SAVE THE EARTH. EVERYBODY’S DOING IT. — ON SELECTING THE RIGHT PERSUASIVE HOOK.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS

There are certain studies that should be replicated. Not because the
findings are controversial. Rather, because the findings are so
uncontroversial that you have to experience it to get how powerful the
effect is.

The “craning and gawking” study is one of those experiments.

Researchers stood on a busy New York city street corner and stared –
craned and gawked actually — up at a 6th floor window. All the while
they were being unobtrusively filmed. The researchers were interested
whether the size of the craning and gawking crowd would influence
whether passers-by would also look up. The entire exercise lasted about
60 seconds.

As it happens, size does matter… but even small groups have a big
impact. Slightly more than 40% of the passers by imitated his behavior.
When 15 researchers looked up — still at nothing — about 85 % of the
passers also looked up.

What is interesting about a bunch of psychologists, standing on a
corner, gawking up at nothing? This experiment offers a profound
demonstration of the power of social proof as a call to action.

C’MON BABY, DO THE MACARENA…

Using the behavior of crowds to shape target behavior builds on the
persuasion / influence strategy of social proof. Social proof is a
human decision-making shortcut. In situations where we need to act but
aren’t quite sure about what decision to take, we tend to look around
and check out what other people in the same situation are doing. And
then we use that information to shape our own behavior. Social proof
turns out to be quite powerful. In fact, in some cases it is a stronger
call to action than potentially saving the world.

REDUCE. RECYCLE. REUSE. I DO.

Have you ever noticed the “reuse your towels” cards in your hotel room?
They typically show a beautiful vista with copy describing how reusing
your towel will save energy, water, and, by extension, the environment.
Are you convinced? Do you reuse your towels? Most people don’t.

The hotel industry seemed to think that “some do” was good enough,
though. Perhaps hotel executives thought they’d hit a compliance
ceiling? So they continue (today!) to print the same cards with the
same pictures and the same largely unpersuasive message.

Researchers Goldstein, Cialdini, and Griskevicius, however, felt that
it was hook (”Do this to save the earth.”) not the sentiment (”save the
earth”) that was weak. They hypothesized that knowing that other people
had done it would evoke greater compliance than just saving the earth.

To test their hypothesis, Goldstein and team created two sets of
request cards that contrasted the original conservationist message with
a new social proof motivator message. The gist of the messages
(although not the actual messages) were:

 - Original conservationist message: Reuse your towels. It will save the earth.
 - Social proof message: Reuse your towels. Everybody’s doing it.

Then they worked with hotel staff to distribute the cards throughout
the rooms. And then waited to see who reused their towels and who
didn’t.

The result was impressive. Hotel guests who saw the “Everybody’s doing
it” message reused their towels 26% more than those who saw the “Save
the earth” message. That represents a 26% increase over the accepted
industry standard.

The researchers wondered if a shared social proof appeal could be even
more persuasive through similarity. So they ran the study again. This
time they included a third treatment variation, which essentially
conveyed, “People in exactly your situation — who stayed in the same
hotel room — have reused their towels.” Their hunch was that knowing
that people who had stayed in the room had participated in the desired
behavior would add even more social pressure to comply.

Again they were correct. Individuals exposed to the
same-room-social-proof motivator message were 33% more likely to reuse
their towels than individuals in the conservationist message rooms.

It seems that the closer to home (away-from-home) the social comparison is, the more effective it is.

ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I’M THINKING?

Pointing to the behavior of crowds is a powerful way to nudge people
toward behaviors that they might or might not otherwise engage in. But,
remember the craning and gawking experiment? It only took one or two
people looking up to get others to stop. And the first few members had
the biggest impact, with the largest increase in stopping and looking
behavior coming with the second and third additional gawker.

And knowing that the people in your hotel room reused their towels has
a bigger impact on your likelihood to reuse your towels than knowing
that people in your whole hotel did.

This suggests that, that while “other people are doing it” is a strong
persuasive message, “other people like you are doing it” will be even
more persuasive.

I think I’d better to go sign up for twitter now…

References for this newsletter are posted at:
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/nov08.asp

2008 12 09

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HOW WEB IS DIFFERENT FROM PRINT

Of all the things that make the Web different from print,
linking is the most important.

Are we tool-making animals or are we animals made by tools? It’s
an old question. How much did the quill shape our minds and
worlds? We invented the printing press which then invented a new
society, a new way of thinking.

“Scribal culture could not sustain the patenting of inventions
or the copyrighting of literary compositions,” Elizabeth
Eisenstein writes in her book, The Printing Revolution In Early
Modern Europe. “It worked against the concept of intellectual
property rights. It did not lend itself to preserving traces of
personal idiosyncrasies, to the public airing of private
thoughts, or to any of the forms of private publicity that have
shaped consciousness of self during the past five centuries.”

And what of the Web? We invented the Web. How is the Web
re-inventing us? What makes the Web different from print?

We need to carefully answer this last question because otherwise
we are in danger of approaching the Web with our print-thinking
and print-techniques. We are in danger of saying: ‘This is what
quality writing is,’ when really what we are saying is: ‘This is
what quality print writing is.’

Here are some of the ways the Web is different from print:
The Web is about links
The Web is about tasks
The Web is about finding
The Web is about permanence
The Web is a process
The Web is about the customer

The Web is about links. Print is about units of content. A
500-word article, a book, a magazine, a report. Print writing is
often a solitary task. The Web is about linking. We’re linking
one piece of content to another. We’re linking the consumer of
the content with its producer.

The Web is a functional, task-oriented place. We come to the Web
to do, and we already have the context when we get to the
website. Print lends itself to length and because print is
physically going out to the reader, it tends to have lots of
contextual language. The Web is bare, hermetic, pared-down-an
ugly but useful place.

The Web is about the customer trying to find the content, rather
than the content trying to find the customer. The Web turns much
of advertising and marketing on its head. You must know the
words your customers use when they search. Otherwise you are
lost.

