Web personality and usability: creating and keeping it

Web personality: creating and keeping one

How often do you see a web site and instinctively like it? It gives you a nice feel!

This page will be devoted to investigating what concepts and elements go together to make a site feel comfortable, attractive, interesting and re-visitable. It is closely allied to Website usability, but not necessarily the same.

It's alternative title was "flowerpots in the window" - but Pooh and friends are also great "feel-good" people and that's a good start. It also has a background that doesn't match the rest of this site!

What are the elements of a website's personality?

The best overview (that is closest to my own views!) is contained in The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls &David Weinberger

They suggest a number of elements (I've used their headings, but the ideas are mine)

1. Find your voice and use it. This is the most important of all! The way you express yourself on your website, your language style (is it right for the message?), your use of the elements of web design. In real life the best interactions are conversations that both participants are understanding and enjoying, so create the same atmosphere in your website. Talk in language that is natural to you and that is readily understandable.

2. Tell the truth. Being genuine isn't hard, it's just cutting out the hype, most of the adjectives and tell people what they want to know. Oh yes, and keep the info up to date. Nothing will turn your readers off more than a site that has out of date information, or spelling mistakes, or a feeling of mustiness.

3. Don't panic. You don't have to have the most beautiful, or eye-catching web site in the world, or the most technically correct (Heck, this one is anything but!) or the biggest. It just has to say something to your readers in a way that will bring them back and make them feel better about life as a result of reading it. That's not so hard, is it?

4. Enjoy yourself. Play with your audience. Your website doesn't necessarily have to look like a thesis. Use headings that intrigue as well as inform. Use colour joyfully (so long as it doesn't run counter to your message or distract the eye too much)

5. Be brave. Say something that is uniquely you, that no-one else has said before. It's easy to fill a page up with links to other pages, but your reader has come to your site wanting to know about you, or your products or your views or the information that they can't get anywhere else. Give it to them!

6. Be curious. This is advice for a reader as well as for an author. If a reader is inspired to read more than the first screen then she or he will most likely feel that there is a relationship - and may come back.

7. Play more What makes you smile or say WOW! I'll come back here again!?

8. Dream always - about being better than last week, or last website, or last latte. That is, change the information on your site as often as you can.

9. Listen up. Do you have an email address or comments page on your website? if not why not?

10. Relax and Keep It Simple.

Some Exemplary sites
Scientific American: topics that just grab you! Jakob Nielsen's Website http://www.useit.com/Includes links to Nielsen's bi-weekly articles on Web usability and other news about designing usable websites. Jakob is highly regarded and even if you don't agree with everything he says, he'll always make you think! NASA: simply the best! entertaining, factually excellent, graphically fabulous. Some of the photography will take your breath away. Usable Web http://usableweb.com - This site, maintained by Keith Instone, is a wonderfully comprehensive "collection of links about human factors, user interface issues, and usable design specific to the World Wide Web." Balthazer: Dramatic & effective use of Flash, exceptional integration & flow, interesting use of audio . . . bridging the gap on traditional media.