Update: Sarah Schacht (@sarahschacht) alerted me to this challenge when she was sick back in March. She did a lot of research on how other cities are making their inspection reports easier to use, even making it possible to integrate the information with Yelp reviews. KING5 did a story on her advocacy that runs at 10 and 11 pm on Thursday May 16. I’ll link to the story if KING5 puts the video online.

That’s when I learned that King County restaurant inspection reports may be inaccessible to the average consumer because restaurant name and business name might not match. Guess which one you need to know to access the inspection report in King County? Then once you find it, can you decipher it?

Fast forward to this past weekend, when I found myself down for the count with fever and chills within four or so hours of eating at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kirkland, one that I patronize almost every time that I teach a motorcycle safety class. (Because I’m not a morning person, I choose not to get up early enough to make a lunch. Instead, I dash over for three fried chicken strips and a biscuit; I am, after all, a Georgia girl.)

That was Saturday evening. It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m better but still under the weather. According to the Mayo Clinic overview of food poisoning, my symptoms onset suggest Staphylococcus aureus which “[c]an be spread by hand contact, coughing and sneezing.” My doc says it can take a week to recover.

Today I finally had enough energy to look up the inspection reports for the restaurant.

They cannot be found by restaurant name (Kentucky Fried Chicken) and street address (11747 124th Ave NE) or street address alone. In both instances, my search was greeted with No restaurant inspection information matched the entered search criteria. Restaurant name only serves up one location in Federal Way.

Here’s what you see when you search for “Kentucky Fried Chicken” in the top five counties in Washington State by population: King (2,007,440) – Pierce (811,681) – Snohomish (733,036) – Spokane (475,735) – Clark (438,287).

The problem – challenge? – is that King County and Pierce County want us to search by “business name.” Quite often the business name is different from the restaurant name. Some businesses own several restaurants, for example.

But Snohomish, Spokane, and Clark? Those smaller counties — perhaps because their systems are newer? — allow us to search by the restaurant name.

King County: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken

Results: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken on King County Health Department site. I promise there is more than one KFC in King County.

Pierce County: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken

Results: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken on Pierce County Health Department site. And I promise that there is a KFC in Pierce County.

Snohomish County: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken

Results: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken on Snohomish County Health Department site.

Spokane County: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken

Results: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken on Spokane County Health Department site.

Clark County: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken

Results: search for Kentucky Fried Chicken on Clark County Health Department site.

Once you find a report, then what?

King and Pierce flunk on the “make it easy to find a report” score. But once you find a report, how easy is it to figure out how safe/clean/risky a restaurant might be?

On this measure, I give the highest marks to Spokane County, given the system currently in place in Washington. That is, there is no state  grading system, you know, like there is for our kids to move certain levels (No Child Left Behind) in school.

In Spokane:

1. Search results are returned in a list with no copy WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS or in bold rainbow colors. In addition to the address and zip code, the results are alongside a Google map. If there are multiple locations, the map makes it easy to select the location you are interested in.
2. When you click through to the restaurant, from the list or the map, you see a list of all reports in reverse chronological order. You can tell at a glance how many times a restaurant has needed a re-inspection (required after some not-explained threshold of failure).
3. When you analyze any individual inspection, you can easily find out what is meant by any category, such as adequate hand washing facilities.

Spokane County Health Department – Results For Kentucky Fried Chicken Search

King County shows points that have been deducted but there is no explanation for what is being assessed (#3 above). If you click the red or blue deduction, like you can in Spokane County, the entire scoring system will snap shut like an accordion. The only thing that might be “better” than Spokane’s summary is the column “Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory” — but you can easily deduce this in the Spokane view which just seems cleaner.

Spokane County – Results detail

King County – results detail

Like King County, Pierce County uses ALL CAPS on its results pages. Basically, the programmers are taking raw data straight from the database and not converting it to something more readable (upper and lower case). Someone who is not a programmer – usually a user advocate or usability expert/consultant – will point out the need for this change which is usually straightforward for business names but not as much for people names, think MacDell. [It is easier to read lower case words because we read by recognizing word shape; upper case words all have the same shape.]

Although Clark County results are modeled after King County’s red-and-blue rainbow, I think that they are easier to read because there is limited use of bold type. And the table is treated like a table. Even if those are old-fashioned lines, they provide a scaffolding that reduces cognitive load.

