I spend a significant amount to time contacting and selling FamilyLearn’s iMemoryBook and pyxlin’. To help clients catch the vision of FamilyLearn I usually have to get them on our resellers website. As often as not, the dialog of our conversation goes like this:

Me: “Can you please go to www.familylearn.com?” I then hear them typing on their computer.

My Client: “Is it the one that says, ‘FamilyLearn: Genealogy, Family Tree and Family History come to life!’?”

This is the point that I realize that they just typed www.familylearn.com into Google or Yahoo! search bar because the FamilyLearn doesn’t say that unless you search for it. They don’t just use search to find our website, but everytime they return to our website or anyother website. To them the internet is Yahoo! or Google. Their internet world lies inside the confines of their default search engine. It doesn’t matter to them that they are making two extra mouse clicks. They don’t know anything different and they don’t need anything different.

I think to many, who don’t remember their first days of muddling through the internet, this is quite a shock. There are people who don’t even know where, or how, or why, to type in a direct URL? Let me tell you, I was just this way for my first several years with the internet. http:// might as well have been Chinese. My online world was Hotmail and anywhere hotmail connected me; MSN Messenger, and MSNBC (all of which I rarely use now I know what else is out there).

I have been reading the insightful book, Don’t Make Me Think!, by Steve Krug(said Kroog). He answers the question of why this happens:
• It’s not important to us. For most of us, it doesn’t matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not lack of intelligence, but a lack for caring. In the great scheme of things it is not important to us [to know how to type a URL into the browser].
• If we find something that works, we stick to it. Once we find something that works—no matter how badly—we tend not to look for a better way. We’ll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to make their website more intuitive. It is a must read.

It took years for me to pull away from hotmail. I didn’t know I had any other options and I didn’t know how to look for them even if I knew they were there.

We are working very hard with our very little resources to make the new iMemoryBook and pyxlin’ systems (to be released Jan 2007) as intuitive as possible. If, when they are released, they don’t feel intuitive enough, please let me know.

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