The problems with FAQs
Links are signposts. They are promises to the customer. They must tell customers where they are going and what they will get when they get there.
The essential problem with the Frequently Asked Question is that it is not useful or helpful. In Ireland it is mandatory to pay an annual license for your TV. I’ve […]
It’s not what people say, it’s what they do
Never make management decisions for a website based on opinions. There is often a Jekyll and Hyde difference between what people say and what they do.
SIMS is a hugely popular simulation game. They wanted to improve sign up for optional registration for those who had purchased the game. At one stage they tested two […]
Web customers care about tasks, not goals
Talking about customer goals is the biggest mistake a website can make. That’s how you lose the impatient customer.
A couple of months ago we needed to find a new house cleaner. I went to lots and lots of house cleaner websites and became more and more frustrated. The typical website had a big silly picture […]
When do you have too much information?
Modern organizations have armies of people trained in producing and publishing information, but there is a huge and growing lack of people who are skilled at organizing, analyzing and prioritizing it.
The Christmas 2009 airline-bombing attempt in the USA showed what can happen when there is too much information and too little skilled analysis. “It’s […]
IKEA chooses an ugly font
IKEA changes its font to Verdana. This is not likely to result in a massive drop in sales.
“Verdana was designed for the limitations of the Web — it’s dumbed down and overused,” Carolyn Fraser, a letterpress printer in Melbourne, Australia, told TIME. The design community is seemingly up in arms that IKEA would choose […]
When online is better than face-to-face
There is an assumption that a face-to-face interaction delivers a better result than a ‘cold’ online interaction. But that is not always the case.
Last month, I needed to change a number of flights at very short notice. A relation had died and I needed to get home. I was in the top tier of my […]
Adding features adds complexity
Many website managers fail to recognize that any addition to the website adds complexity, which may result in confused and lost customers.
The man stood looking at the woman who sat looking back at him through the glass.
“Press the # key,” she said, the slightest air of impatience in her voice. The man looked at her […]
The complexity tax
The complexity tax is demanded by those who want to create dependency.
I was reading recently about a country that had “pervasive corruption and bureaucracy”, and how this made it very complicated to do business. It reminded me about the book, The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando De Soto, in which he showed that the poorer […]
Information is causing global warming
An information tsunami is sweeping the world, eating up vast quantities of time and energy.
“The information avalanche coming from all sides — the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels — is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience,” writes Dusty Horwitt in The Washington Post in […]
Low value content is destroying your website
Low-value content is destroying the usefulness of intranets and public websites. It needs to be stored separately.
Andrew Leung is a computer science researcher at the University of California. His team analyzed a large data/content environment over a three month period. Their findings included the following:
More than 90 percent of the files were never accessed.
Of those […]
