Shopping, Social Media, and Cognitive Bias – The Monday May 2nd Roundup

No shortness of excitement this week. Hockey, royal wedding, Stephen Hamel joining us and… I feel like there was something else… oh right, the death of Osama Bin Laden. With all this excitement it’s amazing anyone is still writing about the internet, yet this week we have posts on building a shopping cart, social media, and cognitive biases all ready for you to interrupt your TV watching and learn something.

Create

Our friends over at Get Elastic have a great post on building your shopping cart. Specifically, they have a 16 point checklist of things to make sure you’ve implemented before you launch.
Next up, Smashing Mag has a guide to user-centered design for mobile devices. What I really love about this is that their first point is “Do you really need a mobile website?”

Attract

Logic and Emotion has a post on Bin Laden’s death and what this teaches us about social media. However, I want to give serious credit to these guys for mentioning validation and how media has become shared across multiple spheres, with a lot of mainstream media still playing a crucial roll.
Enor has an interesting post on social media, comparing it to farmers markets. What bothers me about this post is that – while it’s not wrong persay – it reflects this incomplete view of social media that our industry seems to progress, acting as if it’s some kind of new thing, and not just a minor change on what we already had. This saccharine view of social media remembers the pre-2005 internet as the 2 year dotcom bubble of single purpose webpages and advertisements, forgetting the forums, the chatrooms, the user submitted content sites. It’s not that behavior has changed so much as the market/audience online has grown. That said, the rest of their article is right on, explaining how to target and optimize a social media campaign.

Analyze

Google is continuing their series on GA v5, this time talking about the new custom reports.
L3 has a great, if simple, post on how to use the URL Query Parameters List Builder for Google Analytics.

Optimize

Six Revisions has post on Cognitive Biases and how these shape the user experience. This post discusses a lot of the basic assumptions that we make about web design, layout, and function, and how designers should keep these in mind in order to optimize the buying process.

Kent Clark

Some have compared him to the Dalai Lama, others to Kublai Kahn. When he isn't teaching third world children how to purify water with nothing more than a plastic bottle and a garden hose, he is creating mad waves for surfers off the west coast with little more than a paddle. Some say there is a boat involved, others that he walks on water. Little is known about his background. he appeared from nowhere 15 years ago and claims heritage from a land with neither want not need. He makes little comment, stating only that it was a pretty cool place. Fire does not burn him, cold does not hurt him. Words could... but they don't. When he passes, pedals fall off branches. When he speaks, hair tugs at skin, pulling just slightly in his direction. He does not sleep but he does dream. He has muscled his way into the lives of the famous and whispered his way into their hearts. And in the wee hours he plays oboe softly, as if to sooth the night to sleep.