The Web is about permanence. Over time, most print content
degrades, dissolves, disappears. Try finding that brochure you
published in print in 2003. But if you put it up on your
website, it’s still there. This is the great blind spot of web
teams. Review and remove.

The Web is a process. Print is an event. You get it all together
and then you publish. And then it’s over. Job done. On the Web
it’s job begun. The print and IT culture of launch and leave is
a ruinous strategy on the Web. Great websites involve continuous
improvement of your top tasks.

The Web is about the customer. It is not about the control of
elites. It is about the wisdom of crowds, the collective
intelligence. At the center of the Web is the customer, not the
organization. It is about the things the customer wants to do,
not the things the organization wants to do to the customer.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

******************************

***********************************
Comment on this post at our Giraffe Forum Blog
http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2008/12/07/how-web-is-different-from-print/#respond

2008 12 08

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The 10 big energy myths

Chris Goodall


Myth 1: solar power is too expensive to be of much use

In
reality, today’s bulky and expensive solar panels capture only 10% or
so of the sun’s energy, but rapid innovation in the US means that the
next generation of panels will be much thinner, capture far more of the
energy in the sun’s light and cost a fraction of what they do today.
They may not even be made of silicon. First Solar, the largest
manufacturer of thin panels, claims that its products will generate
electricity in sunny countries as cheaply as large power stations by
2012.

Other companies are investigating even more efficient
ways of capturing the sun’s energy, for example the use of long
parabolic mirrors to focus light on to a thin tube carrying a liquid,
which gets hot enough to drive a steam turbine and generate
electricity. Spanish and German companies are installing large-scale
solar power plants of this type in North Africa, Spain and the
south-west of America; on hot summer afternoons in California, solar
power stations are probably already financially competitive with coal.
Europe, meanwhile, could get most of its electricity from plants in the
Sahara desert. We would need new long-distance power transmission but
the technology for providing this is advancing fast, and the countries
of North Africa would get a valuable new source of income.

Myth 2: wind power is too unreliable

Actually,
during some periods earlier this year the wind provided almost 40% of
Spanish power. Parts of northern Germany generate more electricity from
wind than they actually need. Northern Scotland, blessed with some of
the best wind speeds in Europe, could easily generate 10% or even 15%
of the UK’s electricity needs at a cost that would comfortably match
today’s fossil fuel prices.

The intermittency of wind power does
mean that we would need to run our electricity grids in a very
different way. To provide the most reliable electricity, Europe needs
to build better connections between regions and countries; those
generating a surplus of wind energy should be able to export it easily
to places where the air is still. The UK must invest in transmission
cables, probably offshore, that bring Scottish wind-generated
electricity to the power-hungry south-east and then continue on to
Holland and France. The electricity distribution system must be
Europe-wide if we are to get the maximum security of supply.

We will also need to invest in energy storage. At the moment we do this by
pumping
water uphill at times of surplus and letting it flow back down the
mountain when power is scarce. Other countries are talking of
developing “smart grids” that provide users with incentives to consume
less electricity when wind speeds are low. Wind power is financially
viable today in many countries, and it will become cheaper as turbines
continue to grow in size, and manufacturers drive down costs. Some
projections see more than 30% of the world’s electricity eventually
coming from the wind. Turbine manufacture and installation are also set
to become major sources of employment, with one trade body predicting
that the sector will generate 2m jobs worldwide by 2020.

Myth 3: marine energy is a dead-end

The
thin channel of water between the north-east tip of Scotland and Orkney
contains some of the most concentrated tidal power in the world. The
energy from the peak flows may well be greater than the electricity
needs of London. Similarly, the waves off the Atlantic coasts of Spain
and Portugal are strong, consistent and able to provide a substantial
fraction of the region’s power. Designing and building machines that
can survive the harsh conditions of fast-flowing ocean waters has been
challenging and the past decades have seen repeated disappointments
here and abroad. This year we have seen the installation of the first
tidal turbine to be successfully connected to the UK electricity grid
in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, and the first group of
large-scale wave power generators 5km off the coast of Portugal,
constructed by a Scottish company.

But even though the UK shares
with Canada, South Africa and parts of South America some of the best
marine energy resources in the world, financial support has been
trifling. The London opera houses have had more taxpayer money than the
British marine power industry over the past few years. Danish support
for wind power helped that country establish worldwide leadership in
the building of turbines; the UK could do the same with wave and tidal
power.

Myth 4: nuclear power is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricity

If
we believe that the world energy and environmental crises are as severe
as is said, nuclear power stations must be considered as a possible
option. But although the disposal of waste and the proliferation of
nuclear weapons are profoundly important issues, the most severe
problem may be the high and unpredictable cost of nuclear plants.

The
new nuclear power station on the island of Olkiluoto in western Finland
is a clear example. Electricity production was originally supposed to
start this year, but the latest news is that the power station will not
start generating until 2012. The impact on the cost of the project has
been dramatic. When the contracts were signed, the plant was supposed
to cost €3bn (£2.5bn). The final cost is likely to be more
than twice this figure and the construction process is fast turning
into a nightmare. A second new plant in Normandy appears to be
experiencing similar problems. In the US, power companies are backing
away from nuclear because of fears over uncontrollable costs.

Unless
we can find a new way to build nuclear power stations, it looks as
though CO2 capture at coal-fired plants will be a cheaper way of
producing low-carbon electricity. A sustained research effort around
the world might also mean that cost-effective carbon capture is
available before the next generation of nuclear plants is ready, and
that it will be possible to fit carbon-capture equipment on existing
coal-fired power stations. Finding a way to roll out CO2 capture is the
single most important research challenge the world faces today. The
current leader, the Swedish power company Vattenfall, is using an
innovative technology that burns the coal in pure oxygen rather than
air, producing pure carbon dioxide from its chimneys, rather than
expensively separating the CO2 from other exhaust gases. It hopes to be
operating huge coal-fired power stations with minimal CO2 emissions by
2020.

