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In line with the trend towards "localization" of W3 content comes the ComputerJobs Store.
This clean and well-designed site is solely focused on information technology jobs in particular geographic regions The company does this through regional Web sites called "ComputerJobs Stores." These online job "stores" contain employment, job opportunity and informative career content specifically geared toward information technology professionals.
There are ComputerJobs Stores in Atlanta, Chicago, Texas and the Carolinas. Each "store" has the same basic layout with the same corporate logo, but is distinguished by being color-coded.
What we like about the site - apart, of course, from its exemplary design - is that the content is locally-oriented. For example, clicking on the "Career Help" button in the Texas "store" leads to a link to "Texas User Groups", a list of groups providing discussion and education for computing professionals.
The site is refreshingly gimmick-free and is a snap to navigate.
In a recent edition of his newsletter, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch waxed lyrical and enthusiastic about a gizmo called Alexa.
Alexa is a stand alone application which sits on your desktop. It displays who owns the site you are currently visiting and how well it is rated,
in terms of overall traffic.
The ownership information is pulled from
InterNIC records, so only .com, .org, .edu and .net sites are
reported. Efforts are being made to expand this to international
registries. Traffic data is determined by analyzing requests found
from key Internet caches.
Click next to the window, you're shown even more information in a drop
down box. The site ownership data is expanded, to provide a street
address and phone number, if listed. You're also shown how Alexa users
have voted for the site, plus a Yahoo Internet Life review rating and
a RSAC rating, if either is available.
To get a sample without installing the application, simply enter:
http://widener.alexa.com/sitedata/SITE
where you replace SITE with the web address of the site. Don't include
the http://, and keep in mind that at the moment, sites may be listed
with or without www.
Which we duly did.
Unfortunately, the data for interbiznet.com proclaimed that the site was last updated in July 1997. Worse yet, data on one associate's site displayed an out-of-date address, while data on another incorrectly attributed ownership of the domain to an organization in Green Bay, WI...
Obviously, the type of data Alexa is trying to collect are extremely interesting and would be a boon to marketers. But if the data is incorrect, then it's worse than useless.
The Press Release sounded almost too good to be true:
"Tritium Network announces
its plans to begin a five-city launch for free Internet access beginning
in January 1998. The company will be offering free memberships to potential
users in New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC and San Francisco..."
(Tritium, it turns out, is "a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen".)
We duly pointed our browser to the site. And found ourselves confounded.
The site as a whole is a great example of the triumph of form over function.
The "homepage" features a logo and some attractively animated text
which finally settles down to the words "extraordinary" and "enter".
Hitting "enter" presents the user with a demand for a username and
password.
The homepage sets the tone for the rest of the site, which is long on "kewl"design
elements, but low on information and comprehensible navigation aids. All in
all, a good example of a self-consciously "hip" second-generation
site.
Now, we have no problem with black backgrounds, strangely labeled links and
esoteric nomenclature. But we've been around the block a few times (in Web
terms).
1998 will doubtless see a slew of naive users flocking to the Web (don't
try logging on between Christmas and New Year), most of whom will find the
"place" confusing in the extreme, will not understand link conventions,
and will probably not be using the latest and greatest browser.
We're afraid that site designs like Tritium's will simply confirm to newcomers
that the Web is full of weirdoes, and that, as a medium, it is all but incomprehensible
to "outsiders".
We checked out Tritium's Employment
Opportunities page. It was updated on July 11, 1997...
Worldwide, there are around 90 million users of the Internet
(Nua
Internet Surveys, 12/8/97), of whom about 56 million are in
the USA
and Canada.
Lots o' people - and about double the number compared to the
beginning of
the year. But still a drop in the ocean in a world of six billion souls.
However, at this rate of increase, the proportion of "sophisticated"
Web users will shrink relative to both the absolute number of users
and the
ever-increasing proportion on "novices".
And it's amazing how naive novice users can be (but we were all
ones once
· weren't we?)!
Jakob Nielsen in his article "Tech-Support
Tales" offers real-life examples of calls to a
net-users' tech-support
line studied by Sara Kiesler and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon
University
as part of their HomeNet project (Internet home use in Pittsburgh).
(We would thoroughly recommend a visit to Jakob's
site, which is full of trenchant analysis written in a
straightforward
way.)
The user probably thought that doing what the hardware vendor
recommended
would make the entire system good again and not just
fix the
system-level features. Novice users don't understand the
difference
between different classes of software and that Web browsing
would involve
installing additional software. This specific problem also
highlights
the risks in having the user call multiple help desks and
getting advice
that does not match the user's complete situation because each
desk
only knows about part of the user's environment. Reveals a fundamental flaw in the user's conceptual model of the system.
To be fair to the user, have you ever seen a TV commercial from
a computer
vendor that shows the happy buyer installing a modem? One more problem caused by a fundamental error in the user's
conceptual
model of the system: the user would probably not have
complained about
not being able to use one of the telephones in the house while
another
member of the household was on the phone elsewhere in the
house, but
the user doesn't understand that using the modem is equivalent
to making
a telephone call. After all, a modem is a computer
thing; also
it doesn't make any sounds while it is operating so it
"clearly" can't
have anything to do with telephony. This is a classic usability problem and should have been
fixed in the
design of the general system: when an already running
application is
double-clicked, it should be brought to the foreground, and if
it doesn't
have any open windows, a new blank document should be opened.
Doesn't
have anything to do with the Web as such, but can still be
enough to
make the user think that "the Web doesn't work".
Remember, these are true stories! They serve to point up
how difficult
it is to become Web-competent, and how disoriented newcomers are -
things
the sophisticated user tends to forget (how many times have
you
delivered "Internet 101" to friends and relatives?).
The key, then, to attracting and keeping the growing legions of new
users
on your site is to keep it simple. This means abiding by the "link conventions"
(links = blue, visited links =
purple), making your site
easily navigable,
avoiding "Webtalk" and an emphasis on technology and
gew-gaws (Steve
Case came to the same conclusion......).
KISS.....(Keep It Simple, Stupid)
--John
Blower
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