The Smoking Foot

HFI’s December newsletter recaps the key findings outlined in 2005’s Putting Research into Practice seminar. eg:

*
People who are taught about breadcrumbs tend to use them more often.
However, users still do not use them spontaneously. (Hull, 2004)

*
On sites with clear labels and prominent navigation options, users tend
to browse rather than search. Searching is no faster than browsing in
this context. (Katz and Byrne 2003)

* Design is a key
determinant to building on-line trust with consumers. For motivated
users of an information site, bad design (busy layout, small print, too
much text) hurts more than good design helps. (Sillence, Briggs,
Fishwick, and Harris, 2004)

* Sympathetic error messages and
emoticons (like those in IM programs) can influence users’ perceptions
of the application. (Tzeng, 2004)

2005 Annual Research Review

Some time in 2005 the one-billionth user went online. Statistically, we’re likely talking about a 24-year-old woman in Shanghai.

36% of Internet users are now in Asia and 24% are in Europe. Only 23% of users are in North America.

It
took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The
second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users
will be in Asia.

Ten years ago, the ‘net was mostly used by
geeks; now it’s the default way to do business in many countries. In
our U.S. and European B2B studies, many business professionals said
they visit a company’s website as the first step in researching
potential vendors.

	One Billion Internet Users

“At one level it’s clear that the dam has broken,” said Paul Otellini,
chief executive of Intel. “There’s an inevitable move to use the
Internet as a distribution medium, and that’s not going to stop.”

The
rapid emergence of the consumer electronics and computer companies as
Internet video providers is certain to challenge the control of the
cable, telephone and satellite companies, which seek to dominate the
distribution of digital content to the home.

In the battle for
the living room, cable, satellite, and increasingly, phone companies
are trying to defend their turf by offering more choice through an
array of content in video-on-demand programs.

But fending off the Internet’s openness will be a struggle, one that the online companies themselves lost years ago.

A
prototype of one feature of the Microsoft IPTV service, known in the
industry as a matrix channel, allows several baseball games to be
viewed simultaneously along with textual information like player
statistics.

They are companies like Apple Computer, Google,
Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, with all of them beginning to make
available an ever-widening array of video content that looks more like
a world of 5 million channels rather than 50 or even 500.

(extracts only above - full article at the link below)

What would a world with television coming through the Internet be like?

Written by a Professor of Journalism in Argentina (translated from Spanish):

“Basically,
the story that is published on the Internet today is still being
produced as it has historically been produced in printed media.

The
author deals with the important stuff (he writes) and other people
enlarge or enrich his text by adding design and content. This working
process conceives of the author as a one-talent person: he can only
write.

In this scenario, somebody is specifically in charge of
the layout, another person takes the pictures, a third one chooses the
photos, somebody else handles the videos and audio that will be
eventually edited by another person and, finally, a “technician” posts
everything online.

In such a structure, a journalist is believed to have less ability than a 16-year-old boy who makes his own weblog.

This mechanism strangles the size and richness of the story.

If
the author has no control on what, where and how the multimedia content
will appear, this content will inevitably be excluded from his story.

To
believe, as is usually the case, that the reader’s ability to check
content separately, in itself, constitutes a multimedia edition (click
to watch the video) is nearly equivalent to suppose that eating some
lettuce and then drinking two spoons of oil will give us a salad. Some
things must be mixed up in order to work.”

	The End of Childhood

“Every link you put on a webpage in some way detracts attention from
every other link. A “landing page” is typically a page someone lands on
when they click on a keyword or banner ad. These pages generally have  a very specific purpose-to sell something, to get you to join something, etc.

In
its excellent report, Landing Page Handbook, Marketingsherpa found that
the more clinical, simple and focused a landing page is, the more
likely it is to succeed. Any links that do not support its primary
objectives will create leakage of potential customers, as they click on
‘interesting’ links that lead them away from the sale.”

This one above is from Mr McGovern. I haven’t read/seen the Sherpa book… it USD247, but the link is below if you’re interested

Landing Page Handbook: How to Raise Conversions — Data & Design Guidelines

Private
Philanthropy Across the World 1995-2002 - a study by John Hopkins
University (link below is direct to the pdf download 10KB).

Are we missing a mark with Tanzania?