Myth 5: electric cars are slow and ugly

We
tend to think that electric cars are all like the G Wiz vehicle, with a
limited range, poor acceleration and an unprepossessing appearance.
Actually, we are already very close to developing electric cars that
match the performance of petrol vehicles. The Tesla electric sports
car, sold in America but designed by Lotus in Norfolk, amazes all those
who experience its awesome acceleration. With a price tag of more than
$100,000, late 2008 probably wasn’t a good time to launch a luxury
electric car, but the Tesla has demonstrated to everybody that electric
cars can be exciting and desirable. The crucial advance in electric car
technology has been in batteries: the latest lithium batteries -
similar to the ones in your laptop - can provide large amounts of power
for acceleration and a long enough range for almost all journeys.

Batteries
still need to become cheaper and quicker to charge, but the UK’s
largest manufacturer of electric vehicles says that advances are
happening faster than ever before. Its urban delivery van has a range
of over 100 miles, accelerates to 70mph and has running costs of just
over 1p per mile. The cost of the diesel equivalent is probably 20
times as much. Denmark and Israel have committed to develop the full
infrastructure for a switch to an all-electric car fleet. Danish cars
will be powered by the spare electricity from the copious resources of
wind power; the Israelis will provide solar power harvested from the
desert.

Myth 6: biofuels are always destructive to the environment

Making
some of our motor fuel from food has been an almost unmitigated
disaster. It has caused hunger and increased the rate of forest loss,
as farmers have sought extra land on which to grow their crops. However
the failure of the first generation of biofuels should not mean that we
should reject the use of biological materials forever. Within a few
years we will be able to turn agricultural wastes into liquid fuels by
splitting cellulose, the most abundant molecule in plants and trees,
into simple hydrocarbons. Chemists have struggled to find a way of
breaking down this tough compound cheaply, but huge amounts of new
capital have flowed into US companies that are working on making a
petrol substitute from low-value agricultural wastes. In the lead is
Range Fuels, a business funded by the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla,
which is now building its first commercial cellulose cracking plant in
Georgia using waste wood from managed forests as its feedstock.

We
shouldn’t be under any illusion that making petrol from cellulose is a
solution to all the problems of the first generation of biofuels.
Although cellulose is abundant, our voracious needs for liquid fuel
mean we will have to devote a significant fraction of the world’s land
to growing the grasses and wood we need for cellulose refineries.
Managing cellulose production so that it doesn’t reduce the amount of
food produced is one of the most important issues we face.

Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture

The
uncomfortable reality is that we already struggle to feed six billion
people. Population numbers will rise to more than nine billion by 2050.
Although food production is increasing slowly, the growth rate in
agricultural productivity is likely to decline below population
increases within a few years. The richer half of the world’s population
will also be eating more meat. Since animals need large amounts of land
for every unit of meat they produce, this further threatens food
production for the poor. So we need to ensure that as much food as
possible is produced on the limited resources of good farmland. Most
studies show that yields under organic cultivation are little more than
half what can be achieved elsewhere. Unless this figure can be hugely
improved, the implication is clear: the world cannot feed its people
and produce huge amounts of cellulose for fuels if large acreages are
converted to organic cultivation.

Myth 8: zero carbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildings

Buildings
are responsible for about half the world’s emissions; domestic housing
is the most important single source of greenhouse gases. The UK’s
insistence that all new homes are “zero carbon” by 2016 sounds like a
good idea, but there are two problems. In most countries, only about 1%
of the housing stock is newly built each year. Tighter building
regulations have no effect on the remaining 99%. Second, making a
building genuinely zero carbon is extremely expensive. The few
prototype UK homes that have recently reached this standard have cost
twice as much as conventional houses.

Just focusing on new homes
and demanding that housebuilders meet extremely high targets is not the
right way to cut emissions. Instead, we should take a lesson from
Germany. A mixture of subsidies, cheap loans and exhortation is
succeeding in getting hundreds of thousands of older properties
eco-renovated each year to very impressive standards and at reasonable
cost. German renovators are learning lessons from the PassivHaus
movement, which has focused not on reducing carbon emissions to zero,
but on using painstaking methods to cut emissions to 10 or 20% of
conventional levels, at a manageable cost, in both renovations and new
homes. The PassivHaus pioneers have focused on improving insulation,
providing far better air-tightness and warming incoming air in winter,
with the hotter stale air extracted from the house. Careful attention
to detail in both design and building work has produced unexpectedly
large cuts in total energy use. The small extra price paid by
householders is easily outweighed by the savings in electricity and
gas. Rather than demanding totally carbon-neutral housing, the UK
should push a massive programme of eco-renovation and cost-effective
techniques for new construction.

Myth 9: the most efficient power stations are big

Large,
modern gas-fired power stations can turn about 60% of the energy in
fuel into electricity. The rest is lost as waste heat.

Even
though 5-10% of the electricity will be lost in transmission to the
user, efficiency has still been far better than small-scale local
generation of power. This is changing fast.

New types of tiny
combined heat and power plants are able to turn about half the energy
in fuel into electricity, almost matching the efficiency of huge
generators. These are now small enough to be easily installed in
ordinary homes. Not only will they generate electricity but the surplus
heat can be used to heat the house, meaning that all the energy in gas
is productively used. Some types of air conditioning can even use the
heat to power their chillers in summer.

We think that
microgeneration means wind turbines or solar panels on the roof, but
efficient combined heat and power plants are a far better prospect for
the UK and elsewhere. Within a few years, we will see these small power
plants, perhaps using cellulose-based renewable fuels and not just gas,
in many buildings. Korea is leading the way by heavily subsidising the
early installation of fuel cells at office buildings and other large
electricity users.

