I remember when my Windows 95, 286 desktop clunker, with external modem that screeched that awful sound, was in my kitchen. With the thrill of dial-up and my Pegasus email client, I would send an email to one of the list-serv’s I belonged to, go make spagetti and a salad and return to see if anyone answered, from somewhere in the world.

Things chugged a teeny bit faster when I upgraded that machine to a 386 and then a 486 and then Eric (who was my geek friend in those days and is now my husband) basically got tired of ripping out its guts and talked me into a new PC. That was around 1997 then, and I’d gotten a Packard Bell that had its modem hidden somewhere, and a zip drive so I could take work back and forth between my job and home. If cable and DSL had been invented then, I didn’t know about it. I was still racing along at some slow baud rate, and having the time of my life!

By year 2000, when I started working for a big-shot Internet company, and was converted to Dell, high speed, IM’ing and Outlook for work, Eudora for home, I was addicted to email as my primary communication with all humans except for my kids. And that’s only because they were too young to type yet.

Working in IT in a male dominated world where a dead plant hanging from a cubicle was a thing of beauty, I learned that nobody dared get up out of a chair to talk to their neighbor if they needed to. With IM and email, why walk? Why stand up at all? Whenever the occasional female who wore a dress strode down an aisle (not me. I stopped wearing dresses in 1983), there would be this abrubt klackity klack as their nimble fingers IM’d god knows what about the poor woman to one another.

I learned that email is not the best way to deliver information or inform “higher ups” of bad news, such as a software defect, unless you are formal, polite, apologetic, are willing to skip lunch for a month to work overtime to make them look better and make absolutely no spelling errors.

I learned, the hard way, never to email anything that you don’t expect the whole world to see. Because they will. Or your boss will.

Now that I work from a home office, I go through one wireless keyboard a year on my desktop and have many ergonomic products and wrist rests, because I learned the hard way what happens when I don’t protect my wrists.

I do a tremendous amount of correspondence from email, PM’s, blogs and forum posts. I’m sure a lot of you do too.

Have you ever noticed that you no longer know how to talk to people?

We noticed (we being husband, kids and me, when I wasn’t in denial), that my working alone from home was changing me. I began to withdraw. I used to get cabin fever, and then flipped to the opposite, where they couldn’t get me to leave the house. (So 2 summers ago Eric bought a used motorhome as incentive to go camping!)

I lost confidence in myself. I started to stutter if out in public. All kinds of odd things were happening, and we couldn’t blame it on my thyroid (which no longer functions), and makes people act wierd.

I had unlearned social skills because I wasn’t using them anymore!

Getting a cell phone has helped. I got involved in local community things related to my kids’ and their stuff. I got rid of IM. I got a dog because the 3 cats aren’t talkative and he’s an insane Golden Retriever with too many squeaky toys.

And yet it seems like now that I’m trying to move away from an email-heavy lifestyle, my ex-husband has discovered it, after years of avoiding computers. He used to call me about the kids. Now, I get emails. Some coaches for sports don’t communicate with parents by phone at all. It’s only by email. Borders doesn’t send me coupons in the mail. They email them to me. Amazon emails me all the time. In fact, everytime I purchase something, I’m bound to get an email from that company later.

All of this brings me to something my husband emailed me from work today. It’s an article called *!#@ The E-Mail. Can We Talk?

Face-to-face meetings can trump technology. Some companies call for “no e-mail Fridays”

” Scott A. Dockter knew things were bad when he found himself e-mailing his assistant seated a few feet away.”

Is this you, too?

Have you changed, since computers and email became a way of life?

A few days ago my Winter issue of the Search Marketing Standard arrived in the mail. So did my usability magazine, a web design magazine and Newsweek. My mailbox so totally gives me away.

This issue is juicy. The articles aren’t basic search engine marketing or basic search engine material. The writers were a personal thrill, not experienced in any other publication I receive. I flipped through it and drove my husband, Eric, crazy, with remarks like, “Oh! There’s Rand!” and “I know that guy,” and “I thought he was younger!” (I won’t tell you which author I said that about.)

It’s an “A-List” bonanza for sure. One peek at the publisher’s information and the list of contributors tells the story. Rand Fishkin. Jaimie Sirovich. Eric Ward. Chris Boggs. Garrett French. Nacho Hernadez. And many more. Fortunately there is at least one woman! Chrysi Philalithes, whom I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more from in the years to come, wrote the exceptional “Reach Users on the Go: New Opportunties in Mobile Marketing”.