Neither Clark nor Pierce help the consumer understand what the numbers or colors mean. King County recently added an explanatory statement to the search page and the bottom of the results page; this happened subsequent to my friend’s nasty experience in March.

Pierce County – Results details

Clark County – Results details

Snohomish County does not use the rainbow system. Neither do they elaborate on the violations to the extent of the other counties.

Snohomish – Results detail

Snohomish – Inspection Report

Take-aways

If you’re in charge of a site that’s delivering this sort of information to consumers, here are some tips:

• Think like a consumer not a regulator.
  I’m pretty sure that’s the difference in “search by business name” and “search by establishment name” as well as “just put a word in” the search field and “use a wildcard” (seriously – what normal person knows what a wildcard is today?). Then there’s the “return a totally different set results if you just use ‘chicken’” in the search box. (King County didn’t return KFC in this scenario. You really can’t make this up.)
• Oh. Make your search terms case-insensitive.
• Make the results meaningful.
  Ask yourself: why are consumers going to be searching restaurant inspections? Either they are thinking of going to a new restaurant or they’ve gone to a restaurant and someone got sick. Or they know someone who got sick. In that scenario, what do they want to know? Give it to them in ENGLISH.
• Accuracy does not mean understandable.
  When I saw that the restaurant my friend went to was cited over and over for “inadequate hand washing facilities” I was dumbfounded. “How,” I asked my husband, “could that be fixed in a week?” Well, if King County had provided a link to explain what the demerit meant, like Spokane County does, I would have seen that it can mean that there is no soap. Or paper towels.
• Think simple, clean, minimal.
  That means a sparing use of bold, an allergy to ALL CAPS and fights-to-the-death over rainbow hues.
• Provide enough info at the top level for us to make a quick assessment.
  Then for the small percentage of folks who want to deep dive, make it easy for us to dive. And then dive again. And again. But at the top level, we just want to know if the place is “safe” in the sense of “a reasonable risk.” Are you always having to do a re-inspection? Has there not been a need for a re-inspection in 2-3 years? Are there regular complaints? Have there never been complaints?
• Develop a simple inspection scorecard that crosses jurisdictional (county) boundaries.
  Because we sure do. And so do business owners. Need some ideas? Check out New York City, which implemented “letter grades” in 2010.
• Activate search on the “return” key. Don’t make us click the “search” button.
• Finally, if the site isn’t mobile friendly, put a plan in place to get there within 12 months.

Screenshots: Kentucky Fried Chicken locations in greater Seattle per KFC.com and Kentucky Fried Chicken locations in greater Tacoma per KFC.com

]]> http://wiredpen.com/2013/04/20/the-future-of-news-in-an-increasingly-connected-world/feed/ 0 http://wiredpen.com/2013/04/16/dmca-alert-from-google-search/ http://wiredpen.com/2013/04/16/dmca-alert-from-google-search/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:29:30 +0000 Kathy E. Gill http://wiredpen.com/?p=7072 The search query was innocent enough: new technologies introduced in 2011.

But look what greeted me (a first, really) at the bottom of page 1:

Of course I clicked the link! And of course it was a music company (EMI) with a long-list of “allegedly infringing URLs.”

How my search query came to be identified with a record title/artist is beyond my imagination!

On G+, I had always been annoyed by the low quality of image previews when videos were shared from vimeo.com, my favorite video website. Now you cannot even embed any videos from Vimeo anymore! I noticed it yesterday and I don’t know if something has been changed by G+, Vimeo or it is my computer acting funny.

A quick search did not reveal any tech headlines. So I decided to run a quick test.

Earlier in the evening, I embedded at YouTube TEDTalk from Larry Lessig about corruption. I did not use the G+ “video” function; I simply pasted the link in the regular URL sharing box.

I then did the same thing with a Vimeo video. As with Yavari, I found that there was no embedded video. Just a still and abstract. (No I did not use the “share” feature at Vimeo – I did this by hand.)

The video was a staff pick:

WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE :: Short Film from Truce Films on Vimeo.

As he notes, this could be a decision made by Vimeo, not Google. But that seems odd, given that I can embed the video here as well as on Facebook.

I wrote earlier this week about Google’s core business, which is selling ads alongside a service that people need/like -> search.