Myth 10: all proposed solutions to climate change need to be hi-tech

The
advanced economies are obsessed with finding hi-tech solutions to
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these are expensive and may
create as many problems as they solve. Nuclear power is a good example.
But it may be cheaper and more effective to look for simple solutions
that reduce emissions, or even extract existing carbon dioxide from the
air. There are many viable proposals to do this cheaply around the
world, which also often help feed the world’s poorest people. One
outstanding example is to use a substance known as biochar to sequester
carbon and increase food yields at the same time.

Biochar is an
astonishing idea. Burning agricultural wastes in the absence of air
leaves a charcoal composed of almost pure carbon, which can then be
crushed and dug into the soil. Biochar is extremely stable and the
carbon will stay in the soil unchanged for hundreds of years. The
original agricultural wastes had captured CO2 from the air through the
photosynthesis process; biochar is a low-tech way of sequestering
carbon, effectively for ever. As importantly, biochar improves
fertility in a wide variety of tropical soils. Beneficial
micro-organisms seem to crowd into the pores of the small pieces of
crushed charcoal. A network of practical engineers around the tropical
world is developing the simple stoves needed to make the charcoal. A
few million dollars of support would allow their research to benefit
hundreds of millions of small farmers at the same time as extracting
large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere.

• Chris Goodall’s new book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, is published by Profile books, priced £9.99.

2008 11 27

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Know Your Site

By Paul Boag

A good starting point for planning the future of your website is to
analyze what you already have. To some extent we are doing this all the
time. That is how new projects happen. However, a more formal approach
helps to better inform your decision-making throughout the web project.

There are two ways to better understand your current website: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative feedback is received by requesting comment from stakeholders and users.

This is traditionally gathered using the following techniques:

Techniques Description
Stakeholder interviews The role of stakeholder interviews is to provide those being
interviewed the opportunity to comment on the existing website. These
comments should be collated for later analysis.
Feedback mechanisms Allow visitors the opportunity to comment on your site using contact us forms, polls, and surveys.
User testing Watching visitors use your existing site can be very enlightening.
It is a powerful way to identify problems in the usability of your site.

Quantitative analysis on the other hand draws upon various automated
analytical tools that provide information on different aspects of your
site’s performance. These include:

Tools Description
Web logs analyzers Every time a user interacts with your website information about
that interaction is stored. Analysis of these logs can help identify
areas of improvement.
Automated performance checkers Automated checkers assess things like accessibility, download times, and browser support. These help maximize your audience.
Online visibility trackers Having a great site is important, but if nobody knows it exists
then it has failed. There are a number of ways to gain an understanding
of how visible your site is online.

Let’s look in more detail at these two approaches and better understand the role of each.

Qualitative feedback

We’ll now take a moment to focus on other feedback mechanisms.

Most websites provide some method by which users can submit
feedback. This is normally a contact page. However, a contact form is a
passive approach and something more proactive is needed if you want
user feedback. The majority of users will not think to send in comments
unless they are frustrated with your site. The problem is that in such
situations they tend to simply leave rather than complain.

If you want feedback on your site then specifically ask for it. This
can be done with a simple feedback form or a more comprehensive survey.
However, a word of warning if you are considering a full-blown survey.
Few users take the time to complete a long survey, so keep your
questions to a minimum. Also avoid making your requests for feedback
too intrusive. They should not hinder a user from completing his or her
goals.

If you are considering making changes to an
existing site, it is well worth implementing a basic feedback mechanism
to canvas opinion before you begin. Whether you are getting
feedback from your site through user testing or via stakeholder
interviews it is necessary to assess the value of the comments made.
When analyzing negative comments about your site, use these four
criteria to judge how seriously those comments need to be
taken:

  • How often the comment is being made?
  • Who makes the comment?
  • What effect the problem has on the user and your objectives for the site?
  • How easy the problem is to fix?

Adobe support provides a simple and yet unobtrusive feedback
mechanism. The side column asks users if they found the support
document useful.

The more often you are hearing the same negative comment, the more
likely it is that the comment is justified and needs addressing.
However, you cannot rely on numbers alone. If your biggest customer has
a problem then you had better address that concern fast!

There is also a need to ascertain the seriousness of a problem. Does
it stop the user from completing a task or is it simply a mild
inconvenience? Does it in some way hamper a business objective? If it
does then it will need addressing.

Finally, establish how difficult the problem is to fix. Even a minor
problem is worth fixing if it is easy to do. Conversely, fixing a major
problem might be unjustifiable if the expense is prohibitive. In such
situations, look for a workaround that lessens the seriousness of the
issue.

Ultimately these decisions are about return on investment. Does the seriousness of the problem justify the cost of fixing it?

Although nothing is better than feedback from your users, it can be
a battle. Stakeholder interviews and user testing are time consuming,
while site feedback mechanisms are often ignored. Fortunately,
quantitative analysis is much less work. However, it should only be
used to support qualitative feedback—not as a replacement.

Free survey service

Providing a method that allows user feedback does not have to be
expensive or complicated. There are a number of services, such as questionform.com that allow you to create free surveys in minutes.

Quantitative Analysis

I am bad at assembling flat-pack furniture. Part of my problem is
that I never have the right tools. Fortunately when it comes to
analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your site, there is no
shortage of tools.

Let’s look at the three types of analytical tools I mentioned earlier, starting with web logs.

Web Logs Analyzers

The most well known form of analysis is carried out on a
site’s log files. Log files track where a user has come from,
what pages they have visited, how long they have spent on each page,
and other data on users’ interaction with your site.

The problem is that log files are hard to understand. There are many
tools available to help with this, from free open-source software to
expensive enterprise-level products.

It is probably best to start with something cheap and cheerful. In
my experience the majority of website owners won’t use the
advanced features offered by high-end tools. You can always upgrade
later.

Another option is to use a statistics collector that doesn’t rely on log files. One such tool is Google Analytics.
This collects considerably more data than web logs, and has an easy to
use interface for analyzing the results. It is free of charge and only
requires a small piece of code on each page to work.

