There is an ongoing and tedious debate at the pedantic end of the usability engineering community about how many ‘titles’ to include in a DDL listing. Three? Mr Mrs Ms? Or maybe we should add Dr? Maybe Professor? (etc. ad infinitum…)

Me, well I’m less bothered about this minutiae of detail, I think a decently inclusive short list will probably be good enough, and I’d rather concentrate on the bigger aspects of design - models and ideas thinking - rather than these details which frankly will never be perfected. So I’d leave it to someone else.

But sometimes, some bloody idiot will make a wholehearty mess by listing every title in the book, including HRH! In this case, it is Bupa International who take the booby prize with 57 (count them!) varieties of title. And they spelt Commodore wrong!

So, HRH Queen Elizabeth , would you like your heath insurance to cover all your family, or just your husband?

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It seems that word about the Flying Spaghetti Monster is out. As one of many theories of ‘Intelligent Design’, its prophet, one Bobby Henderson, has demanded that it be taught alongside other rival theories of Intelligent Design, like the one that says that the world was designed by God.

Bobby wrote about his religion and his demand in an open letter to the Kansas State Board of education. In response, the board has reconsidered its attitude to Intelligent Design. We can only hope now that more of the 10 million followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster will come out of their closets wearing the full pirate regalia!

Followers of pastafarianism rejoice! RAmen!

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It seems that “my computer isn’t quite ready for the Panlogic site”. I suspect that is because I am using the Firefox browser, now used by up to 20% of the online population.

Perhaps a more realistic, conservative estimate might put the number at 8-10%, but this is still a lot of people, savvy people, now using Firefox. Even the BBC are telling us about this, and naming names, so it must be true!

So, oops, Panlogic, but I beg to differ. Perhaps its not me, but you, Panlogic, that “isn’t quite ready for internet population 2005″. Wise up, Panlogic! Intelligent marketing … really, truly?

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Finally, I agree with Jakob Nielsen about Amazon and E-Commerce Design. At last. It has been a very long time since we last agreed. Way back in the mid 90’s I was a great fan. I enjoyed his Usability Engineering and his ‘guerrilla’ approaches. He was a real pioneer back then, a tech made good. But I have found his later work to be turgid and repetitive, with no real new insights. In Usability as Behaviourism? I have described his approach as reminiscent of behaviorism, treating users as black boxes with no considered emotions or cognitions, just like rats in a maze.

But, Mr J, I’m with you on this one. For too long we have held up Amazon as the gold standard for web retail. And now its backlash time! Read the Jakob’s post for the full story, but I paraphrase by saying: cluttered with content and links, marred by featuritis, over-exposed with toys, music, video, software etc., hence poor browsing and the rest.

We should, however, give credit. Amazon really has been that good for that long. It did good e-commerce and provided many many people with their first online purchase. Alongside ebay and google it formed a holy trinity for the dot com era, and rode out the dot com crash.

But back then, it only sold books. And just to people who knew what books they wanted. The clever bit, Seth Godin’s ‘free gift’, was that although it was a website, it made very personal recommendations that we liked. Just like a small store owner or a friend that knew us might do. But although that still pertains, many other sites do similar things now, and Amazon has got cluttered with much other stuff.

You can still buy books you know you want there, though, and I still do and still will. I suppose my point today is that along with Jakob, we think that it’s time for some new thought. Time to roll over, Amazon, and time to get some fresh ideas out there, new and innovative. Time for some new brand new tomorrows.

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Car Insurance SEO experimentation includes in this case just the simple use of page title, h1, initial body text, and alt tag (single image) to see how effective this is in achieving a high rating on this site across the different search engines.

I have been getting high ratings for some very odd things - an off the cuff short comment about Yoda from Star Wars gets top image rating on the search term ‘Yoda’ and search for ‘John Lewis Direct‘ gets a top three rating against 4 million and some. How can this be? This little test might help tell.

Apologies to all my regular readers, normal service will be resumed soon enough after this Car Insurance experiment.

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