I learned about marketing to the Hispanic market from Nacho, in his very well written piece called “Searching for the US Hispanic Market”. Garrett does a nice job explaining social search, in terms that don’t sound overly technical, thank goodness.

Every issue has at least one instructional article with example code. Jaimie wrote this one, called “How to Avoid Duplicate Content”. Rand does what he’s fond of doing, and that’s sharing what he’s learned about business management. One of this more popular blog posts was about SEOMoz’s hiring process. His article, “How to Build an Exceptional SEO Staff” goes beyond that theme in broader scope and detail.

The interview is of Richard Rosen, VP of Business Development of Jambo. There is an article on pay-per-click. Eric Ward’s “My SEO Firm Got Me Banned! Now What?” is an informative and fun read.

This magazine continues to be a real joy to read. The advertisements have a Web 2.0 look to them, with bright colors and large fonts. It’s funny to scan the ads and say to myself, “Oh, there’s Bob Mutch! I know him!” or “Hey, Andy Beal has an ad in there. Cool!”

Maybe they should change the name of the magazine to “SEO Fans and Fanatics” instead.

I always liked that line, “If you want to capture someone’s attention…whisper.” It makes you stop and think for a minute. Another line I swore was my personal tagline in my dating years was, “Once bitten, twice shy.” Both of these can be applied to user centered web design.

Kathy Sierra captured my attention with her Cognitive Seduction and the “peekaboo” law. She has fun reminding us that a little bit of something can be major hit with our brain. If you got the idea that web site visitors don’t want to think, well, it’s more like they don’t want to work very hard. When you drop popcorn in their path, create mystery and intrigue, flirt, and purposely leave out something that demands further investigation or you’ll die, then you’ve found a key persuasive technique.

Kathy refers to it as the “peekaboo”.

She writes,

“In my workshops and talks, I show a series of photos where things are not fully resolved… a face hidden behind a hand, a (potentially naked) woman staring intently at an object you can’t quite see, the lower half of a young man suspended in air next to a tree, where you can’t see the ground OR anything above his waist (is he hanging from the tree? on a trampoline? in the midst of an alien abduction?) To the brain, these “Hmmm… what’s the story here?” images are virtually irresistible. The brain needs to figure it out, and enjoys the experience.

I like to look for these “peekaboo” thingy’s when I do usability audits, especially in travel and hotel sites. It’s not easy to incorporate “peekaboo”. One site of Yurts and Teepees had me dreaming for weeks because some of their pictures offered small glimpses inside them. Just enough. Not the whole inside. But enough to imagine myself there…

Anyway.

Once you engage your website visitor and have them eating out of your hand, you can just as easily lose them if they see any sign that you, or your business, service or product are dishonest or not credible. All kinds of things can set someone off and you were so close. You had that click!

Human Factors International’s November issue of its UI Design newsletter has a piece called Can one build a Web site or application that engenders trust?

They define trust as it pertains to page and application design. In simple terms, trust is when we are confident that we will achieve our goal(s). It is also the belief that we will be treated with respect and not “exploited.”

You may think this is not worth considering as a business requirement for your website or application. However, consider what’s happening outside the Internet (in the USA anyway.) We are asked for our zip code or phone number when we check out from a store. This is often an unwelcome surprise. There is a gas station in my area that will not let you put gas into your car until you enter your zip code into the gas pump first.

These requirements breed mistrust and put us in situations we dislike. Sometimes if you say “no” to giving your personal information, a sales clerk acts offended. I think there should be a warning for any place of business that asks or demands your personal information before accepting or completing a transaction.

The same goes for the Internet. It’s highly invasive and filled with trickery. Finding websites you trust doing business with is important. Designing for trust is vital.
The HFI article includes a checklist of items that help generate trust. You may want to review it to see how your web property is doing.

Related discussion: A Slight Challenge To “Don’t Make Me Think”

For fun and because some of the questions and informative posts coming into Cre8asiteforums lately are interesting, I decided to share some of them.

(Special note to the latest viagra spammer. Thanks for the laughs and being so obviously useless.)

Okay, here we go.

