02 Apr 2007 1954H

Web credibility and captology

First of all, I just want to say, I love my coworkers. I was a little reticent about this business trip, since it was three or four cities this week, but I came to the office and they made me feel right at home. So today I was in Cleveland at HQ and my boss and I were talking about this web credibility stuff that came out of Stanford a few years back, for instance, this study conducted with Consumers Union, and another, 10 Guidelines for Web Site Credibility, seemed promising, and then, just seemingly, stopped, around 2002. What happened? Funding dried up? Hmm. Then I followed along the trail and found the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab, which studies captology, the study of computers as persuasive technology. Originally I was unpersuaded by that title and thought it a load of hooey. Internetworked computers are just the medium now: it’s the messaging that we communicate with different techniques that is the persuasive part, not the computer technology such as the web. The techniques we apply to those communications are time-old. The technology that makes asynchronous mass communication possible is the only thing that is new. So how we apply the techniques to the new technology really is what we’re interested in, and so captology might be better served as how to communicate through new media for persuasion, profit, and enjoyment. As a user experience practice in a web development firm, we are primarily interested in the persuasion and profit part, and increasingly so about the enjoyment and are therefore very much interested in how to apply and refine these techniques. In any case, it appears that their work did not stop, since they have a blog, and in fact a conference, although it sounds like a massive, two day pecha kucha, on web credibility is taking place later this month. I should think it to be very useful and perhaps will go, if only to have an excuse to see S. and friends in the Bay.

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