But this was cool.

Members only link - to the celebration of my 10,000 post.

I was thinking that these posts are just since Cre8asiteforums came about in its present form in 2002. From 1998 to then, I was posting in the original version of it, as well as Webmasterworld and MarketPositionGold’s forum.

And, if you count blog comments, Sphinn comments, articles, columns, live blogging…it can boggle the mind.

Thanks to Risa Borsykowsky for the cover design. Kim Krause Berg on the cover of Time?

Why not?

A commercial in the USA may be aimed at the woman inside the woman. A woman with magic, spark and a no regrets sense of who she is and where she’s going. For starters, in the TV spot, she’s in the driver’s seat.

I can’t remember the make or model of the automobile. I don’t care who the woman is behind the wheel. What I remember and giggle to myself about is that she asks if your car turns you on.

Well, hell yes.

Thanks for noticing!

I have a friend whose car was in my driveway recently. He left at night and my kids and I cooed at how the interior dashboard lit up in blue light. I wanted to make out by that dashboard light. So there.

Marketing to women is usually off the mark. For sassy women like me, however, when you get past how I’m supposed to be according to what tradition and society says I should be, you’ve probably just sold me your product.

Why are men the only creatures who need to be turned on? Who made that rule?

Light and Sound

There’s another user experience rule I’ve discovered I love to debunk. It has to do with sound.

Still experimenting with my new MySpace account, (where I have one friend, who at this point likely thinks I’m completely nuts), I uploaded another new Moby song. I changed my profile picture to remove the bare breasted woman who wasn’t me, because…well. Just because.

(For a moment I thought of putting a photo of chicken breasts there. I still may do that.)

Anyway. I’ve been writing in the blog there. To nobody really, although one man whom I don’t know thinks I’m really far out and “interesting”. I love how I can use images and sound to express myself in MySpace.

I can’t do that here. Usability Law states, “No piped in music.” Guess what? There is, indeed, a place for it. It doesn’t belong on a corporate web site but it can certainly be used in situations with friends where you’re networking and hanging out.

When I want to express light and sound here, I need to find words to turn you on with.

Incentive and Play

When you design your web site, have you put in light and sound? Have you created a mood? Is there something you can say that communicates in an instant why your service is the best? Did you remember to create a need?

Can you change? Yes. When Emoms At Home changed its brand to Sparkplugging, I’m sure there was great agony in choosing the right time, right design and right words to reflect the reasons for the change and not lose anyone in the process.

The new name turns me on. It’s vibrant. It describes exactly what goes into my bloodstream when I’m working on the web or helping clients with their web sites. The new design is surprisingly easy to navigate and more importantly, understand. I LOVE the extra content between the global navigation link labels that describe what’s inside each hub, without the need to click or negotiate a clumsy drop down menu.

Kudos to these folks for providing incentive for me to return, bookmark and write about you. All you did was turn me on by making me feel good and welcome once I arrived.

We need to feel wanted. We need to feel welcomed. We need to feel we’re getting the best bargain. We need to know companies care about our web site experience. We need to be turned on, inspired, catered to, informed, responded to in a timely manner, guided and nurtured.

Is thinking outside the box risky? Yes. Do you like to be entertained while shopping? Well, let’s see. I showed Hema to my daughter and her boyfriend. A minute into watching the homepage explode into something I’ve never seen done before, she asks, “What’s the point?”

Would you sit through while the center content FLASH loads and then watch how the products bang into each other and perform clever tricks? If after I was entertained, I was offered great prices, fast delivery and excellent customer service, I might. I think most people will be annoyed.

Social Disconnect. Yes, I Keep Harping on This.

Many of us seek one another because our butts are glued to our computers.

I’m bored with Twitter. Reading disjointed conversations by other people who don’t know or don’t care that I’m there isn’t doing it for me. I don’t like that feeling of being on the sidelines. Web sites often leave out visitors too. One of the very first words I look for on an e-commerce page is “Customer service”. You may be surprised to know it’s hardly ever there or buried far, far down in the footer as an afterthought.

Customers are not afterthoughts. They don’t want to be treated like one. The HEMA site, while breaking rules for sound and visual, makes me feel like they love what they do, are having fun doing it and want to include me (someone they may never meet) in their fun.

I liked that feeling.

So. I wonder. How come I feel so lonely, that after being in Twitter and Facebook and even owning Cre8asiteforums, that I’ve resorted to writing to nobody in MySpace?

