I was looking around at some sites and was reminded of some older, but still relevant work done by the Stanford Persusive Technology lab on web credibility. I would have like to see the research updated to include some guidelines for UGC (User Generated Content) sites - but even so it is still very relevant. There are also a nice set of charts that describe captology here,  and web credibility here.

Another reason that I was reminded of the persuasive computing work is that I keep hearing from Israeli VCs the notion of “ease of use” being a key ingredient in the Web 2.0 world, and you need to make sure that Web 2.0 enterpreneurs understand that. IMHO that is a mistake - ease of use is the minimal bar - without that you don’t get to play… The real need is to make sure that developers and designers  understand that the real goal is “Joy of Use” - sure it has to to be easy and intuitive to use, but users also need to have fun using the technology - otherwise you won’t succeed.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 8:17 am and is filed under Startups, VC, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.