web behaviour

by: Matt Rhodes

I often get asked to explain why SecondLife (SL) is more than just a geek and sex fest. Millions of people have visited this virtual world only to give up and abandon their avatar on day one (over 10 million according to Wikipedia). I don’t blame them. SecondLife isn’t ready for the mainstream. And nor is it SecondLife per-se that’s important.

by: Mark Rogers

A client, reviewing some of the sentiment scores on the net approval work we have been doing for them recently asked: “why are these people so negative? We don’t get these scores from our off-line net promoters work.”

The client was identifying a pattern we see quite regularly. Online commentary is more negative than off-line. Why? There is no systematic answer to this question, but if you were to attempt an answer you would divide it into three sections:

by: Mark Rogers

A very good pull-together on how to respond to negative blogs from the folks at Multi-Channel Merchant. It suggests that a good initial response is to monitor what is being said, and recommends a thoughtful approach to response. Here are some excellent, clear rules on how to blog, courtesy of Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts:

by: Hemant Karandikar

Ordinary people like us think that designers are a crazy lot and that designs happen somehow. Designers might think that users lack aesthetic sensibilities and need to be educated.

Amidst this great divide here comes a paper by Hofstede on implications of culture on web user interface design. As the web spreads more and more in a multi-cultural world such articles bring fresh perspectives for designers. Read on…