July 2001 Archives
Monday, July 30, 2001
Sites with a Good Experience (or so sez Mark Hurst): For this final regular posting (see Good Experience's schedule changes), I thought I'd finally get around to answering a question that many people have asked me over the years: what are some sites that I think create a good experience? I recommend the sites below. Do try them out for their own sake, but also learn from them as examples of good user experience online.
(Note - None of these sites knew that I would be writing this piece. Except where noted, I have no connection to these sites.)
- Paymybills: For under ten dollars a month this company opens my bills, scans them onto a website, and lets me pay them with the click of a mouse. Meaning that I never have to touch a stamp, envelope, or checkbook to pay bills. Best of all, the site requires no plug-ins or Windows nonsense and overall has a very good design. Consumer banks, learn from this site!
- Mail2Web: A life-saver if you're stuck on a dialup modem and someone e-mails you a huge attachment. This site, for free, lets you delete selected e-mails from your e-mail queue - after which you can go back to your regular mail program and download all the other mail. Did I mention that it's free?
- Yahoo: Unlike any other site on the Web, Yahoo consistently creates good experiences on very different areas of its site. From news to mail to games, all the services are quick and easy to learn and use. Here are my four favorites:
- Yahoo Mail: Lets you have a Yahoo address and check your dialup account's mail - for free. I paid to upgrade my account to get extra server space; my Yahoo Mail account now acts as a virtual hard drive wherever I go.
- Yahoo Finance: The single best portfolio tracker I've ever seen. Set up a portfolio and you'll see - the interface makes it easy to track some very complex data.
- Yahoo News Alerts: Free headlines in a readable format in my inbox once a day. A very quick and easy way to keep up with the major news.
- Yahoo Games: Except for the occasional full-page popup ad, this is simply the best online experience for common board and card games. Excellent all-around.
Note that I didn't include Yahoo's search functionality in the list. There's hardly a reason to use Yahoo search at all, with Google in the world...
- Google: The best search engine. Or rather, the only search engine worth my time. Fast response, ads are all in text (so that they seem more relevant while wasting no download time - better for everyone), and the search results are great. This is an A+ of a user experience.
- Craigslist: A great, fast, free, easy, wonderful site for listings of all kinds - jobs, housing, whatever. Craigslist reminds me why I love the Internet.
- Site59: A recent client of Creative Good who made all of our recommended improvements (and had them implemented by the very capable marcenglishdesign.com). In my helplessly biased opinion, Site59 is a delight to use - clear and easy at each step. (Also, if you live in a major U.S. city, the site gives pretty good deals on last-minute weekend travel. Check it.)
- Half.com: Sort of like eBay (its parent company) except with a much easier interface - one of the best of any major e-commerce site - and no hassling with trying to win an auction. Half.com sellers set the (low) price; you decide whether to buy.
- BayArea's Personalized Comics: I get Foxtrot, Monty (nee Robot Man), and others on a personalized comics page. Well worth the time to set up an account. Free.
- Memepool: An irreverent collection of links to the ideas and sites du jour among Web geeks. Not for the easily offended, but it's very well produced.
- Amazon: Although it (perhaps necessarily) is beginning to look like an AOL-style adfest, Amazon still sets the standard for the best practices of consumer e-commerce. Search, merchandising, and checkout are all well done here.
Schedule Changes: This is likely to be the last Good Experience post for awhile. Since sending my first newsletter to a few hundred people in September 1998, I have published Good Experience continuously - much of the time daily, on goodexperience.com - for a growing community of subscribers that today numbers over 44,000.
Good Experience now moves to an irregular publishing schedule. I will continue to send newsletters as there are news items or announcements to make, but they will be less frequent than past newsletters.
I make this change because I am devoting my writing time to a new research project involving the "bit literacy" concept that I have written about in Good Experience and in Richard Saul Wurman's recent book Information Anxiety 2. This will probably involve some travel - within the U.S. and internationally - to see how bits are affecting people's lives around the world (i.e. not just in New York, as much as we New Yorkers may consider Manhattan to be the center of the universe).
So don't worry - I'll still be in touch, just not quite as frequently.
In the meantime, here's how you can keep in touch:
- If your organization is especially good (or bad) in managing its digital information, or engaging/creating with bits in some way, feel free to get in contact (mark@creativegood.com). Also indicate if you'd be particularly interested for me to visit your organization during my travels.
- If your organization needs help with customer experience, or any element in your customer-facing Internet strategy, the Creative Good team and I are still available for our regular consulting. Our projects (for Gateway, Travelocity, Pfizer, M&M/Mars, Macy's, MGM, and others) have generated significant improvements to clients' key metrics. Contact CEO Phil Terry (pterry@creativegood.com) for more information.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2001
For free: Not everyone is charging for "premium services" these days. A pointer from refdesk.com took me to physicsforfree.com, which contains copyright-free PDF files for two full-sized physics textbooks. Sharing knowledge for free: this is the Web at its best.
That's not to say that charging for premium services is wrong; to the contrary, I understand the economic realities of running a Web business in today's environment. If a good site needs to charge to stay afloat, then by all means charge. But getting knowledge online for free is even better and is a natural (if rarely seen) benefit of Web technology.
The Web at its worst, I'd say, is the unbridled greed that killed the creative impulse in the industry. Dave Winer points us to this San Jose Mercury article:
Silicon Valley's highest-profile venture capitalist, John Doerr, publicly apologized Sunday for his famous statement that characterized the Internet as 'the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.'
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Tuesday, July 17, 2001
Opt-out Update: The FTC website has a tip for removing yourself from direct marketing lists:
You can contact the credit bureaus to remove your name and address from major credit bureau lists for unsolicited credit and insurance offers for two years. If you complete and return an "opt-out" form, provided on request from the credit bureau, you will be off these lists permanently. A phone call or mailing to any one of the three nationwide credit bureaus will get you off the lists.
To "opt-out" of credit card and insurance lists:
1-888-5-OPTOUT (1-888-567-8688) for all three credit bureaus.
Find the original page here. (Thanks to Christine for the pointer.)
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Thursday, July 12, 2001
Back: I made it back from West Africa! Once I get back on the right time zone and get organized, you'll hear more from me. -m
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Copyright 1999-2002, Mark Hurst.
