretty quickly. It may just be further in beta than the others, but the overall design struck me as clunky and there were signs that the service was very buggy. For one thing, when I went to remove my account, I received an unfiltered error message displaying a Java call stack. I'm nowhere near hacker enough to exploit this but still it sounds an alarm bell in my head when a service that can access my Google, Facebook, and Dropbox accounts gives me a peak at its server-side code. It is one thing to be in beta and another to expose users to error messages. It is even worse when I contact your tech support (whose email address was not easy to locate) and receive no reply.
The list of services you can combine is pretty great, though; around the same size as Greplin. I didn't see any WebDav or FTP support like Otixo, though.

Voyurl

I asked for a beta invite from them and haven't heard back. It sounds more akin to Greplin than Otixo and Primadesk, as in it aims to be a personalized search engine rather than a unified cloud file system. The primary things that intrigue me are the browser plugin (judging from the screenshot it's a Chrome plugin, which is great) and the personal analytics. I'm a data-minded person and I use a lot of social sites, such as Goodreads and Last.fm, simply as repositories of information about myself.

Automate Each Week

I always try, at least once a week, to find a cumbersome or lengthy procedure that I do frequently and streamline it somewhat.
To give an example, I often shuffle files between my MacBook laptop and work computer. Sometimes I need to work on files from home, sometimes the OS X interface or a certain program I have just makes things easier.
Now, Dropbox is great for this, but it has its limitations. Leaving security aside, one of the sets of files I work on a lot is a web application for recording library statistics. Since the application requires PHP and MySQL, to run it live on my laptop I need the files to be in my localhost web server directory. So I am constantly copying the latest version from Dropbox, pasting it into my web directory, and then replacing the file that connects to MySQL with a different file (since the MySQL logins on our live site and my localhost are necessarily different). Now, I am not a real programmer, but I know enough of the command line to do this operation via Terminal. So I googled how to write a shell script in OS X and made a libraryStatsTransfer.sh file:


#! /bin/sh
cp -R [Web app's Dropbox location] [Web app's web server location]
cp [The localhost MySQL connection] [The other connection, now in web server directory]



Now, I can run this script and save myself a few seconds and a lot of hideous drag-and-dropping (I am very much a keyboard person, if my post on application launchers didn't already tip you off). Sometimes these little automations don't do much, but other times they're huge and completely transform the way you operate. The first time I installed and configured Quicksilver was the latter.
Computing is an easy example, because computers are all about automation. Any program, at its core, is about automating and simplifying a set of frequently performed commands. But there's no reason to limit oneself to that: cooking, commuting, conversation, etc—all of these have the potential to be streamlined or improved. The real difficulty is in finding something to fix. We are so immersed in our everyday routines that sometimes identifying areas for improvement can be difficult. Then, once you've found something rife with automation potential, thinking up the best way to do it usually isn't hard. Google it, read a book about it, or just meditate for a moment. An answer will present itself.

Things Everyone Should Know About Statistics

I recently read How to Lie with Statistics and it solidified the need for this post.

Sample Size Matters

OK Cupid does some cool things with their data. Awhile back, the site published a blog post comparing their homo- and hetero-sexual users that debunked some common, bigoted myths: namely, that homosexuals lust after and seek to convert heterosexuals, and that homosexuals are likely to have had numerous sexual partners. The results were striking: only 0.6% of gay men ever searched for straight matches, and only 0.1% of lesbians did the same. Hetero- and homosexuals had the exact same median number of sexual partners. But what really struck me was a one of the hundreds of comments on this particular post (btw, don't ever read comments) that said something along the lines of “Your study must be wrong, because I've met two gay guys and they both said they had hundreds of sexual partners.” It was hardly the only comment that drew a ridiculous conclusion from a sample size far smaller than OK Cupid's enormous user base. But this is how people think: well, this is my experience, and my experience is representative, so it must be universally true. Needless to say, thousands of varied data points is far superior to any individual's anecdotes. But…

Fully Randomized Sampling is a Fiction

…even OK Cupid's massive sample is innately flawed. Why? Because it is not a cross-section of all gay people. It's all gay people subscribed to an online dating site based in America. So we can expect geographic, national, racial, income, educational, technological, and (most important in this case) relationship-status biases. And I'm not singling out OK Cupid here: I have yet to encounter a research study without some kind of sampling bias. I love Pew's Internet and American Life Project, for instance, but most of their surveys are delivered over the phone, which skews things in a significant way given their topics. People such as myself, who have not owned a landline for almost a decade and have never been listed in a phonebook, are invisible to their methodology. The only studies that come close to true randomization are done in scientific laboratories, where independent variables are carefully curtailed. But such experiments hardly represent life in the wild where causality becomes absurdly complex, and thus are limited in terms of extrapolation. And speaking of causality…

Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

I hesitated a bit before talking about this, because C≠C has become a thoughtless soundbite. I frequently hear it misused in totally irrelevant contexts, and taking the maxim too seriously leads to an insurmountable, Humean skepticism. But it must be said: just because two variables appear to be aligned does not mean there is any causal connection between them. Perhaps the best demonstration of this was produced just recently, with Google's tongue-in-cheek Correlate that finds extremely strong correlations between arbitrary sets of searches, or matches a user-drawn curve to different search terms' popularity over time. Some of these are quite meaningful: Google is famously able to trace flu outbreaks better than the CDC by studying search term occurrence geographically.

The message is: find a healthy level of skepticism in relation to all things statistical or be persistently deceived.