Google has benefited from a culture of sharing — one personified by RSS — but it is quickly reversing course, which leads me to believe that this nixing of embeds is a deliberate move.

• Google+ has never had RSS feeds.
• Google recently killed GoogleReader, which had wiped out every other RSS reader. Go download Reeder for your iPad, iPhone or Mac right now; it’s free until Google Reader is dead and buried, and it’s excellent. Better than Reader, in fact.
• In 2007, Google bought Feedburner, which helped publishers to manage their RSS feeds. Partners included upstarts like Flickr. There were competing services at the time, but they were quickly shuttered. Last fall, Google pulled the plug on Feedburner, which has “virtually no alternatives.”

TechCrunch wrote last year:

Google – just like most Internet users – is now betting that people are getting their news from personalized news readers like Zite and Flipboard (both of which at least partly rely on RSS, of course), or from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and its own Google+.

I don’t want my search results influenced by the people I know, and I don’t want my news filtered that way, either. I want rich, rounded experiences that I shape.

Where do you think the people who share that info the first time discover it? Hint: probably from their RSS readers, which are much more efficient than Twitter (despite how much I love Twitter).

Is it time to divorce Google?

Image from Newsosaur

According to the Newspaper Association of America, advertising revenue dropped 6% in 2012. Total revenue was down 2% to an estimated $38.6 billion.*

That’s the doom-and-gloom story.

The one that’s not making any waves that I can see is this: the $3.4 billion in digital ads reported by NAA is more than the $2.6 billion in display ad revenue reported by Google last year.

However, over at Newsosaur, Alan D. Mutter compares newspaper ad revenue ($22.3 billion) to Google ad revenue, calling the disparity a “stunning reversal of fortune for the newspaper industry.”**

I think Mutter is waving a red herring.

First, Craigslist, Monster.com and eBay have decimated classified ad sales.

For 2012, NAA estimates that classified ads continued the downward spiral, declining another 9% compared to 2011. In 2012, classifieds accounted for only 18% of total ad sales. In 2000? That was 40%.

It’s not like newspaper leadership was unaware of impending digital disruption. In the mid-1990s, NAA economist Miles Groves “warn[ed] the newspaper industry of the growing challenge to its monopoly on classified advertising. ‘Newspapers had time to take control of the digital world and be the owner of that franchise,’ he says, ‘and we didn’t do it’.”

Second, display ads account for a nominal part of Google’s revenue, only $2.6 billion. A display ad sits alongside editorial content, contrasted with a search ad that appears on search results pages.

That $2.6 billion is about one-tenth of newspaper ad revenue (82% of which is from display ads).

Google’s total revenue for 2012 was $50 billion. Most of that is coming from a business — search — that did not exist (directly) prior to the World Wide Web. There were directory services, of course. The Yellow Pages guided us to businesses, and librarians directed us to information.

In 2012, businesses invested $6.9 billion in Yellow Pages ads, which is a fraction of Google and Microsoft’s search ad revenue. Yellow Pages revenue peaked in the mid-2000s at less than $15 billion. What will finally send that paper directory cum doorstop to the ultimate dump: local mobile ads, which are projected to ring up $9.1 billion within four years. That’s where Google is jousting with Facebook.

Third, Google isn’t the only competitor for ad dollars. And TV is bigger than Google.

TV ad spending was up in 2012 compared to 2011, probably due to the Presidential election. It was a staggering $74 billion, about 50% more than Google’s total revenue.

Total U.S. digital ad sales for 2012, according to eMarketer, hit $37.31 billion.

But Mutter writes:

As illustrated in the green line in the chart above, the digital sales at newspapers and Google started out almost even in 2003 at $1.2 billion for newspapers and $1.5 billion for Google. Google’s sales doubled in 2004, handily outstripping newspapers, and then kept compounding to the point that Google’s sales were nearly 15 times greater than newspaper digital revenues in 2012.

You can’t argue with the data but you can argue with his implication.

Total ad spending for 2012 was $140 billion, according to Kantar Media. Google accounts for about 40% of the total online ad market. There are a lot of businesses in a lot of channels competing for those dollars.

Google and newspapers are not in the same business.

Using Google’s gross revenue as a benchmark is a worse choice than picking television , but even the comparison with TV is flawed.

