I was watching NECN yesterday morning and saw something scroll across the bottom of the screen, "ID FRAUD PITCHMAN WHO PUBLISHED HIS SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS HIT BY IDENTITY THEFT", and thought, Bummer, huh? Nothing quite like throwing down a gauntlet, don't you think?
I found that scrolling message so interesting I was going to write a blog post about it.
To get some background information for the blog post, I went to NECN's website yesterday to learn more.
I'm enough of a dolt to think that, because NECN had it scrolling on their tv show, they'd have something about it on their website. I even searched for both "identity theft" and "identity fraud". The results of that search are shown here in several shots. Here is the first part of the results page.
This is the second part of their results page.
I'm long past not being able to find anything relevant to my search, now I'm well into "My god, do they honestly expect anybody to find anything they want in this?"
And I looked, I really did. On two different computer screens just in case. I couldn't find a thing relative to what I was searching for. Disbelief is an understatement.
There's one more screen in this series. It's shown in the "Continue Reading" link. Next I turned to my beloved NPR because I knew -- I just knew -- they wouldn't let me down.
Yeah, well, let this be a lesson to me that favorites can change over time. I performed the same search on NPR's site. I won't bother showing you the results screens, only sharing what NPR tossed up a matches for... "identity fraud"
That's what I searched for. What I got included and was not limited to:
- Online Art Fraud Nets Growing Number of Victims
- Barack Obama Breaks With Ex-Pastor, Rev. Wright
- Supreme Court Upholds Indiana's Voter ID Law
- Report of Abuse Prompts Raid of Polygamous Ranch
- Exiled to Boston: Verdi's 'A Masked Ball'
I won't bother sharing my experiences on CNN. It just gets worse.
Please don't email or call me to let me know how many awards these sites have won (if they have). I'm well aware and have proven any number of times that sites can win lots of design awards and still be completely useless to people using them. As an early adopter of NextStage's Evolution Technology told his staff, "Well, I personally think this web site looks like [crap], and believe it or not, I don't care about that, nor do I care about any design theory. What I do care about is that everybody who visits this site thinks it looks like [crap], too. The information I have tells me that it needs to have less of this and more of that. Either you make that happen, or I'll find someone who can. This isn't a showcase for your alleged talent, it's a business tool."
Improving Design to Promote Usability is a NextStage Case Study on just this subject.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Upcoming Trainings:
- Know How Someone Is Thinking in 10 Seconds or Less Half-day training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 13 June 08
- SUNY Marketing Professionals Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 11-13 June 08
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