Jay's Summary Notes

More than 10,000 people attended this, the fourth annual Miller-Freeman conference on Web design. The dominant theme this year was USABILITY.

Since Web design is attracting hundreds of times more investment dollars than instructional design, I tried to apply everything I heard in a learning context. When Jakob Nielsen wagged his finger at the audience, reminding us that the "user is king," I was writing "the learner is king," just to try it on for size. Similarly, I substituted eLearning for e-Business, and online learning center for ecommerce site.

Crystal Waters,
Impresario

Jakob Nielsen,
Usability guru

Research finds that you feel more in control if you know where you are.

Lessons from e-Business:

• Make your learning experiences "sticky," i.e. worth coming back for more.
• When a learner is contemplating taking a course, show her related courseware as well.
• If you're not attracting sufficient learners, put up a new online learning center.
• Set up automatic emailer reminders for next steps.
• Make sure your learning delivery system ("backend fulfillment") lives up to the standard promised by your opening page. Check the fulfillment offered by www.kozmo.com, for example.
• Set up a responsive help desk. Check out GEICO Direct, where a "counselor" will call you with information within 15 seconds of your pushing a button on their web page. How about a MentorLine for learners?
• Don't be afraid of cannibalizing old training programs with the new.
• Motivate your users by giving them easy, painless ways to learn up front; once they're accustomed to the system, you can ramp up the difficulty and price of entry.

Know the Learner. Track his visits, see where she goes upon leaving.

Know the Lifetime Value of your learners. If you know my writings, you've heard it before but it bears repeating.

Andrew Zolli,

Siegel & Gale

netGenesis

Usability. What works for web-based training? The most important issue is whether or not users can do what they want. 75% of users at a popular recruiting site couldn't get through the steps to send in an application.

What brings people back to a web site? On the web at large, it's...

• 75% content
• 54% updates
• 58% fast download
• 66% ease of use

What is needless fluff?

• coupons
• brand
• cutting-edge technology
• games
• ability to purchase
• customizability
• chat

Build an experience, not a site. Incorporate:

• user feedback/control
• user drives experience
  
• user productivity/change to exercise creativity
• communication/connection to others
• adaptivity

Don't try to imitate life. Use the aspects of the web to make an experience better than life.

Chat is ephemeral, quickly degrading into flames and flirting. Community requires identity, either persistent user names or self-adminisered profiles.

A good site is both learnable and intutitve.

"The human brain is the most powerful rendering engine on the planet."

--Jakob Nielsen

Study of trust in communities

Jakob Nielsen

Nathan Shedroff

Design gurus Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman debuted their Siskel and Ebert routine.

Why is the web so bad? Unclued bosses.

The Wall Street Journal is not a bad model for a web site. Short articles. Easy to find things. What's above the fold is important (without scrolling!) Inverted pyramid style (conclusion first, then details.) Hyperlinked to stories inside. No banner ads. No graphics.

We've got to dump the upgrade-driven software model of doing business. The tech stuff must meld into the woodwork. The ideal net is invisible. XML will be the real winner here.

Disney and the web: kontrol.

UNext (the university consortium of which Don was just selected president) not into repurposing of bad media. Don't automate the professor and the textbook. One-hour lectures are not the way to learn. Replace them with joint problem-solving sessions.

Nielsen: Is Bill Gates evil? Actually, Microsoft listens to the customer too much. They should listen to what people say they want but they shouldn't try to do it all. Bill, please give 'em what they need, not what they say.

Dan Bricklin invented the spreadsheet. Now he's helping organize business documents for easy reading. Applying his methods would save millions of hours of corporate befuddlement. I'll let Dan tell the story.

"Writing everyday documents that are destined to be read on-screen and not printed out means different words and organization than the same ideas written to be printed out on paper. You can't take what you wrote for paper, paste it into an HTML editor, mark it up with a few tags and call it an on-screen document. You need to write specifically for the screen if you want to take best advantage of the medium. Early television was a camera pointed at a radio announcer reading the same news as on radio. We don't do that anymore. Early web was taking word processing and putting it up as a long scrolling page. We won't be doing that in the future, either.

The MBA Who Mistook His Business Plan for a Web Site

Good Documents -- How to Write for the Intranet

Dan Bricklin

Trellix

"You want web documents to be sticky. With business documents, you want to be able to find things fast."

--Dan Bricklin

Marc Rettig

elab

In Context