Not to go all Lester Bangs on you, but are blogs dead? Before you scoff, hear me out: Yes, we are clearly in the age of the digital community, user-generated content, etc. etc. Blogs are on the agenda of every web-related conference, and those who run websites are all talking about blogs and what they mean for the future.

We, however, the UX community, the early adopters, the geeks, have known about blogs far longer than the masses. When we first started posting and reading blogs, the blogs we read and wrote *mattered*. They were a new, unique voice, something different than the world has ever seen. They spit in the face of traditional sources of news, media and entertainment. Now, with the establishment of myspace, facebook, blogger, etc., it seems that almost everyone has a blog. The result is an oversaturated market where a blog cannot stand out as that new and unique voice. (At the very least, a blog will have to be extremely unique to stand out — launching one that reviews maintstream music, for example, and expecting to compete with Rolling Stone, just won’t work. But if you blogged exclusively about the reggae music scene in Richmond, VA, well, then you might have a fighting chance to exist in a niche.)

As a blog writer, I find it frustrating to keep going, because there are so many other options out there. How do I differentiate myself and convince you to read my blog over all the others out there? If enough people start feeling that way, will many blogs start to go away?

I’m also thinking about corporate blogging, i.e. blogs on corporate or retail websites, and what that means for the blogging community. At the recent eTail Multi-Channel Retailer Conference, one of the speakers pointed out that although it seems every retailer is interested in and talking about blogs, only about 5% of retailers actually have them. It seems that while everybody is interested in the idea of using a blog to promote a company, few have decided to invest in it. This is actually somewhat encouraging to the future of blogging as a whole, as corporate blogging sort of misses the original point — which was always about regular people providing alternative content for web users to consume. If CNN blogs, it is still news from CNN, just in a slightly different format.

Lastly, what’s next? Eddie James is convinced video is the wave of the future, but I wonder if home movies will have the same appeal as the written word (it seems easier to write something compelling than to produce a quality video). Is there something that is just starting to develop that will be the next “blogging”?

One point that was mentioned several times at eTail’s recent Multi-Channel event was the importance of consistent pricing across channels — how important it is to give customers a uniform pricing experience. Thinking about this, however, in terms of shipping costs on the web (a problem that continues to exist for eRetailers — hence the plethora of creative “free shipping” offers), I realized that if the additional shipping cost is considered to be part of the total cost, pricing an item consistenly in-store and online actually does NOT keep said cost consistent across all channels.

I would be interested in an analysis of the cost of running a web store versus a brick and mortar — a web store must be cheaper, right? The transaction cost itself on the web (or any automated ordering platform) is signficantly less than a transaction that involves interaction with an actual human. Obviously there are costs for running a website and distributing products, and honestly I have no idea how this cost compares to that of running a store and distributing products to a store. However, these costs are obviously different, and as such I have to wonder how this affects both the cost and profit margin of any item. The bottom line here is that if items are priced consistently across channels before shipping cost, customers are NOT paying the same total amount across channels, and as such perhaps consistent pricing is not the most customer-centric way to handle things.

What if we integrated the cost of shipping into the cost of running a web store (just as we integrate the cost of running a brick & mortar into the cost of items sold there)? In person, customers are not asked to cover shipping to the store, or to pay wages of the employees of that store on top of the price of the item — that is integrated into the cost.

When I interact with the customers of the company I work for, the most common request is always free shipping — people see it out on the web, but we rarely offer it — and this upsets them. Some friends of mine at another online retailer shared some promotional testing that they ran –”10% off” coupon versus a “free shipping” coupon. In many cases, the 10% off turned out to be a larger discount off the overall price, however the free shipping coupon was FAR more effective. Why? Presumably because customers feel that paying a premium to shop via their preferred channel is unfair; depsite the fact that they would save more with 10%, paying shipping in any scenario just seems like a rip-off.

Is the pay-for shipping model inherently flawed and doomed to fail? How can we fix it?

One of the new trends generating a lot of buzz with regards to web design is Emotional Design. Basically this means creating an emotional experience — one that goes beyond simply completing a task — for users of any particular site. In my industry — retail — this means recreating the positive experience that pleasure shoppers have when they go to their favorite store or interact with their favorite retailer offline.

The principles of web usability, however, suggest that we make sites as easy as possible to use — focusing on our users’ ability to complete the task they are trying to complete, be that purchase an item, conduct research, contact customer service, etc.

But what if the task is something less concrete, such as pleasure shopping? In that situation, perhaps those very things that we see as distractions and diversions during the so-called tasks we expect users to complete actually add to the experience? Multimedia like video, audio, animation, etc. may actually enhance the emotional experience a customer will have on any site. Usability experts, including myself, often preach the values of ignoring functionality that is simply “cool” for cool’s sake, and ensuring that everything on a site adds some sort of tangible value. What if that value, however, is merely being “cool”, i.e. adding positively to the emotional experience of the user?
Are these concepts changing the way we evaluate usability? Can a site make an emotional connection and be usable at the same time?

I was reading Electronic Retailer, one of those free industry rags, at a break during the recent eTail conference, when a headline blared out at me from the page: “Study Shows That Nearly 25 Percent of Hispanics Subscribe to Mobile TV”

WOW, I thought. That is an amazing number for a technology that is so new. How could this many people be subscribed without this mobile feature getting more fanfare? Of course, this number is nowhere near true. It turns out that 23% of moblie TV subscribers are Hispanic, which, as you may have already guessed, means that far less than 25% of all Hispanics subscribe to mobile TV.

Talk about a quick way to lose credibility — Electronic Retailer quickly lost it with me.

I’ve noticed that a lot of websites have started playing audio as soon as the page loads; MySpace pages (especially in the music section) start songs immediately, on ESPN video begins whether you ask it to or not, and more and more banner ads have annoying audio tracks attached to them. Heck, even UX firm Electronic Ink has jumped into the fray with a talking head animation right on the homepage.

From my experience, most web users — at least in the past — do not like it when audio starts without being requested, especially since they may be surfing at work (and probably not supposed to be on the page they are on). However, perhaps the nature of broadband and web multimedia is changing what people expect, and thus the expectation of web users is changing as well. Personally I still don’t really like it, as I tend to be surfing either w/o sound or with some other sound (music, tv, etc.) going on in the background, and as such want to choose when to enter into an interactive agreement that includes some kind of audio.

I stumbled across a particularly funny rant on this subject (that I have cleaned up to some extent) on Deadspin.com: “What drives me particularly nuts about this… is when I get to work in the morning and load up ESPN.com and that Trey Wingo starts talkin’ out my machine speakers about ESPN mobile and I gotta mute the sound card quick before any coworker gives me the evil eye. $#&* a lot of ESPN mobile. $&%^ ESPN.com in general for putting ads that make noise on their site.”

Despite all this, more and more audio is cropping up without being asked. Are we throwing out the usability principles we have learned, or is the way the web works changing?

Typically if I’m talking about US Airways, I’m complaining. This airline, at least in Philadelphia, normally seems unconcerned with providing any kind of passable customer service. However, today I discovered a feature in their new reservation system that made me positively happy. As you can see over to the right (yellow highlight mine), when the city name is typed into the text field, the form uses some kind of AJAXy, Google Suggest-style functionality to autofill based on what the user has begun to type.

Personally, I use these online travel engines a lot to scope out possible trips, and I get very frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the “airport finder”. (Often times, if the airport code is not specified and only a city name is provided, the page refreshes and forces the user to make another choice before continuing.) This particular feature, however — although somewhat minor in the grand scheme of this page — makes finding the airport code for the city in question much, much easier to do.

Bravo USAir! It’s about time!