People! People! People!

          In Redish's Letting Go of the Words, Chapter 2 discusses how to create a web site with good communication. The steps that she tells the reader to include on how to get a better sense of her readers are as follows:

1. List your major audiences
2. Gather information about your audiences
3. List major characteristics for each audience
4. Gather your audiences' questions, tasks, and stories
5. Use your information to create personas
6. Include the persona's goals and tasks
7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site

One of the most communication heavy sites that I can think of is Facebook. It literally was created in order for people to communicate. It was initially only open to Harvard students and from there expanded to other colleges, to all students, and finally, to the rest of the world. The developers for Facebook had to have gone through all these steps whether they knew it or not. Do you agree? Do you think Facebook was one of the pioneers of communication online? What about Myspace or Friendster? Why did they fail?

1. Major audiences: College students
2. Info: they want to communicate with each other
3. Characteristics: Lazy, want to know what's going on without much effort
4. Questions, tasks, stories: want to connect to people, tell their own stories
5. Personas: each individual created their own profile, thereby allowing the developers to know about them
6. Goals and Tasks: to let students see information about their fellow students and be able to share information about themselves
7. Scenarios: the navigation used by the audience, they want to change a certain setting, add a new picture, etc.

          In chapter 3, "Starting Well: Home Pages", Redish discusses what to put and not put on a home page. She also tells the reader what the audience will expect from a home page and what they will not pay much attention to. She explains that the user experience is a key aspect of the site, making sure the audience can get to where they want to go without much trouble. Using Facebook again, it is relatively easy to add a new picture or change your status, but when it comes to deactivating an account, the pathways to get there are much trickier. This is because Facebook does not want its users to deactivate their accounts. This is their way of controlling their users. Do you agree? Does it just so happen that this portion of their site is more difficult than the rest? Or is their a hidden motive for it?