Warmest Greetings,

Getting Web Site Users to Speak Their Minds  

:: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 ::

I'd heard rumblings before that focus groups, when applied to usability testing, are not the best choice. I thought this was because focus group research is done after launch. This may still be a factor, for usability and Quality Assurance departments, but there's more to it according to this article, Is Consumer Research Losing Its Focus? (Lead courtesy of WebWord)

     "Focus groups continually fail to tell us what customers want. The fundamental problem is that, in spite of what conventional wisdom tells us, it is not the voice of the consumer that matters. What matters is the mind of the consumer. The big mistake is in believing that what the mind thinks, the voice speaks. It is time to start embracing methods that can deliver stronger predictive value".

An alternative to focus group testing is, again courtesty of WebWord, this piece on Café testing . I think this beats the idea of getting a puppy and walking around with it to attract potential dates.

     "The basic idea behind café testing is to situate yourself at a café, put up a sign to attract participants, and test the people that come to you. Because cafes appeal to a wide variety of individuals, and people at a café often have time to spare, café testing can be a great way to perform a quick litmus test in the marketplace".

Around the forum in 80 seconds

Is this navigation practical? Perhaps the worst website navigation I have ever seen

     "Love rolling over the navigation as fast as I can."

     "You can get a groovy 'light-show' going to music if you place your cursor on the edge of the boundary-boxes - the red one is the fastest with the orange giving more of a 2/2."

More dangers with MS IE

     "Four new holes have been discovered in the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that could allow malicious hackers to run attack code on Windows systems, even if those systems have installed the latest software patches."

     "Yesterday, Bergen, the second largest city in Norway officially decided to kick out Microsoft."

A Different Kind of Syndication

Member Brad, owner of Everything Else teaches us how he made his blog readable in Palm hand held devices.

     "I have just started playing around with offering downloads of Palm friendly format of each page of my blogs."

Accessible/Usable Forms

     "After reading the article, I definitely want to play around with the forms: I love the bit about the changing title if required form elements have been left blank, explaining clearly why each bit of info is needed, and only returning to the user the unfilled bits of the form after a server-side check."

Doc Type How-to and Upgrading HTML 3.2 and 4.01 to XHTML

     "Is there any easy and robust way of upgrading my (?) HTML 4.01 to some variant of XHTML?"

     "Should I be learning HTML 4.o or even XHTML and creating my site in that?"

     "The HTML Cat at the Library has a few more good doctype articles in there. Among them is Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration from the Helsinki Univeristy of Technology. In there is a nice chart that shows how each browser handles each of your definitions."


Did you time that?

Two Gems

A Quick Kick-Start Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), written by Ammon Johns

Free Web Site Testing Center. I brought it back.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 6/15/2004 10:47:08 AM

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