Gerry McGovern

If you have a website or produce content for a website, then you really need to pick up a copy of The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online* by Gerry McGovern. This book talks about how you can create a better experience for your viewers by attending to the critical tasks. It looks at critical tasks, navigation, search, and the effect of noncritical tasks on your website performance. Read more… (altro)

This book is excellent company for Steve Krug's 'Don't make me think'. McGovern's issue is that customers must be able to easily fullfill their tasks on websites. The less effort it costs for customers the better the website.

The Long Neck refers to the 5% of the content that accounts for 25% of the demand. These top tasks are most important for the success rate of the website. Content must be designed for the (top) tasks that customers need to fullfill.

The other end of the graph, the 60% of the content that accounts for 20% of the demand, is called the Long Tail. Content in the Long Tail tends to disturb the effectiveness of the Long Neck content, because the menu's and links get cluttered.

The method of Gerry McGovern has been used by large companies as IKEA, Tetra Pak, Cisco and Microsoft. It is based upon testing and measuring and improving success, not on opinions from managers, webmasters, website users etcetera.

Opinions are mostly useless. Everything ought to be based upon facts and the way unknown website customers behave.

The only pitfall I can think of is that a website focuses so strongly at tasks in a way that look and feel gets disregarded. The overall design is still a factor in website success, although not as strong as usually believed.… (altro)

Here are some key ideas from my blog postings:

Successful Websites are Task-Focused - http://wanderlustandwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/killer-web-content-successful-web...

Trains, Tickets, Toilets (understanding what your customers want) - target="_top">http://wanderlustandwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/killer-web-content-trains-tickets...… (altro)