Pattern 30: The human touch
 AKA: Things from your life

Back to Diagram 1 - Getting started Back to Diagram 2 - Useability Back to Diagram 3 - Adding detail Back to Diagram 4 - Workflow/security

View sensitizing image - tbd

You have ESTABLISHed THE BUSINESS OBJECTIVES (1) and CLASSIFIED YOUR SITE (11).

Using computers can be an alienating experience for some. How can we make the site seems friendlier? How can we make the experience more fun?

Therefore

Include personal and ‘fun’ content. Link to interesting content on other sites (e.g. sites about your hobbies and pastimes) but make sure it is relevant to the central theme of the site. Contact pages should have names and pictures. Jokes are allowed, but again they must be pertinent. Above all avoid nasty aphorisms like ‘enjoy!’ or ‘thank you for shopping with...’

Consider providing a guide to the site using an AVATAR (32). Provide help and enhance personalization with a CONTEXT-SENSITIVE CONTACT LINK (33). When you link to other sites use THE RHETORIC OF ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE (20) and avoid making the user a PRISONER OF WAR (37).

Contributors and sources
Richard Dué, Detlef Vollmann

Discussion - forces - known uses

Sites that give webmaster@daftname.com as the address for contact are not revealing much about their attitudes. Perhaps the staff turnover is high. Try to give genuine, useful personal information, as you would if someone telephoned you: ‘Hi it’s Ben’. On pages that contain information on personnel consider including a picture, but make sure it does not make DOWNLOAD TIME (42) too long.

Personal pages might also include information on hobbies and pastimes. Linking to related sites also makes the site more interesting and human. Ben is an a professional anthropologist but an amateur musician. He plays the button accordeon (or melodeon). People who are interested in this fact (rather than his expertise in the traditions of the Kwara’ae people) might want to know where they can buy a melodeon or where they can listen to melodeons being played. So why not link to a music shop site or a list of pub sessions where such instruments can be played?

There are limits to this. Abbey national improved their site by removing the lifestyle section, which was rarely visited. The point is that it was not related to the reason people visited: looking for mortgages and there were other sites that did the job better.
A good example of a site with the human touch is the BBC Radio 3 children’s site. There are games including a fantastic musical composition game. You select instruments (marimba, piano, etc.) and rhythms and slot your selection into a bar structure. Kids (of all ages) can learn by experimentation how the different combinations sound and can write quite sophisticated compositions, with a little practice. It is important to note that all the games are educational in some way and thus related the Radio 3’s mission as a cultural ambassador.

Browse the language What is Wu? Look at an example pattern sequence Structure of the patterns
Comment on Wu Contributors Return to TriReme home page Links to related sites