Warmest Greetings,

You Put The Lime in the Coconut and That's Fine With Me  

:: Friday, February 11, 2005 ::

In order to better understand something, we like to put things into terms we understand and can relate to. Dating is one of them. Why is it that just before Valentine's Day I'm seeing romantic or relationship references everywhere?

Take Romancing the User Experience. If you don't want to read the article, the comic by Tom Chi and Kevin Cheng says it all. If you've ever dated a Virgo, you'll REALLY get it.

Cheng writes, "Romance, or indeed any human relationships, are not very usable. Ever see the fake remote controls to control the opposite sex? That's a good user experience. One-click happiness. Wouldn't it be great to just have 1-click Valentine's and Birthday solutions? Yet even if we were offered such an option, we'd probably take the difficult, unusable choice instead. Why would we subject ourselves to this?"

Well, this is where it's messed up. You can't control someone or change them into something you want. I know I learned this on both ends, where I wanted someone to change or they wanted me to change. And in one particular case, a boyfriend and I broke up because he fully expected the Mothership was coming to get him and he couldn't take me along.

I kid you not.

With web sites we want to control where our visitors go, even if we have no clue where they're coming from or why they've come at all. We call them users, and again, this is a term that sounds too much like dating, human relationships and sad to say, suffering some trauma from that.

We're having a go at the term "user" in Are you a loser if you use the word "user"?, in which I stir up the kettle but made points by showing a visitor "annotated resource links".

Anyway, like I said before, in order to better understand something, we like to put things into terms we understand and can relate to.

When it comes right down to it, web sites and lovers want the same thing. Conversions. Making a good impression. Return visits. Committment. And we try things. We always try stuff. It keeps the journey exciting. Things like user instructions. It helps with communication, both for web sites and for dating. Don't take anything for granted.

Test test test. See what works and what doesn't. Usability testing is less of a hassle than dating because usability specialists work from a plan. My dating experience consisted of listening to a variety of pick up lines at the bar, and watching them struggle to pick just the right one. Sorta like navigation labels. If they hit the right one, I'd click on and take them somewhere, usually the dance floor.

User personas are getting to be all the rage and I think this is great. But chances are the design folks won't nab some of their more colorful visitors because they don't know how to talk to them or even imagine them into existence on paper. They don't have the right terms. Think teenage web sites.

You have to go out of your element and do something odd, like sing.

This is how I knew if a guy would work for me or not. If could sing the song about putting the lime in the coconut and drinking it all up and they didn't think that was just totally weird for me to be singing, they were a good catch.

And if they sang along with me, heck. That was a conversion for sure.

May you all have a user-friendly Valentine's Day.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/11/2005 06:06:00 PM

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