Profile #2: All Motivation -- high need to motivate the users to respond in a particular way.

Color, imagery and backgrounds should be used to set the mood and evoke the intended response in your audience.

The Mars Attacks: The Movie site echoes the campy, dark science-fiction mood of the movie in the interests of motivating the audience to become interested in seeing the movie. The Riddler, a game site, offers games and prizes in a brightly colored, cartoony set of pages in order to entice the audience to scroll through a number of advertisements.

Use links for suspense, aesthetic unity, branching storylines and annotation.

This use of links is contrary to the oft-repeated warning that links should specify clearly what the user is going to get by clicking, but it is appropriate for the All Motivation site. At The Spot, the introduction states "WeĠre a bunch of friends sharing a beach house in Santa Monica, California. Everyday we put up this Website and tell the world about our lives through daily journals. We can also interact with you - but only if you come in!" The links at this site are embedded in narrative text, and they serve to unfold portions of an entertaining sopa opera-style story without revealing what, exactly, is to be told.

Be sure that the audience will experience what is intended.

This guideline requires that the designer attend to details such as testing the Web site on multiple browsers and platforms over slow modems, using a Web-safe palette to index images so that they give the same impression on both PC and Macintosh computers, and paying attention to the experience audiences will have while watching pages load; not just the experience of seeing them after they are loaded.

AMTEC 1997 Conference, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Elizabeth Boling, Barbara Bichelmeyer, Kurt Squire, Sonny Kirkley
Indiana University
Last updated 1 June 1997
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~iirg/RESEARCH/AMTEC97/profile2.html