So, how do you judge if an existing site is performing? There are three basic things you can look at:

  • The number of unique users and where they are coming from.
    If many sites are linking to you, it is a good indication that you are
    doing something right. Traffic levels also indicate the performance of
    existing marketing campaigns.
  • The percentage of repeat visitors compared to first time users. If users are returning to your site regularly it is normally a sign of satisfaction.
  • How users are moving around your site. How long are they spending on individual pages? How many pages are they viewing? Which page are they leaving the site from?

The final test is trickier to interpret. For example a user might
visit many pages, which could appear to be a sign of interest in the
site. Alternatively, it could mean they cannot find the information
they require. Instead, compare the time on site to the number of pages
viewed. If they are looking at a good number of pages for a reasonable
time then you know things are going well.

By looking at where a user leaves, you can sometimes get an
indication of potential problems. Are users just looking at your
homepage and then leaving? If they are leaving without viewing other
pages then you have a problem with your homepage. Are users getting to
checkout on your ecommerce website and then giving up? Perhaps
it’s time to user-test your checkout process.

There is a lot more you can do with web stats, but that should be enough for you to analyze you existing site.

Let’s now turn our attention to automated checkers.

Automated Performance Checkers

Sometimes when analyzing your web stats you will notice a
significant number of users who leave your site after only viewing a
single page. This can happen for a variety of reasons. For example,
they may have simply come to the wrong site. However, it could also be
because they have met technical difficulties accessing your site.

There are three tests you can easily perform to identify any potential problems.

  • Check your site on as many different browsers as possible.
    I recommend you look at your site in at least the last two versions of
    Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. If you do not have
    access to all of these browsers then consider using an online service
    such as browsershots.org.
  • Check your site’s accessibility using an online accessibility checker.
    These tools provide a report outlining the various accessibility
    problems with your site. However, a word of warning; these automated
    accessibility reports can be both misleading and confusing.
    Nevertheless, they can help you identify possible accessibility problem
    with your site.
  • Carry out a speed test on your site. You should be
    looking for download times of less than 10 seconds on a 56k modem.
    However, up to 20 seconds is acceptable. Automated checkers have a
    broader role than monitoring site performance. They can also be used to
    track the online visibility of your site.

Online Visibility Trackers

Web stats and performance checkers provide information on site
usability and accessibility, but they don’t tell you how easy
your site is to find. Fortunately there are tools that do exactly that.
Start with a site like popuri.us.

Popuri.us is a free web application that allows you to check your
site’s ranking on search engines, blog listings, and even social
networking applications. The site checks various sources to ascertain
your online visibility.

If you want information about your site’s ranking for specific search terms, then a tool like GoogleRankings.com
will help. Despite the name, this free application checks all major
search engines, reporting your rankings for whatever terms you specify.

There are also a number of desktop tools that bring all of this
functionality (and more) together. However, for the purposes of
assessing an existing site, the free online tools will be adequate. You
need to monitor your site’s visibility on an ongoing basis,
especially when tracking marketing campaigns. In this situation a
desktop application may be more convenient.

Of course, knowing that your site ranks 4653 on Alexa or that 364 people link to it from del.icio.us,
isn’t in itself that useful. The real power of online visibility
trackers is that you are not limited to checking your own website. You
can check on your competition as well.

This article is based on Website Owners Manual, to be published March 2009. It is being reproduced here by permission from Manning Publications. Manning early access books and ebooks are sold exclusively through Manning. Visit the book’s page for more information.

2008 11 06

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Watching the Numbers and Charting the Losses - of Species

Like everyone, I have been reading the graphs and looking at the
numbers that measure the convulsions in the global financial markets.
And as I do, I keep hearing the echo of another frightening set of
numbers — the ones that gauge the precipitous declines in the
species that surround us. The financial markets will eventually come
back, but not the species we are squandering.

Last week in Barcelona, Spain, the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature released results of a global survey of mammal
populations. It concluded that at least a quarter of mammal species are
headed toward extinction in the near future. Don’t think of this
as an across-the-board culling of mammals, of everything from elephants
to the minutest of shrews. The first ones to go will be the big ones.
And among the big ones, the first to go will be primates, which are
already grievously threatened. Nearly 80 percent of the primate species
in southern and southeastern Asia are immediately threatened.

The causes are almost all directly related to human activity,
including, for marine mammals, the growing threat of ocean
acidification, as the oceans absorb the carbon dioxide we emit.

The numbers are not much better for other categories of life. At least
22 percent of reptile species are at risk of extinction. Perhaps 40
percent of North American freshwater fish are threatened. In Europe, 45
percent of the most common bird species are rapidly declining in
numbers, and so are the most common bird species in North America.
Similar losses are expected among plants. What is especially worrying
is how much the rate of decline has increased over the past
half-century as the human population has increased.

These
numbers are shocking in their own right. But they don’t begin to
tell the whole story. These are projections for the most familiar, best
studied, most easily counted plants and animals, which, all told, make
up less than 4 percent of the species on Earth. It is only reasonable
to assume that many, if not most, of the legions of uncounted species
are doing as poorly.

What complicates matters further is a
simple lesson we might also draw from the present financial crisis:
everything is connected. No species goes down on its own, not without
affecting the larger biological community. We emerged, as a species,
from the very biodiversity we are destroying. At times it seems as
though the human experiment is to see how many species we can do
without. As experiments go, it is morally untenable and will end badly
for us.

The good news here is the same good news as always
— the resilience of nature. Given even the slightest chance,
declining species often find a way to recover. But the bad news is also
the same bad news — human irresponsibility. In our myopic
pursuits, we characteristically overlook the possibility of giving
species the chance to recover.