If you handcode CSS, why bother with Dreamweaver (or any WYSIWYG) app?

Price perceptions - shocks in store? Ammon writes,

…a new study highlighted by Wharton, has shown that most people automatically assume that they are being gouged on prices any time they shop.

Myspace Really Troubles Me, Share your thoughts with me on this? This is a really thoughtful series of posts.

Grievous Situation – I’m Getting Framed As A Spammer Take notes.

Designing For Dyslexics This is a very valuable thread that contains personal experiences and instruction.

Confirmation: It Takes A Small Effort, But I’m coming back If you are ecommerce or customer service inclined, this is a nice discussion with ideas and personal experiences.

10 Things You Need To Do When It Comes To Seo? If you don’t know, come to a forums and hope they teach you well.

Localized Search Strategies Ongoing discussion with priceless input.

Elsewhere in Internet-land, Ammon Johns posted a nice piece for SEOMoz called The New Model SEO Customer.

But far more notable than this is that he has been a long-term member at some top SEO forums, and is reading the same blogs and reference material as many of the SEO practitioners I know.

Some food for thought there, eh?

You read and hear it all the time. Somebody tells you to do something a certain way because it’s the only correct way. So, you do it, only to learn later that your original way was fine or an even better approach. You may grow tired of being lectured to. You may not know whom to trust.

I thought Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog post called Bad Advice That Sounds Good was thought provoking. Last I checked, it had garnered 40 comments. He struck a nerve. He wrote things like, “People talk in terms of ideals because they buy into white lies that put themselves or others at the top of social networks”, and “Professionals want to make their profession seem more complex than it is…”, and “Many people with authority only consider their worldview.”

Then he goes on to list certain advice statements that he dislikes. Each of them is common. Like “Create your website for users, not for search engines.” Aaron and others have quite a list of advice peeves. One is the never ending battle over fixed or fluid width layouts.

What has always not sat well with me, in user centered design circles as well as search engine marketing, are those black or white, this way or no way kind of rules. I suppose that people want to be told what to do and how to do it. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all world. How can anyone hope to design as if it is? I prefer to look for guidelines and a common ground first. Then, I can adapt to business requirements.

Requirements Based. Not Ego Based, Not Search Engine Based, Not User Based

I can usually tell when a website was designed for engines. It makes no sense to people. Then, there are web pages that make no sense to search engines or screen readers, but are visually appealing to target groups who not only can see, but thrive on the visual experience. We often hear the mantra, “Avoid FLASH because search engines can’t handle it.”

Search engines aren’t always the target market. What is the first priority for the website? Use that as the guide. There are ways to market websites that use FLASH and images. Rather than being afraid, or creating limits based on rumors, I like to investigate options.

I cringe at the “create for users not search engines” too. By all means, design for people. But, let’s figure out whom you are targeting and deliver what will work for them. Chances are good that what works for people also works for search engines, especially with accessibility.

Design considerations become more of a challenge on global sites that must not offend different cultures. When faced with this, more time is spent studying accepted user habits and acceptance criteria by different groups. For example, if the date is displayed in a certain way, will it infuriate 80% of your readers? Are there solutions designers can try that meet the needs for different groups of people, while still being optimized for search engines?

Sure, there are. The white lie that has never been true is “web design is easy.” This is true only for those who aren’t experienced. If you hear someone say it, and offer to do it for $100, run. Chances are good that designer has never heard of requirements based design.

I was asked today by someone, during a conference call, if I critique site design. I said no. I don’t care if a site designer chooses black and has animation in 5 places on a homepage. If this meets their business requirements, it’s fine. It it satisfies the demands and needs of the target market, fine. If it converts and ranks well, fine. I am not a judge and jury.

I do, however, present the business cases for web standards. I will point out things they may not have considered, like mobile device users, poor vision, those who can’t use a mouse, and a whole host of other common issues that are often ignored. You may be satisfied with the sales and traffic you have, but what if I told you that if you implemented a few new things, sales and traffic would soar? You might even find you have interested a new target market because you no longer exclude them.

Advice that limits your design or pigeon holes you into doing something without offering data and sound reasons for doing it are what you want to avoid. Always keep in mind your priorities and goals for your website and hold them firm as your protective totem. Techniques and practices that help you achieve those goals are the choices you want to make.

Not someone else’s rules for their sites.