Alertbox 7 - Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous.

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Summary:
AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.

While the latter case might seem innocent, irrelevant website "enhancements" diminish profits because they indicate a failure to focus on those simpler design issues that actually increase sales and leads.

The term WEB 2.0 is often used, but it doesn't have just one definition. Here are some examples of the most used definitions:

• "Rich" Internet Applications (RIA)
• Community features, social networks, and user-generated content
• Mashups (using other sites' services as a development platform)
• Advertising as the main or only business model

 

AJAX and "Rich" Internet UI: Too Much Complexity

When all users can do is click a link to get a new page, users know how to operate the UI. People are in control of their own user experience and thus focus on your content. Therefore, it will help keep the users in your web site, encreasing your chances of profit.

An to help with the idea above, take the most famous example of rich UI: AJAX, which lets designers update part of a page, rather than taking users to an entirely new page. Because less data download is required, these smaller updates are typically faster, decreasing response times.

 

Community and User-Generated Content: Too Few Users

Community features are particularly useful on intranets, and many of the Intranet Design Annual winners offer them. The reasons communities work better on intranets also explains why they're often less useful on the open Internet:

• A company's employees are an actual community with a crucial shared interest: succeeding in business.
• Employees are pre-vetted: they've been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to.
• Although some intranet communities — such as those around internal classified ads — are aimed at lightening up the workplace, most intranet communities are tightly focused on company projects. Discussions stay on topic rather than wandering all over the map.
• Intranet users are accountable for their postings and care about their reputation among colleagues and bosses. As a result, postings aim to be productive instead of destructive or flaming.
• Small groups of people who know each other are less susceptible to social loafing, so more users contribute to intranet community features. In contrast, Internet communities suffer from participation inequality, where most users never contribute and the most active 1% of people dominate the discussions.

 

Mashups: Co-Branded Confusion

One of the defining ideas of "Web as platform" is that it lets developers merge the features of different sites into a single service. If you're a business, doing this is dangerous for two reasons:

• Co-branding confuses users, who find it much easier to understand the simpler model of one site = one company. Users are confused when other companies sell on Amazon. Similarly, our studies of investor-relations sites found that individual investors were confused when a corporate site's IR area linked to a third-party site for quarterly reports and the like.
• Having part of your site effectively under another company's control means that you're at that company's mercy if they decide to change the terms of service. For example, the outside provider might decide to throw in advertisements from your competitors. Not material you want to promote to your hot prospects.

 

Advertising-Funded Business Models: Bubble 2.0

Sooner or later marketing managers will discover that Web advertising offers almost no ROI. Only two forms of Web ads actually work: search ads and classified ads (such as eBay and real estate listings). A third type of Internet advertising that might work are video ads, because video is a linear media form (in contrast to nonlinear website navigation). At this point, we don't have enough user research about Internet video to say for sure.

Saturday, March 1, 2008 10:43 PM