Is it because I want to be un-edited, raw, bold, without barriers and don’t want anyone judging me?

Is it because car’s turn me on?

Or is it that the Internet was an experiment in intimacy with people that failed?

Could it be, that in the end, we need to hold hands and make eye contact with one another?

As I return to a less intense work load than in weeks past, I thought I’d relax with you and share some recent usability blog posts that caught my eye, but I haven’t had time to write or comment on them.

Four Bad Designs. Jakob Nielsen picks four examples of designs that missed their mark. Each example is right-on, but my favorite is the first one. Without incentive, there’s no reason to care about the call to action.

Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results. There are limits. More information and comments by SEO’s can be found at Sphinn.

Gord gets into brain with Human Hardware: Men And Women.

Website Redesign: Improving Website Usability and SEO. Having come away from giving a class on usability to SEO’s, I was reminded of just how important and timely this topic is.

Shari Thurow wrote a great article called What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability. It’s a 2-part article. Both include quotes from usability professionals.

Colleen Jones never fails to deliver inspiration. Read her Winning Content Persuades, Not Manipulates

What did I miss, that you liked?

One of my favorite moments is when my kids take over the kitchen. Last night, my 18 year old daughter and her boyfriend decided to make chocolate covered strawberries after we’d made a big dinner for everyone. They’d never done it before.

They went out to the store and bought chocolate chips and big, fat strawberries.

Back at the house, they dumped the chips into a pan and melted them. However, it didn’t have right consistency. It was too thick. So they put in some milk and kept stirring. It still wasn’t right. I didn’t do or say anything. It was fun to watch them figure things out. Finally, after a bit of despair, my daughter decided to throw out the melted chocolate and start over.

That’s when I leapt up in defense and took the pan from her as she was putting water into it. Boyfriend and I were determined to eat that chocolate and couldn’t believe she’d dream of throwing it out.

I poured out the water and her boyfriend and I managed to save the chocolate, which now, with the little bit of water in it, finally melted into a nice, smooth consistency.

They dipped in the strawberries. They dipped in bananas. They rolled trail mix around in it. When they were done, they marveled that some stores charge $3.00 for one chocolate covered strawberry and here they had made an entire pile of chocolate covered fruit and nuts for $4.00.

What’s more important, however, is that they created their own experience and learned from it.

MySpace for My Space

I’ve tried Facebook and Twitter because my friends were there and convinced me to try them out. For the past two weeks I’ve been playing around with a MySpace account I made for myself. I wanted to see what it was like.

I had also needed a place where I didn’t have to be “Kim the Usability Consultant” or “Kim from Cre8pc” or any other versions of me. I wanted a place where I could let down my shields and barriers. Where I’m purely, 100%, no holes barred me. I have one friend in MySpace.

He’s been teaching me about it. His group of friends thrive there. The 20’s and 30’s crowd are so inventive, clever, raw and bold. Nearly every female is showing her breasts. The males aren’t nearly so obsessed with their own bodies. They seem to go for mood or shock value. Some of the women are high maintenance and can’t decide who they are or what they want to show on any given day. Their picture changes every day and if you go to their profile, there are 300 more pictures of them, just in case you want to see her from every possible, conceivable angle.

It’s taken me the entire two weeks to figure out how to navigate MySpace. It took me two days to figure out I had a new message. Changing my profile was horrendous because I never remembered where things were. The user interface explodes with ads and videos. And most of the images belong to a generation I don’t belong to. They’re finding themselves.

I’m not lost. I belong in a different place.

The one element I do like is the ability to put up a song. This is something Facebook doesn’t have. While typically, usability folks think adding sound is akin to eating gravel, I think with MySpace it helps to tell the story of the person whose page you’re on. I happen to love “Alice”, one of Moby’s new songs and added it to my page. There are controls to turn it off if you want to. I like listening to the music selections put up by people however. It helps me understand a little something more about them.

As much as I might like the energy and vitality at MySpace, I also feel like I’m on the outside looking in. It’s definitely a great place for single people. I can see how it can be useful to groups of friends who like to be in constant touch with each other. But the user interface is like my daughter’s bedroom.

Complete and total chaos.

Sometimes it’s fun to try on a web site first to see if you like it. It helps you figure out what you like. It opens you up to what other people like you might gravitate towards. I find that when I explore like this, I’m more open minded about usability because I see different user interfaces and who responds to what.

