On 17 Aug 98, Koen van Hees wrote:
> and so far (i'm half way my first read) i've met a person known as "Jared
> Spool" and one known as "jacob nielsen" anybody heard of those two before?
Heh -- yeah, those names pass beneath my eyes every now and then as I
wander the Web.
Speaking of Jakob Nielsen, his latest Alertbox is quite good. Entitled "The
Web Usage Paradox: Why Do People Use Something This Bad?", it's a kind
of Emperor's New Clothes look at the Web -- it spells out what many of us
suspect deep down, that 90% of Web sites (literally) are pretty much a
waste of everyone's time and money. One particular zinger of a quote:
Because they do get good service on the Web every now and then,
users behave somewhat like Skinner's rats, who would keep
pressing a lever in their cage as long as it gave them a food
pellet at rare intervals. In fact, the rat would keep going
longer if the food pellets came at random intervals: with
randomness, there is always the hope that next time will bring
the reward - exactly as when you click a link on the Web.
And...
There is one happy conclusion from the fact that most websites
are bad and that users spend most of their time and money at the
10% good ones: it is relatively easy to succeed on the Web
because most of your competitors are clueless. In the physical
world, it is difficult for large companies to give good customer
service since most of their staff is unqualified. In contrast,
on the Web, good service is a small matter of programming and
can scale to ever more customers and product selection.
Alertbox: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980809.html
P.S. Koes, it just occurred to me that your country code, 'be', matches
my initials; if I were to register the domain 'be' in Belgium, could I have the
e-mail address [EMAIL PROTECTED]?? How very existential... :)
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte site: http://www.almonte.com/
Business site: http://www.federalweb.com
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