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July 13, 2004
Take a small step
Last week I started exercising on a regular basis for the first time in my life. My regimen includes a run of 3-4 miles and some stretching execrcises, nothing really rigorous. Still these days I'm in state of mind where I'm acutely tuned to any information about exercising, healthy eating and so on. So, it isn't surprising that yesterday when I saw a banner ad on CNN for SmallStep.gov, I clicked on it. SmallStep.gov is a website of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) that encourages you to a small step towards better health. The site includes facts and tips on eating better and getting active. In addition to all this info, if you sign on you get access to an activity tracker where you can enter your eating and exercising schedule to do a better job tracking them (unfortunately the interaction on the site wasn't working very well when I tried it). What makes this site worthy of my attention. First of all, I came across the site when I was already partially motivated to look for information. Second, the banner ad was on the front page of CNN. It was a simple two color yet nicely designed ad. It had the web address on the ad which had the ".gov" domain. Moreover, the Ad Council logo was on the banner ad. All of these factors worked together to make me click the ad. The site itself is nicely designed and very credible since it is associated with HHS and has ".gov" in the web address. There are testimonials of "real" people who have made progress (although the example I read was quite extreme and not that useful for someone like me). You can get a lot of information without actually becoming a member. With the membership you get access to the interactive Activity Tracker. A lot of the things that they talk about on this site (for instance -- setting small goals) and how they've designed the overall interaction of the site remind me a lot of what we talked about in the Captology class that I TAed for BJ. Overall I think this site can become a good case study for students and practitioners of Captology.Posted by Aditya Johri at July 13, 2004 08:17 AM
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