And if I want to be a bare breasted free spirited woman in one of those sites, all the better.

My job could never be called “boring”.

I got a message from Facebook today. Someone indicated I am “hot” in one of those “Compare” applications. I accepted this word graciously offered to me and clung to it like a cat pouncing a mouse.

Facebook has been interesting to explore. MySpace has a cluttered, chaotic user interface that confuses the hell out of me. Facebook is organized and loaded with more ways to connect with and keep track of friends. Not a day goes by where someone is stuck in a bus or elevator, having a terrible day, promoting a blog post, breaking up, or matching me in my taste for food, sex, life, movies, books, and what I’d do if I could start all over again in life.

If you’re sensitive, not being voted as “hot”, “most desirable”, “pretty”, “handsome”, “most want to date” or “best hair” can ruin your week. Facebook can boost your ego and kick it down. Since I’ve never been voted “hot” before, I’ve had some days where this really ticked me off. Am I too old? Am I not pretty enough? Am I fat?

And then there’s Twitter. I gave it a shot. I don’t think I’m cut out for it. You see, when I “talk” to somebody by name, and they don’t respond to me, I wonder what I did to deserve being ignored. Not everyone is on Twitter when you are. Chances are, I didn’t do anything to be snubbed, but communication online may not be what human beings were designed to do.

Not me, anyway.

I’m one of those energy and vibration persons. For me, I get more information by what’s not spoken. I do the soul-to-soul, look into a person’s eyes kind of contact. For me, the Internet has always been a constant communication lesson. It’s also an experiment in how or if I will adapt.

Maybe it’s younger people raised on the Internet who need less human touch to understand another person?

I’m old school, from the days of hippies and wild, vibrant colors. I hug. I touch. I ask tons of questions of someone who fascinates me. When I really like someone, it’s because I admire something about them and want to learn whatever they’re willing to teach me. This may be why I’ve kept Cre8asiteforums going for so long (it debuted in 1998 in an earlier form). I can’t physically sit with all the people I want to know but I appreciate whatever they’re willing to type and share.

In a forum, people develop a sense of community. They bond. In Facebook and Twitter, I don’t sense this same feeling. In Facebook, for example, there is a Top Friends application. If someone claims you are a “top friend” and you don’t even know them, what do you do? With Twitter, there are “followers” and those you “follow”. You don’t have to follow those who follow you, but if you don’t, doesn’t that feel rude?

And then there’s times when you had a Facebook or Twitter friend, and they suddenly dump you. How do people today define “Friend”?

For me, a friend is someone who talks to me and doesn’t make me guess what the hell is going on. In real life, friends can sit with you. You can look at them. See their face. Study their vibe. You can tell when something’s up. Not online. It just was never intended to work that way.

Sometimes I think I’m not cut out for the Internet. It’s far too easy to be misunderstood when the thing that separates you from another person is a keyboard. Even a user interface can put roadblocks in your way. Twitter doesn’t allow emoticons to help express the meaning behind words, for example.

I can tell that I surprise some people when they meet me for the first time. I can be professional. I can be corny. I’ve noticed that some people will talk to me in person but won’t respond to me online. Mike Grehan recently wrote,

I remember arriving and bumping into the wonderfully warm and huggy Kim Krause (yes, the very same Kim Krause spotted on stage singing in a New York nightclub last week!).

It’s easy to be “warm and huggy” when I’m in a situaiton where I know that Kim won’t freak out anyone. I still make the mistake of touching a knee and scaring the crap out of the person because they’re not used to being touched. It’s not like I just jumped into their lap or anything. It’s a knee and I was likely laughing my head off at the same time, not drooling or begging for a wild night in bed.

Which brings me full circle back to Facebook and not being “hot” enough. How would anyone know if I am or not?

With social networking web sites, we can put up anything we want to. We can present any persona we want to. I like to mix my professional identity with the rest of me because in my work, much of me leaks in anyway. I really do care about the web sites I work on. I really do care about my clients and helping them. I really do appreciate their trust and faith in me. I’m loyal to my return clients and give them discounts. I really do refer my partners to companies seeking good help.

Clients don’t want me to be “hot” and I understand that being hot won’t bring me in new business. User generated content and feedback like games, comments, testimonials, and remarks about you are validating, however. Some days you just want to know you’re more than words on a page.

I often wonder about the “social” web and what we’re trying to create with it. I may never be satisfied with the Internet user experience.

It has yet to be able to give me a real live hug.