We are watching a global,
international effort to stabilize the financial markets. It will take a
similar effort to begin to slow the rate at which species are
declining. The bottom line is that what is good for biodiversity is
also good for humanity. This includes protecting habitat and finding
ways to reduce human pressure on other species. It also includes a
concerted effort to slow climate change, which, unchecked, could have a
devastating impact on the entire planet.

What we need, really,
is a new ability to think selfishly in a slightly different way.
Instead of saving the Sumatran orangutan or the Iberian lynx for
itself, it may make more sense to think of saving them for ourselves
— not as resources to be harvested somewhere down the road or
even as repositories of genetic difference, but as essential elements
in the biological complexity from which we arose and in which we
thrive.

Without them, we are diminished.

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: October 15, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/opinion/15wed4.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

2008 10 16

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State of the Blogosphere 2008

The time you spend online does matter. According to
Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, almost 50% of
bloggers dedicate from five to ten hours per week to their own blogs.
Via computer or via mobile, bloggers seem to understand the importance of using tools to provide their users with always new, updated content.

But frequently updates may not suffice. Is your content easily searchable on the internet? Or you just rely on your aficionados to get good traffic? Bloggers know the importance of Google ranking and linking to other blogs to gain more authority.
They know this is a good way to have people stumbling upon your blog
while searching for their interests, and maybe find some other
interesting stuff you have already published.

And do not forget about tags. Technorati’s top 100 bloggers use targeted tagging to make sure their blog gets good results on search engines. Classifying the content of your blog with good, targeted keywords
makes your content more easy to found on the internet. Posts, videos,
images, podcasts: everything can be tagged to improve its reachability.

So, which kind of blogger are you? Read further for some advices on how to improve your blogging experience.

2008 10 01

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The Live Web

The other day I was sitting in the company of leaders in one
industrial category. (I won’t say which because it’s beside
the point I want to make.) A question arose: Why are there so few visitors to our websites? Millions use their services, yet few bother with visiting their sites, except every once in awhile.

The answer, I suggested, was that their sites were buildings. They were architected, designed and constructed. They were conceived and built on the real estate model: domains with addresses, places people could visit. They were necessary and sufficient for the old Static Web, but lacked sufficiency for the Live one.

The Web isn’t just real estate. It’s a habitat, an
environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity
rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives
there. It is alive.

The Live Web isn’t just built. It grows, adapts and changes. It’s an environment where we text and post and author and update and tweet and syndicate and subscribe and notify and feed
and — and yell and fart and say wise things and set off alarms
and keep each other scared, safe or both. It’s verbs to the
Static Web’s nouns. It is, in a biological word that has since
gone technical, generative.

This is what I see when I look at Twitter Search. It’s what I see in my aggregator, in FriendFeed, in Technorati and Google Blogsearch
(and in feeds for keyword searches of both), in IM and Skype, in the
growing dozens of live apps — for weather, sports, radio and rivers of news — on my phone. And when I watch myself and others mash and mix those together, and pipe one into another.

And I say all this knowing that most of what I mentioned in that
last paragraph will be old hat next week, if not next month or next
year. C’est la vie.

Speaking of this week, I just discovered Google InQuotes
via one or more of the Tweeters that I follow. And it struck me that
the reason Microsoft has trouble keeping up with Google is as simple as
Live vs. Static. Google gets the Live Web. Microsoft doesn’t. Not
yet, anyway. It’s comfortable in the static. It’s cautious.
It doesn’t splurge on give-aways because it doesn’t know
that life is one long give-away in any case. We’re born with an
unknown sum of time to spend and we’ve got to dump it all in the
duration. That’s why now is what matters most. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans, John Lennon said. The game of business is the game of life.

Years ago somebody said that everybody else was playing hockey while
Bill Gates was playing chess. I think now the game has changed. I think
now the game isn’t a game. It’s just life. The Web is
alive. It’s a constantly changing and growing environment
comprised of living and static things. Meanwhile what said long ago still applies: …companies so lobotomized that they can’t speak in a recognizably human voice build sites that smell like death.

I don’t think Microsoft is dead, or even acting like it. Nor
do I think Google is unusually alive. Just that Google is especially
adapted to The Live Web while Microsoft seems anchored in the static.
As are most other companies and institutions, frankly. Nothing special
about Microsoft there. Just something illustrative. A helpful contrast.
Perhaps it will help Microsoft too.

If you want to participate in the Live Web, you can’t just act
like it. You have to jump in and do it. Here’s the most important
thing I’ve noticed so far: it’s not just about competition.
It’s about support and cooperation.
Even political and business enemies help each other out by keeping each
other informed. There may be pay-offs in scarcity plays, but the bigger
ones emerge when intelligence and good information are shared, right
now. And archived where they can be found again later. All that old
stuff is still nourishment.

Veteran readers know I’ve been about for .
(And credit goes to my son Allen for coming up with the insight in the
first place, more than five years ago.) I think Live vs. Static is a
much more useful distinction than versions. (Web 1.0, 2.0, etc.) Hey,
who knows? Maybe it’ll finally catch. It seemed to in the room
where I brought it up.

By the way, a special thanks to , , and the audience at our panel at BlogWorld Expo
for schooling me about this (whether they knew it or not). I got clues
galore out of that, and I thank the whole room for them. (Hope the
video goes up soon. You’ll see how it went down. Good stuff.)

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/09/26/the-live-web/

2008 10 01

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About Us Information on Websites

Representing a company or organization on the Internet is one of a
website’s most important jobs. Effectively explaining the company’s
purpose and what it stands for provides essential support for all other
website goals.

Unfortunately, while most sites offer an About Us section, they often do a poor job of communicating the crucial information it should contain.

