Old Houses and Portals

I live in an older home (1920s) in a historic neighborhood. It's not a particularly wealthy neighborhood. Most historic ones aren't. Money flees its breeding ground. But the neighborhood is comfortable and reasonably vibrant. I always wondered why I loved older homes, and finally one of my gurus, Stewart Brand, might have explained it in his book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. He says that older buildings exude what we call "charm" or "character" because they've been altered over time to suit both changing infrastructure needs (the arrival of central heating, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, electricity) and the changing life needs of its occupants (bigger kitchens, more light, more entertainment at home). They grow, morph, and gradually conform more closely to actual human life, like an old pair of jeans. New homes are raw despite their efforts to "design for life". Brand points out that buildings can't be designed up-front for our lifestyles, because no designer can get it right the first time. That's why a home needs so much time to find its proper shape.

What's the lesson for Web designers? Alas, probably not much, despite my most earnest desires to bring the analogy across. The missing element is time. Websites don't give you time. Portals were supposed to let users modify their views quickly, compressing the decades of home conformity into minutes online. Never worked. The vast majority of visitors never knew about customization or took the time to mess with it. Personalization works to an extent, but not completely. Web users are now used to their comfortable sites changing regularly, and although they may not approve, they rarely boycott on that basis.

That said, for years I've been fascinated with the idea of a personalization engine that would track Web user behavior and subtly shift the interface to suit. I've never bothered to fully flesh out the concept, but in general it would work much like Microsoft's failed personalization functionality in Office, the one that gave you chevrons instead of full menus. It was a good idea, but possibly the wrong place to use it. Office users are almost all repeat visitors. Website visitors aren't. Amazon does a good job with personalization, but I'd extend it from "you might also like this stuff" to actually shifting controls and navigational paths. A pipe dream, certainly, but given a huge pile of cash something I'd be interested in researching.

Reading TeaLeaf

Sorry to have been away so long. Complications of various kinds. But now I'm back, and with tea.

Have you seen TeaLeaf? It's a snazzy app that sits athwart your Web traffic, sniffing and recording every user's session. A bit disconcerting, that. But its benefits are undeniable. It stores thirty days (or more, at your discretion) of user transactions, at the user level. It aggregates them too. I've long been a proponent of continual usability checking. Our profession seems to put all its emphasis on initial design and testing, while utterly neglecting Web analytics and other red-flag functionality that can signal usability leaks. Traditional Web analytics is good, but it isn't always granular, meaning that its results are en masse, not at the level of the individual user. It's great for marketing departments, but not as good for usability concerns. TeaLeaf shows the actual user transactions - where people go, what they click, what choices they make, and whether their conversions are successful.

For example, you can lose users at any turn in the road, but especially during checkout. Many visitors drop off when money becomes an issue, and understandably so, since they had no intention of paying anyway; they're just here for the experience, or the knowledge. But others experience technical problems or usability pitfalls. TeaLeaf generates a report on who converted and who didn't, and then you can track out why the failures happened, following every user's trail.