"To be blunt, I think Asian websites still have a long way to go," says Jakob Nielsen, principal and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group. Asian culture is partly to blame, Nielsen believes.
Hailed by the New York Times as the guru of web-page usability, Nielsen was recently in Hong Kong to deliver a presentation on the fundamentals of web usability. Nielsen is a self-professed founder of the "discount usability engineering movement", a school that offers ways to improve user interfaces in a fast and relatively inexpensive way.
Consulting for designers of websites, intranets, software and consumer products, the Nielsen Norman group aims to improve the design of websites, increase sales and customer satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring a quality user experience.
"Some aspects of Asian culture can be harmful to usability, but it doesn't have to be that way. At the moment there is a tendency to cram things into pages. That way might be fine in a printed magazine but, visually speaking, it's confusing in a active medium," says Nielsen.
Nielsen also said that he had found resistance to change in Asia, compared with the United States and Europe. On those continents, the use of consultants like Nielsen is widely accepted. Executives often demand that Nielsen be brutal, he told his Hong Kong audience, because they recognised that an honest appraisal of where they were going wrong was the only way to improve. Nielsen reported that in Asia, however, he had found a perception that accepting a critique of a design involved a loss of face if the analysis showed that the design was not perfect. "I understand why executives feel that way," he says, "but at the same time the real loss of face comes when you launch a site that millions of people come to, but never come back to, because they don't like it."
The solution, argues Nielsen, is to think of the consultant as a test user, who is using the website not to criticise but to help the company build and improve its site. Nielsen says that companies often "throw away the baby with the bathwater" when it comes to a failing web design. "Throwing away a design and just doing something else won't necessarily make the site any better; in interactive design you have to gradually improve. Usability consultants emphasise gradual improvement and allow clients to modify existing designs to make them better."
In terms of usability, Nielsen estimates that Asia is two or three years behind the US. Many American companies have realised that refusing to hear criticism did not work, says Nielsen.
While Nielsen is not exactly giving away his services - analysis of a website costs a standard US$35,000 - he does believe in providing them at a reasonable cost, describing himself as "fed-up" with unusable websites. "Humanity deserves better service and companies deserve to know how to make that happen. I don't want that to be a secret," he says. Although not every company doing business on the web can afford a personal analysis, they will be able to afford the reports on various aspects of usability that can be downloaded from the company's website for US$45 a time, a far cry from the thousands of dollars common to research firms. Between them the reports offer 219 tips on improving web design for e-commerce. Following his tips can lead to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of per cent increases in sales, claims Nielsen.
On a one-to-one level, Nielsen works mostly with companies of 10 to 100,000 employees, as well as government departments, but the latter tend to be "stingy", he says. What is a determining factor in the question of whether to bring in a consultant is not the cost, says Nielsen, it is a matter of how important the project is. "If it is big or you are an internet-only company, that makes it important," says Nielsen. "If it isn't important, then the guidelines will be enough."
He adds: "One of the good things about usability is that it always works, you will get more customers, you will get more sales."
Trend Spotting
Increasingly, companies can look to the internet to secure the services of fashion forecasters, a boon for Asian firms who want to know what urban basketballers are wearing in Chicago or what's hot for London shoppers.
Fashion forecasters make their living with timely and accurate dissemination of just that sort of information. Fashion Shopper, Worth Global Style Network, and Style Detective are just a few.
Many designers and retailers employ in-house trend-seekers to travel to international cities in search of the latest and the hottest. The argument goes that these spotters are handicapped because, being from out of town, they will not find the fashion leaders.
A web-based fashion-spotting firm can employ trend-spotters all over the world. Fashionshopper.com, for instance, displays photographs of boutique windows from Paris, London and New York, and predicts patterns and colours.
Most online prediction services do not offer consultancy, leaving it to the customer to sift through the information on the site and come to his or her own conclusions. An amalgamation of online and offline services seems likely.
Although the fashion industry is notoriously loathe to adopt technology, that may change as some of the major online forecasters give free access to today's fashion design students, who are tomorrow's customers.
Playing on the Hop
Location-sensing technology for wireless telephones has turned Stockholm into a virtual reality battleground.
