Archive for February, 2006
February 24, 2006
Blogging Elsewhere Lately
It’s been a little quiet on the High Context blog lately, largely because I have been posting to two other blogs the past couple of weeks. Check out We Have Always Done It That Way and the Great Ideas Conference blogs for some of stuff I have been writing recently.
I’ll be out in San Diego this coming week for the ASAE Great Ideas conference. Be sure to say ‘Hi’ to me if you read this blog!
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February 18, 2006
RSS TV
Shawn Lea has posted a list of innovations that hotels are probably going to implement over the next few years.
One thing not on the list that they could do pretty much immediately for meetings is to create an RSS Channel that displays recent entries from an RSS feed designated by the meeting organizers.
If you’ve gone to enough meetings you are probably familiar with the hotel tv channel that provides information about the day’s events, which is usually out-of-date and/or redundant to material you already have in print sitting on your bedside table. Not very useful. A TV channel that scrolled RSS entries created by the organizers would be much more compelling and timely and might even be watched. You could even have a podcast voice-over if you wanted to take it a step further.
It should be incredibly simple to manage something like this. Just point the system at the RSS feed for the event blog (you are event blogging your meetings, right?). Boom, all set.
To whatever industry that provides hotel tv systems, get on the RSS bandwagon!
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February 12, 2006
Usability and Branding: You Can Have Both
Kevin Holland provides a thoughtful response to my critique of the Chiptole web site. Here is his summary:
David raised a very good point about the importance of making key functionality usable. I’m just saying it’s not the only point. The purpose of a website is not just to make it easy to find things. It’s representative of the whole experience offered by an organization or company. It is, in fact, your organization. As we are giving our organzation’s website a much-needed redesign, that point is very much on my mind.
I don’t disagree that the web can be an extension of your brand and/or experience for your customers. However, I think you can have both usability and brand consistency (whatever that may mean to you) with a little thoughtful design. Chipotle fails in this area, I still believe.
In fact, Kevin’s post actually contains the core of my rebuttal. He discusses the experience of going to Chipotle as part of their brand: simple, easily understood food selections; rapid service; and a tasty product. All in all, a highly ‘usable’ restaurant experience that is presented in a ‘hip’ way. Why can’t the site mimic this core part of their brand while being hip at the same time? Answer: It could without having to limit its usefulness by burying key features under gee-whiz flash animations.
See Apple’s web site for an example of a company that makes its big margins on the hipness of its highly usable products. No flying iPods, you’ll note.
In reality, this discussion is a bit of a shot in the dark, since we don’t know what Chipotle really wants their site to contribute to the organization. I do assume that selling burritos is in there somewhere, however.
It would be interesting to see a survey of their web site visitors, asking why they came to the site that day. I would bet a free burrito that the single biggest reason is to find a restaurant and/or place an online order, not to see what this hip burrito experience is about. I don’t see how an organization is doing itself any good if the branding gets in the way of providing core services.
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February 10, 2006
Ben gets del.icio.us
Ben Martin on how he has used the del.icio.us social bookmark service with his association’s volunteers to replace the traditional resource guide authoring process:
So, who writes these resource guides? Well, in my experience the links are harvested by association staff and/or volunteers, who also compose short descriptions for the sites they collect. They then write up the guides in MS Word, hand them over to a webmaster, who codes it into HTML and uploads it to the Web site. Then, the resource guide gathers dust on a static page. Perhaps it gets updated next year. Perhaps not.
Friends, there is a better way!
I agree that traditional resource guides, as traditionally authored, are inevitably stale and not too useful by the time they are published. The key to the approach that Ben describes is to trust your members to collaborate without an editorial filter. Upside: current, relevant, member-driven conent! Downside: letting go of the illusion of control. Hmm, maybe that is an upside too…
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February 8, 2006
Post-it Whiteboards!
Wow, check out the 3M Post-it® Super Sticky Whiteboard Sheets! I’ve been mocked before for traveling with my own marker pens. Wait until I whip out my own self-adhesive whiteboard. :) What will 3M think to add a weak adhesive to next?
(Via Laura Lemay.)
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February 7, 2006
Derek Powazek on Home Page Goals
Derek Powazek defines a set of 4 goals for any home page:
- Answer the question, “What is this place?”
- Don’t get in the repeat visitor’s way
- Show what’s new
- Provide consistent, reliable global navigation
Good stuff. Read the whole thing.
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February 3, 2006
Burritobility
I thought I would share an example I used in the Web Site Usability Workshop that I conducted with Dave, Frank and Joanna earlier this week at the ASAE Tech conference.
I started off by asking anyone in the room who likes burritos to raise their hand. 90 out of the 100+ people in the room shot their hand up. I had the right crowd!
What is the number one thing a freshmex burrito restaurant chain’s web site should do? Get you into one of their restaurants to buy a burrito. Simple enough.
Now, go look at BajaFresh.com. The store locator has a convenient search box right at the top to put in your address or zip code and find the closest store. Simple and effective.
Now go to the Chipotle.com web site. Look out for the flying burrito zeppelin! What is that spinning tomato/tortilla chip/hot pepper thingy doing in the middle of the page? How can I find a store? No way to tell without mousing over the chip and then futzing with an animated menu with no labels displayed by default. The only plain text link on the home page is to the privacy policy. (For once, a lawyer has a positive usability impact on a web site design!)
Both sites have a store locator feature. Only BajaFresh makes it easy to find and use that key functionality.
I asked the people in the room, “Who has the more usable site?” Answer: “BajaFresh!”
Then I asked, who probably paid more for their web site? “Chipotle!”
A usable burrito site doesn’t have to be an expensive one.
The lessons here include:
- A great product can be undone by poor usability;
- Usability can be a competitive advantage if your site makes it easier to do business with you;
- If your product is sub-par, making it usable alone won’t help much;
- Flying burrito zeppelins are kind of distracting.
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