Ostensibly, most of the content in a newspaper (print or online) is news. Yes, some news is entertainment, but the content isn’t, in the main, fictional. Most of the content on TV is made-up. News — particularly reporting — is a teeny fraction of total air time for any network except sports, if you were to call a live sporting event “news.”

Mutter continues his flawed framing:

Instead of investing in the technology necessary to gather customer data and target advertising on the emerging digital platforms, legacy publishers and broadcasters  – whether for want of insight, resources, skill or conviction – ceded the opportunity to Google and a host of other digital natives who understand that targetable customer data – not masses of unknown and undifferentiated eyeballs – is the Holy Grail of digital publishing.

Google isn’t a publisher.

From State Of The News Media, 2013

Yes, it’s trying to be a publisher of sorts with Google+. But Google’s core business is delivering advertising around search results.

Google helps us find relevant “published” material — words, images, moving pictures, sound — in an information space that dwarfs the combined output of US newspapers and includes content by current and former newspaper advertisers.

But Google is not the publisher.

Mutter is correct that Google’s founders figured out how to make targeted ads profitable. But first they developed a product that millions of people wanted.

It’s not possible to “save” your way to profitability, but too many newspaper publishers seem to have forgotten that.

In 2012, we had fewer than 40,000 full-time professional employees in the newspaper newsroom, the smallest number in 35 years. And it matters. According to the 2013 State of the News Media report:

Nearly a third of U.S. adults, 31%, have stopped turning to a news outlet because it no longer provided them with the news they were accustomed to getting.

I call it a lack of local relevance.

I don’t know how newspapers will be able to remain solvent until they figure out a new business model. But we won’t get there by thinking of Google as either the whipping boy or as the road not taken.

* NAA methodology: projections based on data provided by 17 public and privately-held companies representing approximately 40% of the weekday print circulation in the United States (about 330 papers) and almost half of all U.S. newspaper media revenue.

** No explanation as to why Mutter’s claim for Google’s ad sales exceeds the estimated industry total by 25%. This IAB report from 2011 reinforces eMarketer’s data (pdf).

It’s one thing to stream a show we’ve bought from the iTunes store or a clip off YouTube. Those are very straightforward.

But what about other (third party) video files?

(1) If you have a DropBox account (and time),  you can upload the video file (acceptable file types without additional software: .m4v, .mp4, and .mov).

Open DropBox on the iPad, click on the video, then trigger AirPlay and select AppleTV.

(2) Want to transfer movies more quickly? Grab a copy of GoodReader. (Yes, a reading application!)

Connect your iPad to your computer using the USB port. In iTunes, select “Apps”. Scroll down to “File Sharing” and select GoodReader. You can now drag and drop the video file into the “GoodReader Documents” pane.

Open GoodReader on the iPad, click on the video, then trigger AirPlay and select AppleTV.

Of course, if you want to watch a video on a plane, just put your headphones on and enjoy!

Use GoodReader To Store Third Party Video On Your iPad

Tip: NerdBusiness

Look at this promotional email from Top Food & Drug:

Where do your eyes land?

Those two bold and red “click here” links along with top-foods.com and Contact Us … right?

Ask yourself: why might a customer be reading this section of an email about promotions?

Here are some questions she might have:

• What are the dates for the sale?
• How do I unsubscribe?
• How do I change my email address?
• Why am I receiving this email from Top Food & Drug?

The questions are answered in the email, but with a heavy cognitive load. This is a friction-full, not friction-less, experience. (A cynic might say the friction is intentional because it makes it less likely that the customer will leave.)

How might this information be presented in a more customer-focused manner, one hat helps her quickly answer her questions?

• Make the type darker; that light gray type has very little contrast.
• Make the hyperlinks meaningful; use key words and verbs and ditch “click here.” Not only is “click here” meaningless for people using accessible technology, it’s meaningless for anyone scanning a page looking for trigger words, words than complete the task. As this example shows, hyperlinks are signposts; craft them well.
• Chunk (make it scannable) the copy.

Here’s one possible rewrite:

• Prices effective 9am March 27 – midnight April 2, 2013.
• Weekly Flyers & promotions are an opt-in, recurring email from TOP Food & Drug; see our privacy policy.
• Change your TOP Connection settings or unsubscribe from these emails.
• Please direct any questions or comments about our service to our Contact Us page.

This e-mail was sent on behalf of TOP Food & Drug (top-foods.com) by Accelitec|interact through enrollment in the TOP Connection program. If you have questions, please call (877) 867-3850.

