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Speaking in Usability Code  

:: Thursday, June 10, 2004 ::

engagability....desirability...personal info cloud...model of attraction...location awareness...persuasive architecture...saleability...findability...cre8ability. There are as many words to describe what makes software or web sites usable as there are stars in the sky.

What fascinates me is that in my little office, while I'm focused on helping online businesses understand how to drive sales and traffic through user centric designs that compliment their search engine optimzation efforts, there are people on this planet who've gone WAY BEYOND search engines, usability and Jakob Neilsen's routine announcements on what's considered usable.

These people are writing about how take everything we've created so far, and how to make it do more than we ever dreamed of.

To tantalize you, begin with the thread at Cre8asiteForums on Engagability which is nowhere close to dying yet.

     "Desirability, engagability is a part of, would be a counterpoint to "Don't make me think" type usability problems.

     "I think your "ethical concerns" are more a symptom of neglected desirability rather than an objection against it.

     "Perhaps emotional well-being and self improvement could be the goals of engagability?

     "...comments like this are what interest me: "For me and a lot of my small-business customers, it's just information overload. What does all this mean?" said Jones about software like WebTrends.

     "Too much jargon and undefined terms can easily keep people from understanding you.

     "Some things turn from buzzwords to normal words, or simply technical words. When does that happen exactly? And, why?

Next,

An Architect in the City of Bits

     "The trial separation of bits and atoms is now over, says William J. Mitchell, head of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. Computers are ubiquitous. Wireless links provide constant connectivity. Everything is media.

     ""Increasingly, we are living our lives at the points where electronic information flows, mobile bodies, and physical places intersect in particularly useful and engaging ways," he writes. "These points are becoming the occasions for a characteristic new architecture of the twenty-first century."

also in the same article:

     "Take something as simple as knowing where the potholes in the city. Every automobile could have a sensor and wireless device that pings out a signal every time it hits a pothole. That in itself may sound trivial, but extrapolate from there. Once you have location awareness combined with sensing, all of the automobiles in a city can operate as part of a giant distributed scanner that builds a real-time model of the city and keeps it updated."


In my Sci-Fi head, I'm visualizing Google installing a bit of sofware into our bodies, like my dog's ID micro-chip is implanted into him in case he gets lost. Google can follow us around, indexing addresses, bank statements, what you buy and directions to your in-laws house. Putting privacy issues aside, WE would be the Google-bots.

My friend (and editor for the Usability/User Interface Checklist), Bill Slawski, found this on education. How to use weblogs to create engaging learning experiences

     ""So, if weblogs and their attributes are so useful, why aren’t they used in formal training situations?"

I'm not scaring you yet, am I.

Look at The mentality Of Homo interneticus: Some Ongian postulates by Michael H. Goldhaber

     "The Internet knows no distance. Wherever you happen to be, the Net connects you with equal speed and facility to everywhere on earth. You can pull up a text faster, in general, on the net than you could find it in a book on a shelf a few feet from your desk. You can move through book–length texts without any sense of what is near the introduction and what near the conclusion. The spatial order and categorization of libraries, so elaborately coded by the Dewey decimal system or the like, is no more."

     "What does seem worth knowing is how to navigate the Internet, how to intrude oneself into it, which sites or persons are nodes who connect one well to other reaches of the whole. Who are the bloggers who will reveal unknown riches or post a rich collection of hyperlinks — among which one would want one’s own sites and blogs to be listed?"

Show this to your boss. Masters of Design: Kathleen Brandenburg

     "Is it beyond the call of duty to ask your design team to kayak out on Lake Michigan at 5:30 on a cold Chicago morning and dunk-test a Nike outdoor watch? Kathleen Brandenburg doesn't think so. A graphic designer by training, the 33-year-old Brandenburg is one of the country's premier practitioners of immersive design."

I'm just getting warmed up, trust me. If you think SEO/SEM is all you need to know to make your web site do better,you're simply not using your head.


     "When you make an emotional connection with your customers, you win their loyalty." (Source: Masters of Design: Lessons From the Masters


As DCrx points out in Cre8asiteForums

     "Pleasure, enjoyment, positive emotions, hedonic values have recently been applied to the user experience. The emphasis on the positive leads to some interesting questions about the user experience: For example, Should the education experience be a joy? Is pleasure important in game playing? What happens when all products are pleasurable?"

In the old days, we only had to worry about navigation and link colors.


I continue on this topic in Strawberry Fields, Forever in the Cre8tive Flow blog.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 6/10/2004 12:55:00 PM

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