Recently I’ve come across two major sites using “mailto:” links on their pages. Seriously… I thought this went out of practice years ago.

Unless I’m really missing something, it seems that using web forms is far, far better practice, mainly because most people don’t use the default mail client in windows to send email. (I hate it when Outlook opens in this situation and pops up all these absurd alerts that I have no interest in because I don’t use the damn program!) I think it is possible to change the mail client, but I’ve never even tried to figure that out, because I use webmail.

1) AOL Video — “Email to a Friend” link
So you’re watching a video on AOL and want to send it to a friend, and click this button, and it tries to open the default mail client. I actually was facilitating a usability test on this site and the user attempted to do this; needless to say she immediately gave up once she realized there was no form involved. (She was a Yahoo! Mail user, btw.)

2) Gap.com Customer Service
Same thing, mailto:custserv@gap.com, plus use of the “subject” parameter to populate the subject field. (And this is the AJAX site of the future???) I wonder how much spam they get to this address!

A few weeks ago I posted about automatic audio on web pages… in general I am not a fan, but in some cases I can understand why it is done. I, however, have no idea what is going through the minds of the folks over at Gap; they have inexplicably added a random musical track to the background of their homepage.

I first heard it after I had loaded up a few tabs in firefox, and I had NO IDEA where it was coming from! I had this blog, my email and gap.com in the browser, none of which seemed capable of producing music. It was only after a second visit with no additional tabs that I realized Gap was the culprit.

What a strange and annoying decision!

Update: The homepage has been redesigned and the music is gone. Perhaps they came to their senses. 

There was a lot of talk at the recent shop.org Annual Summit about how broadband has finally achieved critical mass and how this supposed web 2.0 revolution is poised to take advantage of this trend. 50% of internet homes are now broadband, and on average more than 80% of online purchases are made via broadband connections.

One of the conference’s keynote speakers suggested that the broadband penetration would increase to at least 80% of all internet homes by 2010 (perhaps a conservative estimate as moderate-speed DSL can already be had in many markets for around the same price as dialup). This statistic was used to suggest that the time has finally come to get agressive about targeting broadband customers.

I, however, see a different situation on the horizon; in 2010 when those dialup holdovers are finally embracing what we currently consider to be broadband, the speeds us early adopters will be using will be far, far faster than what we considering today.

Already, Verizon offers a 768k DSL product and a 15MB FIOS product, and Comcast just announced a 16MB product called Blast!; if trend continues this gap will continue to grow. Applications, graphics and videos that we currently consider for the top of the line “broadband” users will become the lowest common denomenator, and perhaps HD imagery and video will be the expectation of “high” broadband users (the early adopters).

Surely we should embrace the broadband of now and continue to monitor its progress, however as the details change, we also must keep in mind that although the details may change, the challenges may remain the same.

As suspected, a lot of discussion at the recent shop.org Annual Summit was devoted to social networking and how it can be leveraged by e-retailers. Although much of the conversation revolved around adding SN tools to commerce sites (Customer Reviews being the most popular), many suggested leveraging external tools such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. to drive both brand messaging and site traffic.

What worries me about this is not unlike the concerns I expressed recently about blogs — will the commercialization of these sites render them obsolete? The great thing about MySpace is that individuals are able to publish their thoughts and opinions, hook up with other like-minded people and have a place on the web to call their own. Sites like YouTube and Flickr flourish because the content is generated by average people, not companies, and as such it is fresh, interesting and exciting. If, on the other hand, every other MySpace page becomes a company promoting some product or agenda, or it becomes harder to find videos on YouTube that were uploaded purely for entertainment and for no other reason, these sites will lose thier cool, and thus their audience.

On a related note, I remember when I first started using eBay back in 1998 — there were phenomenal deals *everywhere*. It quickly became a daily stop on my surfing adventures. Sure, the overall assortment of product was not what it is today, but it didn’t matter. The site succeeded because it was something special in a world of sameness. Nowadays, I hardly ever use eBay because it is so cluttered with people who are more interested in profit margin than getting rid of their stuff. When I do look for something there, I regularly find items that are going for more than I could buy them new at Amazon or another web vendor. Great deals reminiscent of the past can be found occasionally, but they have become the exception rather than the rule.

Are MySpace, YouTube and Flickr next to suffer from oversaturation? If retailers continue to look for ways to profit from these wonderfully organic mediums, I fear that this will be the case.

I will be presenting at the upcoming PhillyCHI meeting — announcement below:

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I wrote an article for the UPA Voice, the monthly publication of the Usability Professionals Association. It’s a recap of the September PHICHI meeting where two new remote usability tools, Ethnio and MindCanvas, were presented to the group.

Read it: Remote Usability: Insight into New Tools

I helped a friend of mine set up a Blogger site so she could update news on her site easily. The other day, however, she called me up wondering why none of the ‘blogs’ she had entered were showing up on the site anymore. She’s not all that web-savvy, so I took a look at her account… and what I found was quite interesting:

The way to create a new post is that little green plus sign on the line where the blog name has been crossed out. Interestingly, however, just under that line is a large blue button that’s about ten times as large as the green plus sign stating “Create a Blog”. If the text was removed from this page, the visual clues would suggest that the big blue button is far more important than the green cross.

Add in the fact that my friend didn’t understand the difference between the terms “post” and “blog”, and it is quite understandable that she created a new blog each time she wanted to post something new.

Especially considering that Blogger seems to be marketed at non-savvy users who are looking to get started blogging with the least amount of effort and learning curve, it is pretty surprising that they are not more sensitive to the lingo that they use on the site. It is not surprising at all to find out that someone doesn’t know the difference between these terms — in fact I know savvy people who use them interchangeably.

How often do people create totally new blogs anyway?