Impatient versus Bored

By Gerry McGovern


Customers are much more likely to get impatient with your website than they are to be bored with it.

When was the last time you were bored with a website? Do you get bored with Google? Do you get bored with Amazon? Perhaps the last book you bought from Amazon was boring, but was the Amazon website itself boring to use?

Do you get bored with Facebook or Twitter? You might get bored with your friends but it’s unlikely that you’ve been bored by the websites themselves. When Facebook announced that they were redesigning their website did everyone go: “Great! We’re so bored with the old one!”

Quite the opposite actually. “After a redesign in March, a Facebook poll revealed that 94 percent of users didn’t like the changes,” Caitlin McDevitt wrote for Slate in February 2010. “When Facebook introduced its News Feed in 2006, students organized to protest against it.”

The Facebook changes may have been the right thing to do. In the long-term, people may have found them very useful. However, people liked the old design because they were used to it. They didn’t want change. Often, the organization wants change much more than the customer.

Why do organizations want change? A number of reasons. To make more money. To improve the quality of the service or product. Because a new manager has been appointed and they need to make their mark. Because the marketing department is bored with the old design. Just bored. It’s a few years old and they’re sick of looking at it.

Redesigning is fun. You feel important. Agencies are great at making you feel that way. They show you way cool designs and you can bring all your intellectual and artistic skills to bear as you discuss way deep things like emotional appeal and branding. Be careful.

Associated Link: More, on Gerry McGovern

Passwords that are Simple - and Safe
Source: MIT Technology Review, 29 July 2010
 
Researchers at Microsoft have come up with a way to create easy-to-remember passwords without making a system more vulnerable to hackers.

Coercing people into a Brave New digital World
Source: Spiked, 27 July 2010
 
Does a government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online threaten to make cyber slaves of us all?

iPhone 4 one month on – A user experience and functionality success, despite antenna issues
Source: Webcredible, 26 July 2010
 
Webcredible Senior Consultant, Abid Warsi suggests that the impressive functionality and user experience of the iPhone 4 is enough to overcome the widely reported technical issues, thus proclaiming the device a big success.

Darwin City Council Website - Australia’s Most Usable!
Source: Loop11, 24 July 2010
 
Darwin City Council came out on top in a recent website usability study of Australia's capital city councils. The aim was to discover which of the six council websites was the most user friendly and usable.

Digital Design Jobs first to experience Growth
Source: UN, 23 July 2010
 
The marketing and design industry in the UK is seeing strong signs of renewed confidence, according to the new European Market Eye report from the industry’s specialist recruitment consultancy, Aquent.

Usability at a Glance
Source: usability-ed, 22 July 2010
 
Something interesting and useful to print out and stick on your wall.

Google may know your Desires before You do
Source: New Scientist, 21 July 2010
 
In future, your Google account may know your birthday and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are.

Closing the Usability Gap between Enterprise Applications and Consumer Web Applications
Source: Integrated Solutions for Retailers, 20 July 2010
 
New White Paper on Workforce Management and the increasingly ancient software which controls it.

Collect Words, not just Numbers with Feedback Analytics
Source: CMS Wire, 19 July 2010
 
Tracking visitors’ behaviors online can help us understand how customers use a site - but what if you could actually ask each individual a question? That’s what Kampyle aims to do with its feedback analytics tools.

Back to the Future...
Source: ZDNet, 17 July 2010
 
Always a popular sport, comparing the PC with the motor industry is as relevant as ever.