Players will track and shoot each other with their mobile phones in what amounts to high-tech laser tag or paint ball. Players' telephone screens will indicate "aliens" (other players), who are trying to "take over the world". Using mobile positioning technology, the game will determine whether the shooter is close enough to score a hit. To a generation swamped by realistic 3D games, Tetris and the other games available for mobile telephones have never been enough. "It's Alive", the Stockholm game, might be just the ticket to alleviate the boredom.
Sweden is acknowledged to be the world's most advanced information economy. It has the widest adoption of computers, wireless phones and the internet, according to a survey released in February by International Data Corp and World Times Inc. The Swedish experience, in line with those who are following behind, is that entertainment and games drive the market, particularly for young and trendy consumers.
It's Alive's revenue model is a monthly licensing fee to cellular operators based on the usage of the game, which is run off the company's own servers. Wireless carriers then charge players either per game or through a monthly service fee.
The Rumour Mill
The internet allows rumours to travel further and faster than ever before. Companies with reputations to protect are easily wrong footed by untruths (or even truths) spreading like brushfires across the network. Many are turning to the sophisticated data-extraction technology offered by internet intelligence agencies. The technology gives companies the chance to snuff out rumours before they spread.
The thought of major corporations keeping an eye on everything that is being said on the internet 24/7 is an Orwellian one. It is happening, however, and it is not illegal. CyberScan, CyberAlert and eWatch are among the companies offering to scour the internet for clients.
Mining companies such as Moreover use technology that can index thousands of online sources four or more times an hour. With a rogue rumour being picked up on a corporation's antennae within 15 minutes, there is a chance for a PR department to squash it. And perhaps its author.
Privacy advocates warn web surfers to be more aware that public foray may be monitored. If they are not being monitored now, their archives might be later. "Too many people consider online conversations like typed phone calls," says Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility.
Look Out for the Mobile Avalanche
If you were buried under an avalanche, you would be grateful for a beacon that gave away your location to someone looking for you. Chances are that you are carrying that beacon - your mobile telephone - and that far from saving you from an avalanche, it might be about to bring one on you. An avalanche of junk messages, that is.
Your mobile telephone provider already knows where you are, it has to in order to be able to route your calls to the nearest transmitter, but a new range of location-based services is riding the back of that technology.
At a panel on privacy at Internet World Wireless, held recently in New York, Jason Catlett, the president of Junkbusters, said consumer fears have been wrongly focused on what he calls the "Starbucks scenario". The scenario suggests that every time you pass a Starbucks, your mobile phone would ring to tell you that Starbucks is offering you a 50-cent discount on a coffee provided you come in right now.
That is wrong, Catlett argued, because the cost of broadcasting such coupons to millions of city dwellers would never be recouped however many mochaccinos Starbucks peddled. The spam would be technologically difficult to develop and hog bandwidth.
Doug Leeds, the director of wireless advertising for OmniSky, however, reminded the audience of the persistance of spam on the internet. It continues to exist he said, because it works. The technological hurdles for taking spam to the wireless world were not actually that big, he warned.
Forget about a Paperless Future, say Industry Executives
The world Papercom Alliance recently hosted a conference designed to help paper industry executives find ways to deal with the impact of an increasingly wired environment on their businesses.
The message was that paper is here to stay, albeit with a slightly different role. Even low-tech paper, it seems, is going to get an upgrade. Prepare for "smart paper", products such as photographs, financial documents, and event tickets that will be embedded with a digital identity, like a watermark, so that each can be linked to the internet, tracked, and copyright protected.
The idea is that smart paper can save time by linking readers directly to additional information online. To provide that interactive element, paper products can carry a bar code or a chemical or biological marker called a "taggent", a radio frequency identification, or a digital watermark.
Bar codes, suggested conference speakers, are not the likely way forward. Consumers consider them tacky and ugly. Taggents could be the answer. Athletes at the Sydney Olympics wore identification badges with taggents, in that case there were strands of each athlete's DNA as a unique identifier.
But analysts say digital watermarking will be the most common unique identifier of paper that consumers encounter. Consumers will be able to hold a digitally watermarked magazine ad or product box to a web camera and the embedded message will be scanned directly into a browser, which will be pointed at more information on the web. Digital watermarks are invisible to the naked eye.
Before paper becomes intelligent, therefore, consumers will have to be willing to plug another peripheral into their already overburdened PCs.