User Research: Two Rounds

To find out how users find and interpret website profiles of companies
and organizations, we conducted user testing of sites run by 63
organizations in five general categories:

  • Large companies, such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, China Mobile, Citigroup, Eli Lilly, Vivendi, and Yamaha.
  • Medium-sized companies, such as Body Trends, Cintas, Pier 1 Imports, and Titan Corporation.
  • Smaller companies, such as GiftTree.com, ImmunoGen, Nabi Biopharmaceuticals, OneCall, and Paper Style.
  • Government agencies, such as the U.S.
    Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of
    the Interior, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Small Business
    Administration.
  • Non-profits, such as American Refugee
    Committee, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, St. Jude’s Children’s
    Research Hospital, and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

We tested 15 sites in our first round of research 5 years ago, and 48 sites in our new study.

On each site, we gave users one open-ended task: evaluate the organization. We also gave them several directed tasks,
such as to find out who runs the organization, what community or social
programs the organization contributes to, and when the organization was
founded.

Most test participants were mainstream Web users, investment
analysts, or journalists with at least 2 years’ Internet experience. In
Study 1, we included a few teenagers because the goals of putting
corporate information on the Web often include supporting student
projects, building long-term loyalty, and attracting interns.

We conducted most sessions in the United States, and a few in
Hong Kong to ensure the international applicability of our findings.

Trends in About Us Usability

We conducted the first study 5 years ago. That’s not much time in the user experience field; human nature and user behavior tend to be stable and change slowly, if at all. Even so, it’s enough time between the two studies to let us assess any big trends.

First, the happy news: About Us usability has increased. The average success rate was 70% in Study 1 and 79% in Study 2. Although the usability increase is not as big as those we saw in our recent second study of store finders and locators, it’s certainly respectable to grow success rates by about 2 percentage points per year.

Progress was particularly good for the task of finding contact information, such as the company’s main address. Success for this task increased from 62% to 91%.
A few companies continue to make contact information virtually
impossible to find on the Web, and some sites seem to deliberately hide
address listings and phone numbers. Doing so will backfire, though,
because users view such sites as having very low credibility.

The less-good news: Task success for finding out what the company or organization does actually dropped, from 90% to 81%. In place of a frank summary of the business, marketese and blah-blah text ruled the day on many sites.

The even-less-good news: Users’ subjective satisfaction with About Us sections decreased from 5.2 to 4.6 (on a 1-7 scale). How can satisfaction go down when overall success rates are up? Because user expectations
for usable websites have grown even higher in recent years. Sites that
make it hard to find the most basic information about an organization
get dinged hard these days; an About Us area that users may have accepted in the past will no longer satisfy them.

One definite trend is higher user interest in video,
especially when it shows interesting or complex products, reports on
corporate events, or showcases the personality of the CEO or other key
staff. One thing hasn’t changed, though: Web users are still impatient
and prefer short videos. One user, for example, had this to say about a
long video: “It’s a little long-winded for a video. It should have
more of the product and stuff showing and less talking. [...] I’m going
to stop that one.”

Overviews: Providing Key Context

To direct users to your About Us section, I recommend offering a homepage link labeled either About <name-of-company> or About Us.
This link need not be the most prominent on the homepage, but it should
be present and clearly visible. In our studies, users had trouble
locating company information when the link had a nonstandard name, like
Info Center, or when it was placed near graphical elements that looked like advertisements and was thus ignored.

We recommend providing About Us information at 4 levels of detail:

  1. Tagline on the homepage: A few words or a brief sentence summarizing what the organization does.
  2. Summary: 1-2 paragraphs at the top of the main About Us page that offer a bit more detail about the organization’s goal and main accomplishments.
  3. Fact sheet: A section following the summary that elaborates on its key points and other essential facts about the organization.
  4. Detailed information: Subsidiary pages with more depth for people who want to learn more about the organization.

This layered content presentation forms an inverted pyramid
that uses hypertext to shield users from overwhelming details, while
making specific information available to those who need it.

For example, average users will rarely click a link for “corporate
governance,” but that destination page can be important for
sophisticated investors or business journalists. This is one of the few
cases in which an obscure link label enhances usability: People who
don’t know the term “corporate governance” won’t click it (because
people don’t click links they don’t understand). In this case, that’s
okay — users who don’t know the term probably won’t need the
associated information.

At the top of your content pyramid, a good tagline
helps users understand the rest of the site by providing context for
the detailed content. Similarly, reading the organizational summary
gives them context for the fact sheet that follows it on the main About Us page.

Although taglines are usually horrible on today’s websites, we did see some good ones in our testing, including HSBC’s tagline: The world’s local bank. One user said, “It
says we are the world’s local bank — that’s a softening concept.
I like that, they have global resources, but it’s available to you
locally. ‘The world’s local bank’ — I really like this.”

Summary statements often degenerate into worthless mission statements
with feel-good verbiage and no specifics. One site had the following
bold-faced summary at the top of its About Us
page: “X Corporation provides highly specialized services to businesses
of all types throughout North America.” Aside from giving the company’s
geographical focus, this content-free statement was useless and
prompted one test user to remark, “I still don’t know what they do.”

Of course, the need for scannability, conciseness, and plainspoken exposition extends from the overview page to About Us section’s mass of interior pages as well. Compare, for example, these user comments about two different company history pages:

[Not liking Bayer, which used a complex Flash-based presentation]: “They
have clunky paragraphs. Key points work better to convey these things.
They have years highlighted, but it’s easier to digest if it’s in a
true timeline fashion.”

[Liking Pier 1 Imports, which had a scannable history page]: “I
like the page on the history. It gives the years and what they’ve done
since they started the business. You can learn a lot by just reading
this little page here — milestones that they’ve accomplished
since they’ve been in existence. It’s bulleted here and you can find
it.”

Good/Bad Examples

Alcoa provided a good example of the 4-stage model.

Tagline: “Global excellence in aluminum.”

Summary: “Alcoa is the world leader in the production
and management of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum and alumina
combined, through its active and growing participation in all major
aspects of the industry.” (Followed by a second paragraph summarizing
the company’s main target markets.)

Fact sheet: Nice use of bulleted lists (following guidelines for writing for the Web), supplemented by clean and useful business graphics.

