How much do we read online?

Jakob Nielsen's latest article, How Little Do Users Read? has some shocking conclusions!

About 20% of the text on your site!!!

Wow, that sounds extremely low to me, but it sounds like he did a good job analyzing the data.

What does this mean for us?

Well, I think Steve Krug's advice to cut your content in half and then cut it in half again seems to be pretty accurate.

In general, I think it's important to be ruthless about putting your pages on the chopping block and getting rid of all the excess fat (Nielsen calls it Blah-blah text).

Your pages should only contain the most important information. That's right. No Welcome! No corporate fluff. No thanks for visiting my site. Just tell people what the site is for and give context to the other pages in the site (or, as Jared Spool would say, give them more of a scent of information). Help lead your readers down the path they're looking for. Help them to find what they're looking for.

Usability or User Experience?

RE: Usability or User Experience?

I've been thinking about these terms recently anyway, so when I came across this article, I knew that I wasn't the only one.

Usability used to be the umbrella term, but it's been replaced with 'user experience.' 'Usability' has come to mean easy to use and tends to be mostly focused on usability testing and making a product usable.

User Experience is a broader term which takes other factors into account: how people are using the tool or web site and the Brand. The article uses a great example of Apple products: I love them too! My iPhone is a joy to use and it does everything so effortlessly.

My job title is actually User Experience Specialist II. I like the sound of that. Not only am I just conducting research to understand user needs, I am helping design the experience of using the product or site.

I think we can all think more broadly about the application of user research to experience because then you're getting more towards user needs and goals and what's not only functional, but pleasurable to use.

A step closer to the Matrix

RE: Matrix-style virtual worlds 'a few years away'

Yup, you heard me... we're getting closer to the Matrix becomming a reality. That's kinda scarry, isn't it? With the brilliance of the Matrix Trilogy still in the back of my mind, it's a bit ironic that we're working towards even more photo-realism in virtual worlds.

Sure, the concept is cool. Who doesn't want to take a vaction on the beach for 5 minutes during an especially cold and rainy day at the office?

But one of the central messages of The Matrix is to break free from computer-mediated reality into REALITY. The real. I.e. not virtual.

I was reading a bit of Baudrilliard recently as well as some Emerson. I feel torn between the real and the imaginary, the virtual world of the internet and the real world of cities, the dream of living life on MySpace versus hiking in Nature.

OK, now don't freak out... I really don't want to live my life on MySpace, but for a lot of people, it's becoming the new social hangout.

I think the more we come back into reality and away from the virtual, the better off we'll be as a human race. I almost see this as a step back... regardless of how cool it is.

Moderation. Yeah, that's it. Let's just keep everything in moderation.

Problems with Walled Gardens

A resposne to Jakob Nielsen:

"In 1999, I wrote an article "Metcalfe's Law in Reverse" about the problems of so-called walled gardens, where a service cuts itself off from the Internet and tries to add value by being closed."

On NPR yesterday, there was a segment on Bit Torrent and how it worked by grabbing only bits of content from disparate sources. A side note to the story was the certain ISPs (Comcast, actually) were attempting to block the traffic on their network for file sharing programs such as Bit Torrent.

Jakob Nielsen brought this same argument up back in 1999 and concluded that it will fail.

"Facebook and the current generation of social networks are trying to replicate the walled garden strategy that failed ten years ago. It'll fail again."
The idea is that by closing off the network, it will promote value, but as Metcalfe has shown, the larger network will prevail. Will it prevail in large corporations? When will we stop purchasing external systems that won't talk to each other and start integrating them into a cohesive user experience?

I think we need to be working towards integration, not exclusion.

Netiquette: Response to David Pogue

Response to David Pogue's The Netiquette Diaries

I've had similar experiences in online communities where people have gone seemingly out of their way to be rude to me. At first, I was just hurt. Then something else occurred to me...

There is this sense that everyone and everything out there on the internet is there just for me-that we are somehow entitled to it because we have the ability to browse for information about anything we like at the tip of our fingertips.

This "My way right away" philosophy is causing our culture to expect this out of everything. What started as a sales ploy of Burger King became a national epidemic of selfishness.

On the internet, each of us are the most important thing and everything (and everyone) else are just there for our entertainment, enjoyment, criticism and disdain. It doesn't have to be malicious, and most of the time, I don't think it's meant to be-we've just come to expect that it's all here for us.

This mentality is not only found on the internet. American culture these days fosters it.

Two other comments resonated with me:

There are a lot of angry people out there; there are also a lot of stupid people out there.
Anonymity may be the culprit-it's much easier to say things when they aren't to someone's face.
Once we start being accountable for what we say and do on the internet, I think people will start being nicer to each other-without that accountability... well, you see what we get.

Response to: How Usable is Jakob Nielsen?

In response to How Usable is Jakob Nielsen?

While I don’t hold Jakob Nielsen up to Guru status, I do find his comments accurate and thought provoking. In the realm of web design and usability, I believe it’s important to survey the entire industry, not a single person. Thus, we should all be reading as much as we can from several different sources in order to balance out our own views of current trends in web design and usability.

It seems that this particular article was mostly a personal attack on Jakob-that he had conflicts of interest, that he doesn’t care about graphic design, that he has a bad writing style, etc. These personal attacks, while they may be true, don’t affect the content of his articles. I still think he has good things to say, though I would not base my entire opinion on usability on one person’s views, be it Jakob or Jared or Edward (Tufte) or Ben (Schneiderman)… (I could list several more here).

As for the argument of visual design, I completely agree. Jakob is entirely focused on usability-does the site work? If the answer is yes, then you’ve met his goal. However, there can be a marriage between graphic design and usability; form and function. I believe that as technical communicators, as web developers, as content owners, as graphic designers that is our job.

An interesting side note on the use of blue for links: Anatomy has shown that blue is the worst color to use because there are actually no blue cones in the fovea of the eye. This means that we can only perceive the color blue indirectly. When we focus on something, we use the fovea of the eye. The fovea allows us to focus on something about the size of a thumbnail held at arm’s length. We can only see blue using our peripheral vision, that is, outside of the fovea because we literally have NO blue receptors (cones) in the fovea.

Jakob should not have a “Monopoly on Usability Consciousness.” That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to what he says, it just means that we apply it with a grain of salt.

PostGrad Thoughts

I've been realizing just how much grad school took out of me. Busy-ness seems to be part of the PostModern condition. Our lives are fast-paced whether we like it or not... or are they?

I've been recently trying to focus on simplification. Choosing activities that are meaningful and important to me, instead of just things that fill my time.