So I did me a little survey the other day, to inform some of the thinking around an idea I've been noodling with. Basically, I wanted to find out whether people feel in control of their shopping spend, and whether they think it's important to be. I wanted to find out whether there's a real problem worth tackling here.

I prepared a really quick Google Form, and fired it in quite a few directions:

• Twitter (where I have 1570 followers, and 15 people retweeted it to a total of 45,961 more followers, not accounting for overlaps between social circles);
• Facebook (342 friends);
• Google+ as a public post (388 people have me in their circles);
• A university forum run by TheStudentRoom;
• The Skiff Mates mailing list (which I think has a couple of hundred members).

I had each posting send its answers to a different Google spreadsheet, so I could compare audiences (particularly the student and Skiff ones, as these wouldn't be based on people I know) without asking individuals to answer one of those "where did you hear about this survey" questions.

The first thing I noted was the number of responses. I had 179 in total, here's how they broke down between those sources:

And here's how many responses I got, per person I sent this to directly (i.e. not counting those retweeters):

So just looking at the quantity of responses: Twitter is fantastic for delivering numbers, but my audience on Facebook seem just as inclined to join in. The Skiff mailing list has a pile of really helpful folks (which isn't a total surprise to anyone who's been there). Google+ delivered very little traffic, which was a bit of a surprise; I've found it a great place to get into discussions around posts and tend to get more comments there than on my blog.

Onto the content; few know what they spend really well, there's a sizeable minority of 14% who don't have a clue, and about 40% of people have general poor understanding:

In contrast, respondents tended to feel it was important. 15% felt it was extremely important, 55% fairly important or better:

The interesting stuff came when I compared the two audiences, to find, say, people who understand their own shopping poorly but think it's important. (Please excuse the graphical table)

If I worked in advertising, I would probably give the segments in this table catchy names. But I don't, so I won't. Conclusions from this:

• Most people who consider understanding their shopping to be important think they understand it already: 28.5% of the audience answered both questions with 1 or 2;
• There's a small minority - just over 10% - who consider self-knowledge about shopping important, and admit they don't know their own habits well. These sound like my prospective audience;
• 17.3% just don't think it's important (answering 4 or 5), and 10.61% neither know nor care (answering 4 or 5 to both questions);
• Between these groups there's an interesting little float of groups: 23.5% who think it's of average (3) importance but don't know (4 or more), and 15.5% who know it reasonably well (3 or better) but consider it important (2 or better).

Two final points: about half of the respondents (94 out of 179) were kind enough to give me their email addresses (9 of whom fit in my prospective audience, and may hear from me), and 96.6% of them say they own smartphones. This last point suggests my surveyed sample is biased towards smartphone owners.

Spending a year in academia is giving me an appreciation for experiment design and Doing Things Properly. So in a bid to be a bit more rigorous, I had a think about what I would want to see from the survey results in order to find them interesting, before I sent it out.

I wanted 100 respondents; 30%+ to answer 3 or higher on the "how well do you understand" question (65% did); 30% to answer 2 or lower on the "how important is it" question (54% did); and 10% of respondents to answer 4 or 5 to the former, and 1 or 2 to the latter, and have a smartphone (10.61% did). I think this experiment confirms my hypothesis that there's a latent demand for help here from a sizeable audience.

More on alarm clocks... the DoubleTwist guys have done this beautiful app. It looks wonderful - extremely clean and simple. I upgraded to ICS today so will spend a little time in Android-land, using it. And there's a great interview with the designer here.

I quite liked his perspective that as a designer, Android was a fun place to be because it's where most work is needed. I don't get why more people don't feel this way.

I thought this one was cute, too; Lufthansa producing an alarm clock which wakes you to the sound of different cities :)

"By disassociating "branding" from "selling" he has found the perfect Catch-22 of unaccountability -- setting a goal that is not measurable."

Another great piece from the Ad Contrarian on the advertising industry obsession with engagement over more accountable and less palatable metrics. He quotes Martin Weigel of W+K Amsterdam who goes into more detail and calls out specific bad habits this leads to:

"the impact on sales revenue of any version of engagement until it leads to purchase is - lest there be any doubt or debate - zero"

When I first started blogging, I used a quite esoteric product (for which I developed a great fondness) called Radio Userland. I can't remember why I stopped using it, but at the time I found myself jotting down lots of short-form thoughts. My style of writing was very different to the longer pieces I do nowadays, and in part I put this down to the lurking "Title" field that TypePad includes: it suggests a formality to individual posts.

But I quite miss being able to throw out any old idea. The conciseness of Twitter makes it great fun, but it's an awkward place to carry out conversations and sometimes I want a little more than 140 characters… so I'm going to start putting shorter-form stuff over on my Google+ stream. I'm also cross-posting longer stuff there, to see how that works too.

Jakob Nielsen just posted Mobile Site vs Full Site. Like much of his writing, it's provoked a critical response from web designers. Most of this criticism is for suggesting separate mobile sites; suggesting mobile is a separate use case; and not mentioning techniques like Responsive Web Design. I've not read the full report (as, I suspect, most critics haven't), but I think it's a bit unfair.

As he clearly states in the first 8 words of the body of his article ("Based on usability testing of hundreds of sites…"), his advice derives from observations of real user behaviour - often a rich source of uncomfortable truths. NNG observed users accessing existing web and mobile sites on a mobile device, and where there was a mobile-specific version, they found it easier to use. It's rational to conclude from this that there ought to be mobile-specific versions of content.

He is unhelpfully specific as to how this should be done ("If mobile users arrive at your full site's URL, auto-redirect them to your mobile site"). I think if I read that literally I'd be tempted to disagree with the detail of implementation, but find it hard to argue with the intended effect. From the end-users perspective the advice is valid: give mobile users a mobile representation and let them switch representations if there are features on the desktop site not present in the mobile version, that they wish to use.

How this is achieved is a different matter, and a point on which he's quiet, if not silent: leaving room for multi-serving, RWD, RESS, or other approaches (in a follow-up interview by .Net magazine, he suggests all three). A user can't be expected to notice whether the site they're accessing works well by virtue of its being responsive. They are unlikely to care whether it was produced by a server using separate templates for different representations of content, or some other mechanism.

He talks of a "mobile use case", but if you look at the detail of what he suggests it doesn't seem so contentious. To suggest that mobile sites should avoid esoteric features without limiting core functionality is valid: Amazon, Google and eBay all do exactly that; even a textbook example of responsive web design like the Boston Globe hides some content (the "social" links are hidden and revealed by a "More" link next to the Tools section of the footer). If Nielsen is basing his advice on observations of users, I would expect that they have demonstrated such an approach to be a good one.

The challenge, as he clearly points out, is finding the "cut between mobile and full-site features in such a way that the mobile site satisfies almost all the mobile users' needs"; and this is the crucial "it depends" get-out which gives Nielsen and his critics the wiggle room to find agreement.