Detailed information: 14 additional pages listed in a drop-down menu with good information scent (except for a link named “it all starts with dirt,” which should have been called “history”).

Screenshot of Alcoa's main 'About Us' page
Screenshot of GSA.gov's main 'About Us' page

The main About Us pages for Alcoa (good) and the U.S. General Services Administration (bad).

In contrast, the U.S. General Services Administration skipped the
information model’s first 3 levels entirely and went straight to a menu
of 49 detailed links. No tagline (not even on the homepage), no
summary, no fact sheet. Without these higher overview levels, it was
very hard for users to make sense of the crushing details in the About GSA section. No context, no understanding.

Why Explain Yourself?

Fortune-500 companies and major federal government agencies might well ask why they should bother providing About Us
information. After all, they’re big, important, and presumably famous.
They really shouldn’t have to bother with peons who are too stupid to
know all about them.

However common in major corporations and government agencies,
arrogance is an unproductive attitude no matter how big you are. People
with little to no knowledge about your organization might have several
legitimate reasons for wanting to learn about it. For example, they
might be:

  • Professionals who are new to your industry and want to interact
    with business partners and investigate potential vendors. If you’re a B2B site, you need to cater to these new users.
  • People who take up new sports or hobbies, discover a new genre
    of literature, are diagnosed with a new disease, start eating a new
    type of food, or otherwise become interested in companies and
    organizations that they’ve never dealt with before. If you’re a B2C
    site, you need to cater to these new users.
  • Journalists who are writing their first story on a new beat or first story including your company. If you want PR, you need to cater to these new users.
  • Individual investors who read something positive about your
    company or saw it pop out of a statistical screen of stock metrics. If
    you’re a publicly traded company and want new investors, you need to cater to these new users.
  • Job seekers who were attracted by one of your ads, but want to
    learn more about the organization before applying. If you’re expanding
    your staff, you need to cater to these new users.
  • Children who are investigating new areas of knowledge. You might need to cater to these new users.

E-commerce sites, transactional sites, and online services sites need a strong About Us section because users often wonder who’s behind
a Web-based service, how it’s funded, and whether it’s credible. If you
order from an e-commerce site, can you trust the company to ship the
package? Will it accept a return if the product arrives in poor
condition? If you register on a site, will it sell your personal
information to anyone who can pay, and thus expose you to endless spam
about everything from transaction-related products to offensive porn?

For government sites, it’s a basic point of democracy that all
taxpayers have access to clear information about various departments
and how those departments are using tax dollars — whether or not
they’re experts in an agency’s topic area.

Finally, for non-profits, a good About Us section is a must for attracting donations from a broader donor base. (See also: Government agencies’ and non-profits’ ROI from usability.)

Trust and credibility
are major issues on the Web, where even the biggest company exists as
only a few words and pictures in a browser window. The most deceitful
and unethical company can look as good as a company with a long history
of community involvement and honest customer relationships. Explaining
who you are and where you come from does matter, as do simple things
like providing management biographies and photos.

When it comes to design, it’s easy to balance the needs of transactions
and corporate information. By all means, dedicate most of your homepage
to sales, current offers, and navigation to products or services. Just
remember to include a simple link to the About Us
section. The link doesn’t have to be the first or most prominent.
Indeed, if you’re using a standard left-hand navigation column, you can
place the About Us link at the very bottom of the list. Just don’t hide it.

Connecting to Users

In any conversation, saying who you are and what you do is basic to
good manners. In business, it’s also good to establish credibility and
respect by explaining your company’s origins, how you view your
business, and how you relate to the community.

The Web is very depersonalized, but from our earliest usability studies, we’ve seen that users like getting a sense of the company behind the website.

Having a good About Us section facilitates this
understanding. Clearly stating what you do helps customers understand
your site as a whole. Of course, your overall site is what ultimately
represents your organization to users. People look at product pages and
read the site’s content when they’re evaluating an organization as a
possible vendor, business partner, employer, investment, or (in the
case of charities) donation recipient. Communication isn’t restricted
to About Us. But dedicating an area to providing users with
facts about your organization and its history and values helps pull all
of the site’s content together.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/about-us-pages.html

2008 09 29

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One of us is smarter than all of us

The wisdom of crowds comes not from the consensus decision of the group, but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts/decisions of each individual in the group.

At its simplest form, it means that if you take a bunch of people
and ask them (as individuals) to answer a question, the average of each
of those individual answers will likely be better than if the group works together to come up with a single answer. And he has a ton of real examples (but you’ll just have to read the book for them ; )

[Also] diversity increases the quality of the aggregated wisdom of the group.
If you have too many people who are alike, then no matter how smart
they all are, they may not come up with the same quality of answer than
if you have less smart folks who have a very different point of view. Diversity brings new information. And that new information is valuable.

In order for the crowd to have wisdom, the crowd has to be made up of individuals who argue! Or as he puts it in the book,

“Diversity
and independence are important because the best collective decisions
are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or
compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with
cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions
in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with.
Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms–like market prices, or
intelligent voting systems–to aggregate and produce collective
judgements that represent now what any one person in the group thinks
but rather, in some sense, what they all think.”

And my favorite line that sums it up:

“Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/03/one_of_us_iisi_.html

2008 09 24

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How to market to the information-rich

The Web is the land of the skeptic, the cynic, the impatient,

time-starved, information-overloaded consumer who is on a

mission. The mission is to solve a problem, answer a question,

get a good deal. The Web is the land of the comparison shopper,

the person who wants to read reviews to see if the product is

actually any good.

Trying to grab the attention and tug the sleeve of this

information-rich consumer is much more likely to irritate than

to interest them.

Marketing must change. Marketing used to say: “Don’t go down
that road, go down this road. My destination is much more
interesting.” On the Web, we choose our destination and will not
change it. Marketing must now say: “I can help you get to your
destination faster and easier.”

http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-09-22-marketing.htm

2008 09 24

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