We just wanted to follow up on our posting last week announcing the
HumanClick interactive tours at Stoney Grove.  We had two tours this week,
one Tuesday and the other tonight (Wednesday).  Despite a real surge in
overall site visitors (many with .edu and .org URLS indicating that they
might have come from either this list or another mailing we did),
relatively few people elected to chat.  It may be that they were
uncomfortable with the technology, or with talking to anonymous folks on
the other end.  Several people seem to have had trouble either getting into
HumanClick, or in finding it once they’d transferred from one page to the
next. We suspect that this may be a result of unfamiliarity with Windows on
the part of the visitors rather than anything intrinsically wrong with the
chat software.
Our site is fictional, and we had characters from the site “in character”
chatting with visitors. This caused some difficulties with our visitors,
who either were unfamiliar with the site and didn’t know what to do with
us, or wanted to talk about HumanClick only.  This is certainly an
interpretive problem that other sites, real or fictional, deal with
whenever they have interpreters in character.
From our perspective, we found that we were able to handle multiple chats
without problems, that the time lag between questions and answers was
reasonable, and that the program allowed us to see where on the site
visitors were, and thus address them with comments specific to the page
they were viewing.  We had an international turnout, which was nice, and
some interesting conversations. Overall, HumanClick is a neat tool and will
work well for sites with low to modest visitation.  It is an fairly easy
way to add interactivity to your site. If anyone has any questions, please
email us off list at [log in to unmask]  Thanks to all who came!

Barbara Heath and Mark Freeman

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