Extra! Extra!

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the world’s foremost authority on diamonds, colored stones, and pearls recently worked with Extractable to launch their new website www.GIA.edu. The new website was designed with a coherent navigational structure that promotes critical user paths.

The site design and information architecture should increase student applications and stone submissions while driving repeat visitors as they have a more positive online experience with the GIA brand.

If you need a stone evaluated, are interested in a jewelry career, need to buy a ring or learn more about a stone make sure to visit GIA online or visit them in Carlsbad.

It’s great to see our client SAFE Credit Union winning cheers from the greater credit union community for their 2007 WebAward-winning site. Credit Union Magazine just published an article titled “Build a Better Web Site” which features SAFE’s three-pronged approach to web marketing. It’s also great to see Extractable referenced within the article!

Extractable, the leading West Coast interactive agency, today announced it has won eight awards at the annual Web Marketing Association WebAwards.

Awards Extractable took home include:

* Best Credit Union Web Site - SAFE Credit Union
* Financial Services Site Standard of Excellence - Schwab MoneyWise
* Investment Site Standard of Excellence - Contango Capital Advisors
* Medical Site Standard of Excellence - Merit Medical
* Medical Equipment Site Standard of Excellence - Merit Medical
* Pharmaceuticals Site Standard of Excellence - Victory Pharma
* Technology Site Standard of Excellence - Network General
* Technology Site Standard of Excellence - IDT

The Web Marketing Association was founded in 1997 to help set a high standard for Internet marketing and development of the best web sites on the World Wide Web. Staffed by volunteers, this organization is made up of Internet marketing, online advertising, PR, and top web site design professionals who share an interest in improving the quality of online advertising, internet marketing, and web site promotion. Now in its 11th year, the WebAwards is the premier annual web site award competition that names the best Web sites in 96 industries while setting the standard of excellence for all web site development. More than 2,400 sites from 40 countries were adjudicated during this year’s competition. Entries were judged on design, copy writing, innovation, content, interactivity, navigation, and use of technology.

“We are very pleased to receive this recognition from our peers,” commented Craig McLaughlin, Extractable’s President and CEO. “These awards further validate Extractable as the leading provider of interactive services to financial services, life sciences, and high technology firms looking to leverage the web as a core component of their overall customer experience strategy. Our primary focus is creating business results for our clients through the online channel. The sheer number of awards we won this year is a testament to the quality of our people and their commitment to consistently delivering the best to our clients. We are lucky to have such a killer team.”

I was forwarded this article from the Palo Alto Daily news yesterday. The article covers the recent launch of the City of Palo Alto’s new website and the rising tide of public disdain for it, citing long load times, an odd color palette, low contrast, and a disjointed user experience. The article also points out that Palo Alto paid a tidy price for the site, especially when compared what Mountain View paid for their site.

Update:
I see Valleywag’s got a short critique here.

Extractable is pleased to announce a new hire within our Strategic Services group: Mathew Quilter.

Mathew Quilter joins Extractable as a Web Strategist. He previously worked at Walmart.com, Logitech.com and Xerox.com. He has managed content from initial development to global rollout, launched Web marketing programs across multiple geographies, and consulted to various start-ups on issues from Web lead-generation to globalization strategies.

We are proud to have Mathew on board!

We are proud to announce the launch of our first project with McAfee. We designed a Flash-based product demo with voiceover to market McAfee’s Secure Internet Gateway appliance. The Secure Internet Gateway provides small and medium-sized businesses a strong line of defense against web and email threats, including spam, phishing, viruses, and spyware.

Nice job, team!

The demo is live at: www.mcafee.com/us/smb/products/promos/sig/index.html

Extractable is pleased to annouce the launch of the Schwab MoneyWise web site! Kudos to the Extractable team for a solid inital project, resulting in site launch during Financial Literacy Month. The team is excited to continue enhancing the site with additional activities, tools, content, and a community forum! More information regarding the site’s charter can be found in the official Charles Schwab press release.

The site is live at: http://www.schwabmoneywise.com

Congrats to the Extractable team on the launch of the redesigned Merit Medical website.

The site is live at: http://www.merit.com

I just returned from the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas, where I gained some new insights. This was a great conference, featuring many informative sessions on topics such as “Usability Challenges of Web 2.0,” “Best Practices for Form Design,” “Maximum Value IA,” and “Mobile Information Architecture.” In addition to the conference sessions, the Summit was a great opportunity to share ideas among peers and exchange techniques and advice.

But one of the more interesting lessons, for me, was from the casinos.

