Many business and technology related books are soporifics but the four discussed below address some important industry questions and provide researched, creative, and sometimes unexpected answers.
Homepage Usability
Homepage Usability, 50 Websites Deconstructed
Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir
2002, New Riders Publishing
315 pages, $39.99
Every carrier and agency site must have a home page. Generally it's the first thing a visitor sees. If the home page doesn't appear immediately relevant and accessible, the visitor will click the back button, never to return. So the home page has a special role to play and it's critical to the success of the site.
Nielsen/Tahir devote the first 50 pages of their book to an overview of the principles of homepage design. The discussion is so clear, well organized, and convincing that you want to immediately check your own homepage, something Nielsen anticipates and helps you do. The results of a self-evaluation can be discouraging but certainly provide specifics to focus improvement efforts.
The balance of the book examines 50 homepages, mostly by well-known organizations, such as Amazon, Citigroup, and ESPN. Each homepage is reproduced in living color and the accompanying text offers in-context concreteness the earlier general principles section lacks. The book is very attractive and lends itself to browsing as well as reading through.
Highly recommended for everyone with a strategic or practical interest in a Web site
Web Laws
The Laws of the Web
Patterns in the Ecology of Information
Bernardo A. Huberman
The MIT Press, 2001
100 pages, $24.95
Huberman argues, convincingly I think, that even though the Web has been created by and continues to evolve through billions of separate, uncoordinated human actions, the result exhibits law-like behavior that one would expect only from a deliberate, planned effort. To ignore the laws he's discovered and reported on is to relegate your efforts to almost certain failure.
What's perhaps most important about his insights is that distribution patterns on the Web don't follow a bell curve, a model with which we're all familiar, but a power curve, a (more or less) straight line, that exhibits the same proportions no matter which section of the curve you sample. That's significant because given data on any part of the curve you can predict what some other part of the curve will look like. It suggests that no matter what anyone does, a few sites will receive a great number of visits and most very few. That could have significance for carriers who think they can sell through the Web, sharing sales with ten or twenty other sellers. It isn't likely to happen. A very few sites will win the lion's share of attention with interest falling off rapidly for the rest. It's a winner-take-all pattern.
The worry that the Web will lead to competition strictly on price appears unfounded. In fact, relevant information and the recognition of a good fit between needs and offering is stronger on the Web than traditional sales channels — and that suggests hosting really useful content on Web sites and making great efforts to tell people about and encourage them to visit the site (people don't search randomly but try to pick up pointers from other sites, friends, publications and so on. Social based searching may be more important than search engine use).
Not an easy read but provides crucial information Internet strategists should know.
Internet Marketing
Gonzo Marketing
Winning Through Worst Practices
Christopher Locke
Perseus Publishing, 2001
214 pages, $25.00
Locke established a reputation as co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, The End of Business as Usual, published in 2000. In Gonzo Marketing, Locke's central claim is that the Internet is not another mass marketing channel. The pattern of smaller markets, niches, seen over the last 20 years, finally finds its pure expression in the Internet.
Locke claims, with some reason, that traditional marketing methods have failed
miserably on the Web and in fact cause more ill will than marketing support.
What works, in part, is effective personalization, simplicity, and quality
(Amazon) and the creation of communities of interest (eBay).
According to Locke you really can't go after people on the Web directly. They'll
back off. The harder you try to sell them, the more they'll look elsewhere.
Obviously, that's a bit of a problem for ad agencies, public relations firms,
marketing departments, and other members of the black-art-of-marketing club.
Maybe they never really had any magic. They certainly don't when it comes
to the Web. From that point of view, it's been a bust.
So what's Locke's prescription? Find existing, genuine Internet communities of interest — with no specific ties to your product or service — and underwrite them. Help them thrive. In return, you get recognition and links to your site. And perhaps most importantly you create goodwill, brand recognition, and a population of potential customers and referrers.
Locke's book is likely to make you angry (that's his intention) but it's well researched in explaining why traditional approaches won't work. Though he provides suggestions for what can work, more details would have been useful.
Paperless Office
The Myth of the Paperless Office
Abigail J. Sellen & Richard H. R. Harper
The MIT Press, 2002
212 pages, $25.00
Do you remember "Paper Free in '83?" It was a Reliance initiative, I think, that was both bold and premature. Well we've finally gotten there, haven't we? No? Well what's the problem? Or better, what's the point? — and thus the Sellen/Harper book.
You've probably heard that we're using more paper than ever, a linear increase of about 3% per year. One study showed that introducing e-mail into an organization increased paper consumption by 40%. It appears that the more interconnectivity we enjoy, the more paper we print. Though the number of copy machines is increasing slowly, the number of computer printers is growing rapidly. Where we once copied, then distributed reports and the like, we now distribute them electronically and print them locally. Some carriers are trying to do the same thing with policies via PDF files. It would be interesting to know whether agents/insureds print them out or leave them in electronic form.
The more technology we have, the more paper we consume. That's counter-intuitive. What's happening? Are we all reprobates? Probably not. The ideal of being paperless simply isn't possible today and may never be possible. That's because paper has affordances that technology-based alternatives simply can't provide. It's not that we're backward. It's that technology isn't up to the task and it isn't obvious how it could be redesigned to become so.
Affordance, a term coined by Donald Norman, means characteristics that make something useful for a human purpose. Paper is light weight, at least in small quantities, easy to read, can accept editing marks and comments, can be hung or arranged on a desk and so on. Technology, even the new tablet PCs to be introduced this year, simply don't have the flexibility, convenience, and manipulability of paper. On the other hand, technology makes writing easier, information storage more compact, and search and accessibility instantaneous. Paper will continue as a working medium to be discarded when the project it supports is completed. Digital media will serve for transmission and storage/retrieval.
Though the Sellen/Harper book isn't focused on the insurance industry, it's not too hard to extend their insights into our space. And though they sometimes need formal studies to discover/confirm common sense, objective research does improve credibility. The book gets into great detail about the different affordances of paper and technology and how they suit the needs of the workplace. Overall, their key point is that it's a grave mistake to try to make an office paperless only to conform to some ungrounded ideal. Paper is important and it's here to stay. The most productive offices, they claim, are those with full wastebaskets — not with no wastebaskets.
Anyone that is part of a plan or program to significantly eliminate paper would do well to read this book. It provides general cautions as well as specific examples of what works and doesn't.