Hidden costs of self-service
A self-service website can only be effective when people can complete the tasks they came to complete.
The toll booths on a motorway I regularly use were removed recently. In their place is an automatic system called Eflow that captures your car registration. You then have a number of options for payment.
I happen to […]
Obsessed by technology
It’s time for a more realistic view of technology. Human input is still useful, and in some situations essential.
If you go to the bottom of the Google News homepage you will find the following statement: “The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.”
What exactly is […]
Choosing the right classification words
Climate change or global warming? Pandemic flu or bird flu? Learning or training? Should we choose the ‘correct’ words or the words people actually use?
According to Google, every month an average of 300,000 people search for climate change, while 2.2 million search for global warming. Yet the official term on most government and media websites […]
Block reading: how we read on the Web
We don’t scan a webpage. Instead, we scan a particular block or section of it.
I was working with a company who, based on research, had discovered a top intranet task. It was interesting that the web team initially had no idea what this task was about, even though there was huge demand for it in […]
