Giraffe Forum

It is time for marketers and communicators to stop treating customers like little children and start treating them like intelligent adults.
“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology,” the good Google person told me. “This includes […]

A great many people have a poor view of what happened during the 2000s, with the exception of the growth of the Web.
According to a survey published in December 2009, Americans have a pretty dismal view of the 2000s. It has been voted the worst decade in living memory. “By roughly two-to-one, more say they […]

If your customers fall in the forest of your website and you don’t hear them scream, did they really make a sound?
Yes they did. It was the sound of them clicking on the Back (I’m outta here and I won’t be back) button. I’ve been doing this web thing since 1994 and I still make […]

Manage your customers’ time
The Web is not free. It charges customers their time. Successful websites deliver the most value for the least time.
Google is the benchmark for success on the Web. Google is obsessed with time. Your time. Google is all about helping you find stuff quickly. Practically everything Google does has speed as a […]

The exact words you choose on the Web can have a huge impact on behaviour. Finding the right combination of words takes testing and a focus on the action.
Dustin Curtis creates user interfaces. He’s a creative type. I knew that as soon as I visited his website because he uses a black background. That’s very […]

To make menus and links simpler you have to think like a customer. You also have to reduce the number of links and focus on the task at hand.
If you visit the BBC homepage and choose “Sport” you are brought to a page about sport. Just sport. The critical first screen is all about sport. […]

Success on the Web is not about making customers do what you want. It is about helping customers do what they want.
My Lenovo laptop has great battery life. The battery lasts for 650 thousand million years if I don’t turn it on, and for 65 thousand million years if I turn it on dimly lit. […]

The key to web success is to stop thinking about organizational information and start thinking of customer tasks.
It all started many years ago. I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. A colleague was sick in Beaumont hospital in north Dublin. My friend Tom and I decided to pay her a visit. As we […]

Yahoo’s customer is the advertiser. Google’s customer is you and me. That’s why Google has been more successful..
“We have never been a search company,” Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive told the New York Times in August 2009. “Search was Yahoo’s origin story,” stated Danny Sullivan, a search engine expert who has followed the search industry […]

Your customers couldn’t care less about your new look, your new design or whether your dog has just had kittens.
“Hi Gerry,” the Air New Zealand marketing email started off. I remember many years ago when I was a young employee at a company that had just bought its first computer. We got this word processor […]