Irreverent Thinking

People hunt for information, quite often in the long grass and can become disillusioned if they see no progress, this reminds me of using AltaVista as a search engine in 1995!

I posted an interesting question on LinkedIn last week about the role that psychology plays in designing sites and have a got a fair set of useful answers. The most interesting talked about Jakob Nielsen’s theory of information scent. The basic idea is that human forage for information in a fairly lazy manner and as they hunt down the piece of information they require there is a balance between finding and reading. If the balance is too skewed towards work (finding) then they lose interest. Jakob goes on to list a few very good tips but it got me thinking.

If this is a forage then the stronger the scent, the greater the will to continue foraging and as many companies now integrate on and off-line information a great way to improve interaction would be to give tasters of off-line activity. E.g. “…request our brochure that gives far more information than you can find here”. Not, maybe, a very good example but you can see the point - it heats up the scent and therefore increases the drive to complete the call to action. Another example could be “register to our forum and read 20,000 comments about xyz product/service”.

This is fairly simple and we do this in many case now but we are not visualising it as a forage/hunt, we are trying to balance action with benefit when in many cases it is a far simpler case of balancing action with (foraging) progress. “This way to food” would be a great example of clarity but that assumes we know what the visitor wants and that, quite often, is an unknown so we have to either understand exactly what the visitor wants (and then post 10ft high signs) or try to understand what he or she wants and spoon feed them.

Alternatively we give the visitor a better view of the prey (information) so they can stalk (find) it with greater ease.

Oh yes, that’s usability, isn’t it?

So much these days is made of your trust rating on the web that there is an argument saying that those with rarer names are easier to find and therefore easier to trust. So if you’re called John Smith then it is highly likely you will be lost in a deluge of other John Smiths or, worse still, mistaken for someone else. The growth of the social networking has seen an explosion in name searching is now one of the commonest activities, whether it’s inside Facebook of directly on Google.

Time to change your name, maybe?

The business version of Facebook? Probably not as it won’t get as cluttered or generate as much social drama with it’s pure for business approach. I like it so far and you can find me here - I’m still new though - and I can recommend the expert section where you can ask questions and get (mainly) good answers.

I’ve just been away for a week on the rather beautiful Greek island of Kefalonia and on the transfer back to the airport the rep handed out the inevitable questionnaire with a supporting set of instructions that said I had to rate each of the questions as follows: 100-76% Excellent, 75%-36% Good, 35% to 5% satisfactory and only if I rated any of the items less than 5% should I mark it down as unsatisfactory.

Now, we all know these survey and reports form the basis of people making decisions of where to go but I couldn’t agree with a 7% rating as being satisfactory. I kept the questionnaire and plan to drop an email to the CEO of Going Places so I visited their HELP page to find….erm, no section for post-holiday communication and no way to speak to the man - this contrasts with this site which shows you how to contact all the top brass, okay, it doesn’t show the persons name but you still feel it will get to the desk of the person you want to talk to.

Following on from a post I made a few weeks ago on Pods I tried to turn the thinking on it head and see how the corporate world could benefit from analysing the use of pods and pod behaviour. Most companies now realise that they need to do more than simply put up a web-site, run a few email shots and start a blog - they realise the traffic (raw fuel) flows around these places and lots of other unrelated places such as independent blogs.

Understanding this “sphere” is something I have been trying to make sense of over the last months and I’ve always used words such as space or sphere and wondered why it didn’t feel right. My initial foray into Facebook provided the trigger for me to realise that it’s less about space/place/area and more about connections, family if you will. Hence pod.

So what role does my pod play, if any, when it comes to deciding how the corporate world should deal with me. It stands to reason that better understanding me allows the corporate world to sell/promote/educate in a far more focused way so the question then is how do corporates learn from this?

I think this is early days and I think the corporate world has to understand how these pods work before they can leverage them so step one is to build the corporate pod, the places and connections that the corporate touches. Understand this influence and then extend it outwards, sorry no solutions yet - just a mindset and an idea I’m going to try this week and see how well it goes down with a client. I’ll keep you posted.