Month: July 2003

July 2, 2003

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  Thought

  News.com reports that Overture unveils new ad service. This was, of course, expected given that competitor Google has already announced their similar contextual product.

  “The product, called Content Match, allows Overture to place advertising text links on relevant content Web pages of newly signed distribution partners, which include Microsoft’s MSN and Edmunds.com. The service builds on Overture’s core business of selling commercial placement within search results that appear on partner sites including Yahoo and Microsoft. Advertisers pay Overture a per-click fee for preferred placement in those search results, and Overture splits the sales with its partners.”
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  Thought

  Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster

  The article introduces us to “informavores” and the application of foraging strategies in animals to the way that people forage for information on the web. This serves not only as an interesting metaphor in considering web best practices but also reminds us that our sites (from a user’s perspective) are part of one large experience — using the Net and we need to account for this in creating effective sites.

  “The big difference between websites and rabbits is that websites want to be caught. So how can you design a site to make your content attractive to ravenous beasts?

  The two main strategies are to make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it’s an easy catch. These strategies must be used in combination: users will leave if the content is good but hard to find, or if it’s easy to find but offers only empty calories.”
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  Thought

  Great Q&A with Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO in Technology Review:

  Well, one big problem is feature creep. Companies feel pressured to add features because they want to put a checkmark in every checkbox in the product review magazines. Home stereos are a perfect example. How many people use one-tenth of the features on their stereo? And, in fact, the most expensive home stereos actually have the fewest features, because those users understand that they actually get in the way of the experience. And so I think what we try and do as designers is use real hard evidence of people in the world to show our clients what things are appropriate and what things aren’t appropriate, and help them have the bravery that they need to be able to resist the temptation. If we didn’t have those checkboxes, a lot of features wouldn’t exist. The other classic example is digital watches, where the cost of adding extra features is so low, that you end up with all these features through this incredibly low bandwidth interface that nobody can ever remember. I love my watch, but if it weren’t for the fact that half the instructions are engraved on the back, I would never remember how to change anything on it. And that’s rather sad, really, considering how long we’ve had digital watches.