Here’s a real life persona for you – the busy housewife (or, mother, home worker, domestic engineer, etc).
My wife is a busy mother and [one of the above] and uses the web every day, mostly for checking her email, managing our online photo albums and reading the Babycenter bulletin boards.She also buys things online and manages a large proportion of our finances online, reads the news and stays up with the latest entertainment goings on.
Read MoreOnline press rooms come under fire over at Contentious. According to Amy Gahran:
Journalists increasingly turn to online press rooms because a well-done online press room can save a lot of time. Time is critical to journalists, because of deadline pressures. If they can’t find exactly what they seek, immediately, they’ll turn elsewhere.
Among the errors Amy notes are making the press room hard to find, not listing press contacts, and not listing press releases in date order, latest first.
I think that the media room we have on our hospital site doesn’t fall into those traps, thank goodness, although not knowing this audience particularly well, there may well be others.
So I finally decided to buy a portable MP3 jukebox and settled on the Rio Karma. Off I go to Shopping.com to compare prices. Little did I know that I would be running an impromptu usability test in the process.