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Showing posts from October, 2010

Are you making assumptions about how web-savvy your customers/users are? Two examples for consideration.

We were in Europcar the other day to rent a car and a gentleman who was probably in his late 40’s was being explained the options of how to pay for road tolls.  The first option mentioned was that he could simply go to the tolls website to pay.  He threw his hands in the air and expressed that he knows nothing about websites.  The option presented next was thankfully a lot more palatable, paying via entering credit card information over the phone. Just over a year ago I was involved in putting a site together for a closed group of invitees and we thought it was reasonably intuitive to use.  What we didn’t consider though was that some of our invitees were not used to signing up to websites and consequently they had never had to think about what their username would be or what picture they would use for an avatar (not to mention the process for how to get it onto their computer and then onto the website).  For a subsequent event, we took this onboard and generated usernames and passwo

Is Social Media reducing the likelihood of serendipitously meeting people you know when travelling?

I was pondering earlier today while over 2000km from home whether there is less likelihood now of serendipitously meeting people when travelling, since friends and family now have a greater awareness through social media and location-based sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tripit, Foursquare…) of where you are and where you are going (and vice versa). About two hours after Jane & I had this discussion, whilst sitting down for lunch, a work colleague that sits a few desks away from me wandered past and said hi; she was in the area for a conference and both of us had no idea that the other would be in the area. So rest assured, there are still lots of opportunities to randomly run into people while travelling.  I wander who I’ll see next.