Re: FN-FORUM: What's causing a psychological block?

date posted 28th June 2003 11:13

Hi Peter

For me, it all looks very complicated without appearing interesting. If you
get past the initial "christ, that's a lot of text" feeling, you can see
that there might be something interesting in there, but your eye just kind
of slides off all that text. Passages like this

"Knowledge management (KM) is now a multi-billion dollar industry, yet
nobody has yet come up with a truly efficient means of searching and sorting
the information available on the Web. "

just make me think of advertising spiel... it looks like the only person who
is getting benefit from reading it is whoever is making you read it... if
you get what I mean. You can't see easily "what's in it for me".

I don't know if there *is* a way of catching people's eyes quickly so they
can see the basics of the box without wading through text, but I think
trying to find a better one would be a good place to start.

Probably no use to you... but there you go!
Dan.


> This week I put up the first fully working prototype of my Web site.
> Altogether I had something like 1000 visits.
>
> http://www.stigmergicsystems.com
>
> When I did a Web log analysis, there was a satisfactory spread of
> hits all over the site and about two thirds visited the most
> important part of the site - where I explain and demonstrate a
> "Kempelen Box".
>
> So far, so good. However, when I test to see how many people actually
> tried out the "Kempelen Box", to see the agents and see what answers
> the box gives to questions, I find the results shockingly poor.
>
> Where am I going wrong? What psychological block is stopping people
> playing around with the box? Or, is the whole concept so boring that
> nobody bothers to see how it works?
>
> I'd appreciate some help . Especially from those of you on this list
> who visited the site this week.
>
> Don't try to spare my feelings. Be brutal if you see obvious flaws.
>
> Thanks.