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		You can’t find a coffee shop in Seattle--How Minor Usability Modifications Can Pay Big Dividends Looking for a coffee shop in Seattle? You won’t find it using AnyWho. Turns out the company that calls itself The Ultimate Directory hasn’t included coffee shop as one of its “category keywords,” the basis for indexing its millions of business listings. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself. Just go to www.anywho.com and use the Find a Business category. Type in “coffee shop” for the kind of business you’re looking for. Enter “Seattle” as the city, and select Washington from the available list of states. If you prefer, add a zip code---98199 and 98124 are two Seattle-area zip codes I can remember offhand from when I lived there. Your results: No listings found. - Please try again. Think I’m being unfair to AnyWho? Perhaps. Let’s give it another try. This time, use the more erudite “coffee shoppe” as your search term. The search will still fail, but it will fail in a more informative way: The category "Coffee Shoppe" could not be found. - Please try again. Ah, now we’re on to something. There may in fact be some coffee in Seattle, we’re just not asking how to find it correctly. This specific example points out a general reality of the web. Despite claims that good design is all “common sense,” or the more malevolent aspersion that “user even rhymes with loser,” much of the web remains hard for most real people to use. Why? Well in part it’s because almost all sites on the web could still benefit from some real focus on how real people behave. It’s important to remember that most real people don’t work in information technology. Most real people don’t care how difficult a website was to design and build, they care about how easy it is to use. Does it answer their real questions for them? If a customer has called it a coffee shop all their life, why on earth should they have to learn to call it a coffee “house” simply to satisfy the requirements of a website designed to help them find (and presumably then buy from) a business? In the world of online commerce, the consumer is still king. When technology arrogance meets a consumer habit head-on, it is the technology that needs to be robust enough and supple enough to match the consumer behavior, not the other way around. Still want to find that coffee? Searching for “coffee house” will give you results that include four national online stores and one Seattle-area Starbucks, hardly a locals-only establishment anymore. Instead, we recommend you check out a nice little place at the in-town Seattle suburb of Magnolia. It’s called Caffe Appassionato, located at 3217 West McGraw Street. Just how long did it take us to find that listing online, given the company’s rather unusual spelling of a rather distinctive name? Don’t ask! About Rare Medium Rare Medium Atlanta is a leading provider of digital solutions for Fortune 500 clients, dedicated to using the ordinary sciences of strategy, design and technology to deliver extraordinary results to our clients. Whether by defining unique user experiences, deploying rich self-service environments or implementing robust content management applications, Rare Medium Atlanta is focused on creating client value. Now more than ever - experience matters... For more information about Rare Medium Atlanta, please email us at info@raremedium.net or visit us on-line at www.raremedium.net. 1.888.RMEDIUM. 1145 Sanctuary Parkway, Suite 125 | Alpharetta, GA 30009		Case Study: Find out how the worlds leading luxury hotel - The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company - improved its site usability to dramatically improve online sales bookings! The 7 Deadly Sins of Web Application Design :: 1) DATA GRAVEYARD Information is buried in too many disparate data sources. 2) UI JUNGLE Existing data sources must be accessed via independent and inconsistent user interfaces. 3) ADMINISTRATIVE TOWER OF BABEL Customers are forced to use inconsistent access scenarios systems administrators are consumed by different security and login schemes. 4) UNMINED GOLD When information is difficult to access, the enterprise is unable to tap into cost-effective existing data assets. 5) INFORMATION IVORY TOWER Barricaded behind the corporate firewall, potentially valuable data resources go unexploited by the enterprise. 6) WHO’S ON FIRST? Where the enterprise fails to streamline communications and workflow, employees duplicate each other’s efforts. 7) DATA AND COMMUNICATIONS CHAOS Balkanization of communications and data interfaces makes employees operate within systems which, at best, are dysfunctional, and at worst conflict with one another.

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