I just sat down with my wife and took her through Google docs. She wasn’t too happy about it. I tried to find some old copy of Office I could plonk on her new computer, but when that search was fruitless, Google docs triumphed over forking out more cash for (yet another) copy of Office.

On the first introduction to Google docs, there was a lot of kicking and screaming - what do you mean it can’t do that? How do you do this? That’s just stupid, why doesn’t it work like Excel? I knew this pain was coming, but I persevered because I knew that everything she wanted to accomplish could be done in Google, for free, and live permanently online (which was a bonus as the day before she accidentally deleted her entire My Documents folder - yes, she works in tech).

Sure enough, after a few weeks of working through and learning the new software, she is very content with her move online.

It interesting seeing this process first-hand, especially if you develop UIs (as I do now and then). A function that accomplishes an existing task in a different (but more efficient) way is normally loathed by the user. Especially if the efficiencies are ‘under the user radar’ - by that I mean small enough to not be individually noticed, yet in aggregate, meaningful.

When this happens you are trying to break a habit. Which is hard. Habits drive a considerable amount of our behavior because they are short-cuts we don’t need to think about. When you are forced to change a habit, you weigh the effort in changing against the perceived usefulness of the new approach. If the effort seems too much, you see a lot of kicking and screaming.

This is why you have to be careful with user feedback. Users want everything familiar, not necessarily better - because they don’t want to have to change their habits.

Sometimes you need to push through this barrier to a better place. Sometimes. It’s a fine line between functionality that improves the experience but breaks a habit, and functionality that’s simply different and annoying to users.

Either way, I suggest you try not to test too much on your wife.

I recently took a readership survey on the Digg site and realized there were some fundamental flaws in the way we are trying to understand online behavior.  And this is by no means solely a problem at Digg, it speaks to a deep seated bias we have when trying to probe media behavior.

Some examples from the Digg survey:

Question: How often would you say you go online?  Many times a day, daily, weekly, etc.

Between my home computer that I never turn off, my work computer I turn off once a week, my cellphone and my Ipod Touch, I don’t think I am never NOT online.

At some point the distinction between online and offline blurred to such a degree that there is now no meaningful demarcation.   I can certainly ‘disconnect’ myself, and do.  But even then, I am conscious that my online presence still ‘exsits’ and perpetuates itself without my direct involvement.

In this sense, the more important measure is how integrated my ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lives are, not how often I switch between the two.

Question:  Which of the following do you visit at least once a month?  <list of websites>

What exactly is a ‘visit’?  I have a iGoogle home page that streams 10 different RSS feeds, am I ‘visiting’ each of those sites every time I read the feed?  Do I have to click through to them for it to count?  What about my RSS reader where I look at the BBC news, is each article a visit?  What about the CNN Breaking News emails I get?  Are those ‘visits’?  If I never turn off Twhirl, how many visits is that a day to Twitter feeds?

Again, ‘visit’ is a remnant of an earlier online experience and one with roots in TV and radio - where the only way to get to the information was to physically change the channel.

We need to think about ‘consumption’ not ‘visitation’ when thinking about online media.

Question: Rank these reasons for spending time online - entertain, research, manage my life, etc.

Why do I go online?  What’s most important?  This question loses all meaning when you think of your online life as an extension of your offline one.  ’Online’ is not a destination with a cause and reason to visit, it’s a fluid extension of real needs/wants/desires.

‘Needs’ is the real issue here - what needs does your online life fulfill?

The survey continued in the same vein with subsequent questions.  Websites were treated as destinations and ‘visits’ and the online experience had reason and purpose.

I think it’s time to rethink a lot of how we measure ‘online behavior’.  Rather than assuming individuals online are ‘destination’ seekers, we need to think about how individuals aggregate and move between the nodes of the network they create.  It doesn’t mean destination seekers don’t exist, it just doesn’t adequately explain the complexity of their online world.

Bottom line, why measure online behavior like we used to measure offline behavior?  A mouse isn’t simply a different way to navigate, it’s a paradigm shift in your relationship to information.

I thought Digg, of all companies, would have understood that.

I came across a site called intrade on my general web surfing the other day. Intrade is a prediction market. You register for the site and can actually ‘bet’ money on the outcome of certain events.

There is a long history of prediction markets for all sorts of things from sports to Hollywood movies - ‘long’ in the Internet sense of the word, which is ’short’ in historical terms. Wikipedia has a page giving some good background details. I navigated my way to intrade as it was mentioned on a political news site.

On intrade, McCain is currently siting at about a 40% chance to win the White House while Obama is in the low 60% range. This was interesting as poll after poll puts them in a dead heat. I looked into the intrade system a bit and it looks fine (I am no expert here but at least I understand it - there are probably some pretty smart people behind it). You buy and sell ‘contracts’ with other traders and the price of a contract varies between $0 and $10. Each ‘contract’ has an unambiguous binary outcome and is ultimately worth (at the conclusion of the event) either $0 for it not happening or $10 for it happening. So if you buy Obama contracts at $6.10 and he wins the election, you get a payout of $10 - $6.10 = $3.90 (minus a commission - finally a Web 2.0 site with a business model!). If he loses the election you lose all your money as your contracts are worth $0. This is the Obama chart on intrade:

So why does Obama look like a shoe-in on intrade but a lame duck in the polls? Is Obama mania getting into the heads of intrade traders? Do they long for change? Need hope? Feel higher taxes on the rich is the solution to their poor lot in life as traders?

Likely none of these. On the surface it’s tempting to equate the prediction market to polling, but it’s really very different. The intrade numbers aren’t saying Obama is going to win in a landslide 60%/40%, all they are saying is he is most likely to beat McCain - margin unspecified (although you would think there would be a correlation between the strength of the prediction and the ultimate margin - we just don’t know what that is). So intrade traders think, given the current polls and events, Obama is still more likely to pull it off.

However, if you look at the Republican v Democrat leanings (a vote that indicates preference for a party rather than an individual), support for a ‘generic Democrat’ is strong. Or in other words, McCain is neck-and-neck with Obama despite strong support for a Democratic ticket, an unpopular president from the same party, an unpopular war and an economic downturn. You would think a logical trader trading in presidential picks would give McCain better odds considering what he as overcome to be even at this late stage. Of course balancing this is Obama’s huge war chest - money for political advertising - that will be unleashed in the coming weeks. Obama media saturation here we come.

Although even with that war chest, I don’t think I would give Obama much over a 50% chance. He still seems over priced. Ultimately though, no one really knows who is going to win.

Prediction markets for political outcomes are just a stab in the dark as there is no set of logical sequences or historical precedents that point to one outcome or another. There is just a whole lot of future uncertainty. It’s like trying to predict the price of oil. Demand and supply can be forecast somewhat accurately, but Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities with no UN backing can not.

I’d like to see the political prediction markets on intrade react when Obama reveals he is the illegitimate child of a certain elderly Arizona senator. It could be true…