How else might this be redesigned or rewritten?

“Collecting information. May take a min…Will restart when done…Please wait…”

As I waited (more than a minute), I started a search: <Kindle collecting information restart wait>.

I expected an Amazon.com corporate page to be at or near the top. (Or even a sponsored ad.)

Nope.

Amazon’s forums top the returns. In the category “Kindle Died.” Yipes!

Dear Amazon, I tweeted, this ain’t good.

Dear Amazon: this is a scary message “Collecting information. May take a min…Will restart when done…Please wait…” (1/2)

— Kathy E Gill (@kegill) March 24, 2013

Google search for “Collecting information. May take a min…Will restart when done…Please wait…” should not have forum #1 hit 2/2

— Kathy E Gill (@kegill) March 24, 2013

Scary messages should have a corporate response.

The “best” message in this nine-message thread (the first search result with a variety of terms/phrases) is dated 2011:

If you have your device in a Amazon unlighted leather cover, remove it and call Amazon for a refund. Now try a reboot. After disconnecting from all external power sources, hold power switch for at least 20 secs.(count them) to no more than 30 secs. Your Kindle should respond but will take a couple of mins.

Next hit for “Collecting information. Please wait…” in Google is from late 2012:

After trying everything the tech support advisor asked me to do, he regretfully declared my kindle ‘dead on arrival’.  And told me I’d have to package her up and send her through the valley of the shadows of death, all the way back to the Amazon Returns Center.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Since this is apparently a battery-charging defect issue, Amazon is sending me a replacement kindle, free of charge:)

The third “please wait” hit (another Forum) is also related to a paperwhite Kindle and dated January 2013; Amazon tech support again provides a replacement.

I did a reset and so far the problem has stopped. Amazon told me though that I don’t need to return the defective Kindle. To make things even better, I have a Wifi Paperwhite with Special Offers and they’re sending me a non-SO as a replacement. Love how they handled my case and they definitely have me as a customer for life

At JustAnswers.com (where experts are paid for answers), earlier this month someone asked the same question. The answer: perform a hard reset (with instructions on how to do that).

A forum participant in Ireland linked to the best Amazon forum thread, one with an official moderator joining the discussion. The thread began in November and is still ongoing in March. Thread title: “collecting information may take a few minutes” — Dear Google, is there a good reason you didn’t return this thread for any of my searches?

Attention, customer service folk

Problems like this one need an official answer. Forum posts are helpful but don’t inspire confidence in your company.

How to perform a hard reset on an Amazon Paperwhite Kindle

• Press and hold the power button for 30 seconds
• Release the power button and wait for the unit to reboot. This could take two minutes. You should see the progress bar making progress underneath the Kindle tree.
• On my paperwhite, there were no other steps. The unit was “on” after reboot.

Is this because the phone is in our hands and we are looking to go “out” for dinner, for example? Is it because we’re watching TV and want to know more info about an actor or director? Is it because we are bored? (All of the above.)

But that slide (at the bottom) hides just how much we use our mobile phones at home, according to the report appendices:

• Arts and entertainment searches: 70%
• Food searches: 71%
• Restaurant searches: 56%
• Shopping searches: 69%
• Technology searches: 70%
• Travel searches: 60%

Google search data per report appendix.

But these data just don’t jibe with the indices that show context of use.

How can food searches, for example, occur at home 71% of the time when the index shows most occur in-store?

Mobile search context. Q: Where are you? What category of information did you search for? N=6,303

I also disagree with one of Google’s interpretations: I don’t think mobile search is the “trigger” for additional action.

I believe mobile search follows a decision (the true trigger) to “do something.” It contributes to what that “do something” might be, but I don’t believe the sequence is “a random search on my phone” -> “let’s do something because the phone coughed it up” — which is how I define the verb “trigger.”

The data come from 6000+ mobile phone searches made by 416 participants (who kept a mobile search diary over a two-week period) + additional questions + 323 exit surveys. (Data from 70 tablet owners were not included in the results.) Average searches per day: 1.25. I’m clearly not an average consumer: at Barnes and Noble today I initiated three separate product searches using Google/Safari.

Download the PDF of the study.

Updated to clarify that the report reflects mobile  phone search and to highlight the disconnect between data in the report and data in the appendix.