[Sigia-l] requiring users to identify the audience category they are in

[Skot Nelson]

On May-10-2006, at 8:15 AM, Kenneth Bryson wrote:

> 'residents' 'visitors' or 'business.'   However, I feel this is a
> mis-labeling scenario.  Not only do the top level categories not  
> provide
> any real clue as to the content they categorize, much of the  
> content is
> actually cross-linked between numerous categories.

As top level categories go, these are pretty standard. You are quite  
right that they don't reveal much about what the content might be:  
this is quite common when there is a push for "single word" or  
unnecessarily short titles.

It may be that your examples are theoretical and that The City home  
page provides other clues to the visitor: a home page with somewhat  
more descriptive words designed to correctly stream the users could  
work.

> I tried to think of other sites that do similar labeling and the only
> thing I could think of is ecommerce, where you need to choose whether
> you are a man, woman, or child.

Lots of other examples exist: every bank in Canada has both an  
"Investing" and a "Banking" section, even for those who aren't  
logging in or transacting (in fact, those who ARE logging in should  
have a single sign in...I'm not sure who's not doing this at this  
point.)

Airlines and the travel industry do this by sending agents and direct  
sales customers through dramatically different paths.

Even that bastion of e-commerce success and poor design Amazon  
provides a type of streaming through the heavy use of categories: one  
of the things they do very well is ensure that your search results  
cross these categories.

Looking for good and bad examples is an interesting, and more  
difficult challenge. Banks, for example, have a tendency to stream  
their audiences into categories which are meaningless to the audience  
itself. Hence the rise of the "single sign on": just show me where  
ALL my money is -- the distinction between "investments" and  
"banking" is yours, not mine.

Frankly, your "Visitors" labels make sense (except that I didn't  
think anybody actually visited Toronto anymore); Business & Residents  
seems somewhat odd -- where do I go to find out how much my property  
taxes are going to be, or what day my garbage is going to be picked  
up? In this case, I'd suspect there'd be answers to both in both.