The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online

by Gerry McGovern

Every website has a "long neck"--a small set of tasks that are very important to your customers. In this book, Web content expert Gerry McGovern offers tried and tested tips to make your website the commercial asset it really should be.

The Stranger's Long Neck is a practical guide for any manager wishing to improve their organisation's online performance. Web content specialist, Gerry McGovern, explains that all websites have a small set of tasks, or "long necks," that are important to its customers and that must be easy to complete or customers will go elsewhere. The Stranger's Long Neck shows how to tune in effectively to what your customers want--and then deliver it with aplomb.

Understanding customer needs can be a difficult task when customers are ‘strangers', in that he or she is always "on the outside," particularly so in an online environment. Using case studies including Tetra Pak, Microsoft and the NHS, and illustrated with web shots throughout, The Stranger's Long Neck shows how organisations can use the ‘long neck' theory to create and manage efficient and user-friendly websites.

Genres: Nonfiction, Design, Web

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2010

Reviews

[Frances Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very practical book if you’d like to have a go at Top Task Analysis, a very interesting quantitative UX research method which relies on asking representative users to vote on the most important tasks to them. I tried it in a recent UX contract and the results were very insightful. I’d highly recommend the approach for all UX teams. The author (who has been very helpful to me over Twitter and email) has a new book coming out soon which is even more detailed when it comes to the difficult and time consuming task of shortlisting before you send the survey out so I’d probably wait for that one now.

[Eduardo Toledano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant insight! This is a necessary book if you work in the User Experience (UX) field.

[Stan Skrabut · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have a website or produce content for a website, then you really need to pick up a copy of The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online* by Gerry McGovern. This book talks about how you can create a better experience for your viewers by attending to the critical tasks. It looks at critical tasks, navigation, search, and the effect of noncritical tasks on your website performance. Read more

[ThL · Rating 4 out of 5]

Core topics
* organize web around tasks, find the most important ones as seen by the customer
* Measure task success, failure and disaster.
* Old stuff actually reduce quality and should be removed

Unanswered questions:
He is arguing that you should ask the marked. Asing the marked would never lead from Nokia phone to iPhone. When is a service so innovative that the marked is a wrong source for information.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, fairly quick read, but I kept putting it down. I think it's just not something that seemed fresh to me. Key points: Less is more, you just need to figure out what to keep. What should you keep? The content that pertains to the user's top tasks.

[Martinxo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty much essential reading for anyone who runs a large website with the intention that users (customers) get what they need quickly and with minimum stress. Great stuff.

[Lea Bech-Sjøthun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pragmatic approach - great methods! I'm already in the process of testing the websites :-)

[Ateeq Ahmad · Rating 4 out of 5]

good book for all usability enthusiasts

[Bob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Useful to anyone looking at Web development. Like all of McGovern's writing, The Long Neck is more practical than other Web usability / marketing books.

[Joanne Dickinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Used this book as a desktop reference when designing web sites to measure and increase visitors' experiences through integrated and interactive communications.....