First of all, I should explain that I don’t really gamble. I have no moral objection to gambling, but I do have a pretty thorough understanding of probability, and I’m aware of the fact that casinos make a lot of money. It must come from somewhere.

This means that if I walk through a casino, I can just observe. Casinos are designed around the user experience, with no clocks, hard-to-find exits, and an ambience that I’m sure has been carefully calculated.

On my way to check in for the Summit, I passed through the hotel casino. (Strangely enough, at many hotels going through the casino is the easiest way to enter.) Walking through the casino, I felt something was amiss, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Something just didn’t seem right. As I was leaving through the casino at the end of the day, I got the same odd feeling.

The next day, I happened to arrive at the hotel venue a bit early and had a bit of spare time.

I do have one exception to my lack of interest in gambling. If I am in a casino and have extra time and a lot of loose change in my pocket, I will pull out my change, find slot machines of the correct denominations, and donate my pocket change to the cause of casino profits. I consider the money gone as soon as I pull it from my pocket. In most cases, I am right.

On this particular day, I started looking for slot machines of the right denominations to make my contribution. I discovered that I couldn’t find any that actually accepted coins. The coin slots and been covered and the only way to play was by inserting bills, or some sort of card representing money won. On my way out in the evening, I asked one of the helpful casino people where I might find real slots that took real coins. They said to try to smaller casinos not in a hotel.

Then I realized what was missing! The sound of money. Because the slot machines didn’t accept coins, they didn’t pay out coins either. They just added to total “credits” on the machine. To cash out, you got a card representing your winnings and took it to a window. This meant that walking through the casino, there was no longer the random, “ching-ching-ching-ching” of coins crashing into the trays on the front of the machines. In fact, the noise in the casino was pretty much random crowd murmur, with a periodic outburst from someone when they won.

This seemed odd. Didn’t the casinos realize that hearing someone else getting a large number of coins was bound to be encouraging others to gamble? The sound of money. How could it not attract people? I puzzled over this for some time.

So, I observed a bit more. By not needing to reach into the payout tray, grab a coin and put it in the slot, the gambler could give the machine a spin every 2 or 3 seconds easily. The old method using coins probably meant a spin every 4 to 5 seconds. This meant that slot players could play more quickly.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if this more rapid rate of play made up for the loss of the influence from the crashing coins.

Then I remembered that everything about a casino is deliberate. This implied that research must have been done to determine which factor lead to the greater profits, and rapid play won. If “coinless” slot machines had decreased profits, they would never have been adopted.

So the real lesson is that even if we determine which option or design gives the better user experience, we should always keep business goals in mind, and test against those goals (not just raw user experience) when determining which option or design should be implemented.

According to story in Reuters, “wiki” has now been proclaimed a real word by the Oxford English Dictionary.

I find this somewhat troubling. I have been treating “wiki” as a real word for many years. I find it used in news and magazine articles constantly. Anyone who works in any web-related field certainly understands its meaning. And all this time we have been using an unofficial word.

So it has been a long journey for this collection of four letters to become a real word, but it has been worth the wait. When someone says “wiki,” there is a strong shared meaning. Others either know the word or do not, but do not mistake if for something else.

There is a bit of power in inventing a term for something new, rather than just pulling together terms already in existence (I know, I know. “Wiki” is a derivative of “wikiwiki.” But being a derivative, it is new.) A wiki could also have simply been called “an open page” or “collaborative web” or some other combination of existing words. If that had been the case, imagine the chaos that might have insued as various companies and factions tried to include their own sites under such an umbrella term.

If someone says “wiki” we generally agree on what that means.

This is in sharp constrast to other ideas which have been expressed in terminology that is just a recombination of existing words. Take “user experience designer” for example. I know exactly what it means, and you probably do, also. But if you get eight web folks in a room and ask, you will get at least nine opinions about the exact meaning.

This same lack of common meaning is true of much of the vocabulary we have been forced to establish as the web has evolved to prominence. Remember “webmaster?” Luckily, that has fallen from common usage, because it was so vague as to be almost meaningless. And “web page” is becoming increasingly inaccurate, since what you are seeing in your browser is likely a set of templates used to display a collection of content objects and applications. The term “web page” is a just holdover from thinking about the web by relating it the more familiar idea of a book or magazine page.

But, I have hope. We eventually stopped using the term “horseless carriage” in favor of terms such as “automobile,” “car,” and “taxi.” And no one says “picture show” any more unless they are a Rocky Horror fan. I think new terminology will evolve to replace some of the interim descriptions we’ve been using, and it can’t be soon enough for me. Let the names begin!