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Breasts Sells Blogs  

:: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 ::

Breasts Sells Blogs

Jeffrey Zeldman and his wife are celebrating Springtime and the impending birth of a child with a site redesign and nicely shaped breast. I understand how the new green color fits (spring, green, birth, renewal.) I also "get" Zeldman's expressive way with words and his overall passionate approach to life and web site design. He writes,

     "But I designed from my heart. My goal was to create a place where I felt safe and optimistic, and maybe you will, too."

Well, I'm all for it Mr. Zeldman. The woman illustrating your homepage looks like she's about to join the "Mile High Club" (those are airplane seats she's sprawled over, right?). I'm not sure how the image illustrates the overall purpose of your popular site, but I do know that female body parts often sell web sites. But would it work for me? Would my blog traffic increase if a man's nipple was poking out on the front page? I think not.

If you haven't met Zeldman, you're missing the pleasure of reading from one of the Great Ones. He is also brave. Bookmark Zeldman.com

Usability Testing

Your user is worth it. Heuristics vs. Usability: Evaluating the Vendor Experience

I like this well written article because for starters, this is how I provide affordable usability web site reviews. My test case covers many types of usability oriented areas, such as user interface (where most heuristic elements reside), tasks and personas, and persuasive architecture. The question I'm sometimes asked "We already designed (or finished) our web site. How dumb (or embarressing) is it to go back and test it at this late date?"

It's never too late to test. While the perfect world scenerio is to test requirements during the build process, there are many times when a quick review for basics, or an information architecture review, or user testing (which should be ongoing anyway) or as this writer says, "rules of thumb" are checked for. While full blown usability testing can run into the thousands of dollars, including the cost of travel for a team to fly out to your company, many of us provide tests, tasks evaluations and user interface reviews at any time, for affordable fees. The writer states this common case:

     "Problem: I have no time to do usability, and I don't want to do an heuristic evaluation. Solution: Do some heuristability. Yup, it's hybrid time. The plan is to take our "rule of thumb" checklist (because thankfully there are standards and guidelines available), create a few scenarios based on the top two or three primary tasks for each user group, and give the checklist (with guidance) to the SMEs and have them run the scenarios and give the feedback."

Search Engines

Find me the needle in your haystack. By date, please. The Web as historical record

     "I then wanted to find the original definition, and discovered one of the weaknesses of most search engines and the Web itself: you cannot sort by date. Most search engines do not give you that facility at all. ASK does allow it but the results are of limited value as many of the entries on the Web do not have any usable date attached to them. This is a major problem for historians, like myself today, but will be a greater frustration to future historians looking back over a hundred years of the Web and not knowing when something was written."


We don't want no thought control. A Letter from Google

     "At least one Wall Street pundit had somewhat harsh words for Google, and compared their efforts more to those of Willie Wonka. From what I understand, the rest of Wall Street is equally unimpressed by Google." (Nicely researched by Bill Slawski.)


Clever

How many ways can a shopping cart or arrow be drawn, anyway? 300 Images From 1800 Sites decided to find out.


Just Techie

If you know what Dave's talking about, let me know. Cre8asiteForums news feed aggregator


How To Impress Your Online Customers (and encourage them to buy more.)

A little service goes a long way

     "Keeping the customer (i.e. doing everything you can to make sure they come back again) is highly dependent on the overall shopping experience that they have. E-tailers are mistaken to think they can put up a website full of products, click, click, click and thats the end of that. Developing an online rapport with the customer, making sure their needs are attended to, asking yourself how would 'you' want to be treated are all integral parts of the 'user experience."


Intrigue

Experience the difference. Experience Design

     "Current practices in marketing are not unlike this model of communication. A marketing strategy can be seen as a one-to-many model of communication in which the "curriculum" is a kind of scope and sequence created by marketers, advertisers, brand specialists, and copywriters. It is also self-referential in the sense that it judges its own performance on the basis of sales, and does not necessarily fully take into account those people that are actually using the product or service. I have seen many prominent copywriters boast about how a sales letter dramatically increased the sales of a product due to some unique use of language they have command over, yet the actual value and experiences of the people who have bought the product or service is noticably absent."

Barry Welford found it. A good example of a highly accessible website in the news.

     "There are one or two features I'm not strong on, but it would be interesting to hear other people's reactions to this website."

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 5/04/2004 12:17:09 PM

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