This is the link to the page it is on

http://www.jhu.edu/%7Ecnp/compdata.html

Private Philanthropy Across the World 1995-2002

Hostway’s national Pet Peeve survey assembled a list of 15 irritating website practices:

1. Pop-up ads
2. Requiring the installation of extra software to view the site
3. Dead links
4. Requirement to register and log-on before viewing the website
5. Slow-loading pages
6. Content that is out of date
7. Confusing navigation - hard-to-find pages, too many clicks
8. Ineffective site search tool
9. No contact information available (web form only)
10. Inability to use the browser’s back button
11. Overdone sites - unnecessary splash screens/animation
12. Text that moves
13. Music or other audio that plays automatically
14. Poor appearance - colors, fonts, format
15. Opening a new window for a link

Then
Hostway asked their respondents how they felt about each of these. Only
(only?) 38% of the respondents found ‘opening a new window for a link’
irritating.

Pop-up ads were everybody’s favorite pet peeve by a
landslide. Requiring visitors to register or log on before viewing
content and requiring visitors to download additional software to make
the site word came in second and third, respectively.

Then Hostway asked folks what they’d do when they came face to face with their pet peeve

* 76% said they’d never come back to the site
* 74% said they’d unsubscribe from promotions and mailings
* 71% said they’d never purchase from the site
* 71% said they’d view the company negatively
* 54% said they’d complain to friends and associates
* 24% said they’d complain directly to the company

What Site Visitors Find Annoying

This one’s about being more open to questions & ideas we’d perhaps too easily dismiss (Drayton: guilty as charged)

“Cluelessness
is underrated. It’s the newbie who does something he didn’t know was
supposed to be impossible. It’s the naive guy asking the one dumb
question any clued-in person would diss. And it’s that question that
leads to the answer no expert would have found.

The clueless
accomplish amazing things–not necessarily because we’re bold,
brilliant innovators, but perhaps because we just don’t know any
better. We see the simplicity of the forest while Those Who Know are
overanalyzing the complex subtleties of the trees (and miss the point).
Sometimes NOT knowing about a “problem” weakens (or eliminates) it.”

Mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said,
“The ’silly question’ is the first intimation of some totally new development.”

The Clueless Manifesto

From Google’s pagerank algorithm to the APIs of eBay and Amazon
to the movie ratings on Yahoo, these companies know how to harness the
collective activity and intelligence of people to make their services
better.

1. The home page is no longer the most important page on your site.

2. The information architecture that people use to find your content is, increasingly, not yours.

3. Each feature added to an application is more to think about - for everyone.

4. Folksonomies are a way for users to map their own, familiar vocabulary to your alien one.

5. Words are the currency of the Web. Spend the most time on your words.

6. Seducible moments are those increasingly rare moments when you can talk to your users in an appropriate context.

7. Recommendation systems are a forced move.

8. Users want control.

9. Users appreciate tools that help them make their own well-informed decisions.

10. The best software models human behavior.

11. Links model how users value content, and are only the start…

12. Sometimes it is easier to design for yourself than others.

13. There is always an opportunity for a better interface to data.

14. All things being equal, faster interfaces allow for more innovation.

15. Most people are willing to trade their personal information for good service.

16. As choices grow, so does the importance of learnability.

17. Redesigns are dead.

18. Network effects are rare, and killer.

19. Network effects work in the opposite way for teams building software.

20. Personal value precedes network value

21. People rarely do things for the “good of the network”

22. Del.icio.us, though providing very cool tagging features, is mostly about a single person remembering items for later.

23. “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous”

Web 2.0 Talk - Leveraging the Network

Television has an inspiring past, ripe with innovation and popular
culture influence. Since its coming of age mid-20th century,
generations of TV viewers happily embraced their broadcast experience.
For the industry, making a connection with consumers was a pretty
straightforward, one-to-many experience…until recently.

Today,
audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented, splicing their time
among myriad media choices, channels and platforms [....] With
increasing competition from convergence players in TV,
telecommunications and the Internet, the industry is confronting
unparalleled complexity, dynamic change and pressure to innovate.

Our
analysis indicates that market evolution hinges on two key market
drivers: openness of access channels and levels of consumer involvement
with media. For the next 5-7 years, there will be change on both fronts
– but not uniformly. The industry instead will be stamped by consumer
bimodality, a coexistence of two types of users with disparate channel
requirements. While one consumer segment remains passive in the living
room, the other will force radical change in business models in a
search for anytime, anywhere content through multiple channels.

The
tech- and fashion-forward consumer segment will lead us to a world of
platform-agnostic content, fluid mobility of media experiences,
individualized pricing schemes and an end to the traditional concept of
release windows. Figure 1

illustrates the behavioral differences that will lead to the
“Generational Chasm” between the passive mass audience (”Massive
Passives”) and leading-edge users (divided into two sub-groups:
“Gadgetiers” and “Kool Kids”).

The end of TV as we know it: A future industry perspective (IBM Institute for Business Value study)