Wandered into Salt Tasting Room a couple weeks ago but didn’t get a chance to check it out. Nina and Lorraine have been able to do what I haven’t – check out the legendary Salt. Well, I’ll have to live vicariously through their musings about the place. If that doesn’t work, there’s always sweetspot‘s sweet nothing from July 21st:

07-21-06 Pass the Salt

Ahh, France, so many things to love: the history, the clothes, the men. (S’il vous plaît, they invented French kissing. It doesn’t get any better than that!)

And the way they throw bread, cheese, meat and wine together, creating a meal that rivals five-course feasts from Michelin-starred restaurants. Which is why we were so delighted to stumble across Salt Tasting Room, a sleek new joint that elevates charcuterie and cheese to their rightful place at the top of the gourmet food chain.

At Salt, good things come in threes. Choose any three items from among the 20 meats and cheeses listed on the blackboard. Pick three condiments (and we’re not talking ketchup and relish) from the exotic array of chutneys, nuts and assorted accompaniments and voilà! For $15, you’ve just created your own little taste of Provence, complete with crackers and baguette.

Our tip for first-timers: Let your waiter create a wine and plate combo for you. Our taste buds won’t stop craving stilton, honeycomb and cabernet sauvignon. Or wild boar chorizo paired with organic apricots, or Hungarian salami with Riesling, or. . .

Now bring on the hot waiter and some French kissing. Excusez moi, we meant to say, French dishing. . .

Salt Tasting Room
www.salttastingroom.com
Blood Alley, Gastown
604-633-1912

If your imagination isn’t running wild at the moment, there’s also vitamin v‘s daily dose from July 28th:

10 things we love about salt tasting room

1. Its secretive, Blood Alley entrance in Gastown. Look up for the salt shaker.
2. The gorgeous, clean, modern design—with a picture window looking onto a whitewashed flophouse.
3. GM Chris Stearns’ new faux-hawk. Did he get it for his recent stage in the kitchen at Charlie Trotter?
4. Brilliant and unusual wine selects, like the amazing Italian Feudi di San Gregorio white ($60/bottle).
5. The beautiful concrete bathroom walls. Really.
6. Sean Heather’s (The Irish Heather) prize meat slicer.
7. The modern take on the ploughman’s lunch that constitutes the menu. $15 gets you three meats or cheeses from a rotating list, with Terra bread and crackers. So simple, so smart.
8. The tiny plates of “condiments” that come with roasted Spanish macona almonds, organic Similkameen apricots and French cornichons.
9. The fact that the 50-seat room was standing room only even before the opening was announced.
10. That this list could be a least twice as long.

Read more and view the blog at www.salttastingroom.com

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Another great Poynteronline posting:

Poynteronline
E-Media Tidbits

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Posted by Laura Ruel 12:05:52 PM

Seconds to Create Credibility

At the Nielsen Norman Group Usability Week’s Friday session, Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability, Hoa Loranger addressed the importance of site credibility.

“It is an important factor [that determines] whether a person will visit a site and will stay on your site,” said Loranger. “You have seconds on the home page to make a good first impression.”

Loranger cited the work of BJ Fogg at Stanford University to describe how to create feelings of credibility on your site:

• Good visual design
• Third-party endorsements of your work
• Providing a physical/street address for your organization.
• Updated content — not just content, but recent awards, etc.
• Promotional content and ads that are relevant to the site’s content
• No typos or bugs
• Easy to use

Loranger provided examples credible vs. not credible sites. Sean’s Painting was noted as less credible than Chism Brothers Painting. Similarly, Loan Finders was described as creating a less credible feeling than Lending Tree. She also noted the overwhelming form that appears on the second click on the Loan Finders site as also having a negative impact on credibility.

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Another great Poynteronline posting:

Poynteronline
E-Media Tidbits

Friday, June 23, 2006

Posted by Laura Ruel 7:25:08 AM

Text Ads Get the Most Looks

Here at the Nielsen/Norman Group’s Usability Week in San Francisco, Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne yesterday presented results from their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

Similar to the results in Poynter’s Eyetrack III study, their research on ads shows that people do not look at static ads with graphic treatment.

Users seem to “zone out” (with their peripheral vision) ads and other site elements that have clearly distinguishable ad features such as graphics and colors that make the ads look different from the rest of the site, or animated ads.

Nielsen/Norman’s study found that people spend, on average, less than one second viewing display/graphical treatment ads. Users did look at animated ads when they preceded content and were forced. However, in these cases the user had nothing else to view.

“Is this what you want to do to your users?” Coyne said.

When users DO look at ads with graphics, those ads usually have:

• Heavy use of large, clear text
• A color scheme that matches the site’s style
• Attention-grabbing proprieties such as black text on a white background, words such as “free” and interactive (UI) elements.

(More coverage of this research)
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With the need now, more than ever, to reach an audience that is bombarded all the time with stuff, it makes more and more sense to refine your message. One of the things we’re working on now with Urban Mixer is the visual element.

Poynteronline has always been a good source for all things online, period. Here’s such a posting which was totally helpful:

E-Media Tidbits – What Makes Web Images Attractive

Poynteronline
E-Media Tidbits

Friday, June 23, 2006

Posted by Laura Ruel 11:25:09 AM

What Makes Web Images Attractive

More from the Nielsen/Norman Group’s Usability Week in San Francisco. (Previous coverage) Yesterday Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne presented the results of their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

They offered one interesting and much-discussed observation: Task-oriented users really don’t pay attention to images on Web pages.

Similar to Poynter’s Eyetrack III results, and the results of an initial study done by my organization, the Digital Storytelling Effects Lab (DiSEL), NNG found that images seem to be most effective when a user is browsing or when images are directly related to the content’s overall presentation.

Both Eyetrack III and the NNG study found that faces in images tend to attract users’ focus. NNG mentioned to the dangers of using images as “an obstacle course.” Images that appear unnecessary, at least peripherally, can be erroneously tuned out.

According to NNG, images that do NOT attract attention share these traits:

• Generic/stock art
• Off-putting, cold, fake, too polished or “set up”
• Not related to content
• Look like advertisements
• Low contrast in terms of color — not crisp

Meanwhile, images that DO get attention share these traits:

• Related to page content
• Clearly composed and appropriately cropped
• Contain “approachable” people who are smiling, looking at the camera, not models
• Show areas of personal/private anatomy (Men tended to fixate on these areas more than women — really!)
• Items a user may want to buy.

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