Usability

Myth: People Read Less Online

Once again, the old story about people not reading on the web is getting attention. As Dean Allen wrote ten years ago, it goes like this:

Users don’t read
Users only scan
Users haven’t got
No attention span

I hate to get vulgar when it’s not even Friday yet, but this is bullshit.

Even in this current incarnation, there’s a critically important dodge:

Because users are in a hurry to find the very piece of information they’re looking for which is exactly what they normally do when reading newspaper articles and non-fiction books. They scan to skip the irrelevant.

In other words, people read on the web almost exactly the way they read anywhere else: they skim till they find what they need. This is manifestly not the same thing as “users don’t read,” and claiming that it is will almost certainly lead to stupid content and UX choices. The whole anti-reading campaign is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the ways in which people read printed text, and the difference between their behaviors as online and offline readers.

In fact, people read more deeply online than they do in print, and on the web, “scanners” tend to read about as much text as “methodical readers.” Go read the whole Poynter EyeTrack ‘07 report site. It’s excellent, as is Leen Jones’s post on the subject.

Publish date:
June 23rd, 2010
Discussion:
10 Comments
Posted in:
Content Strategy
Design for Reading
Usability

The Plot (Not) To Annoy Eric Meyer

Headshot of Eric Meyer

Do not taunt happy fun Eric Meyer

Every year, thousands of people in the web industry attend the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, and every year, the number of SXSW-specific tweets—way too many quotes from panels, of course, but also “Going to Ginger Man” and “Ballroom A is LIKE UNTO AN ICEBERG”—tend to drown out other discussion in the web-making section of Twitter.

And every year, Eric Meyer, who no longer attends SXSW, is annoyed by all the SXSW Twitter fuss. And reasonably so. Twitter needs to work out a way to send certain tweets to subsets of your followers. (Seriously, guys—Livejournal figured this out how many years ago? It’s time.)

Since Twitter hasn’t done so, I’m trying a new workaround, not just to avoid annoying Eric (although he is a very nice man), but as an attempt to hack together a better communication plan, period.

This year, once my plane hits the ground in Austin, all my SXSW-related tweets will start showing up at @kissane_sxsw instead of my usual @kissane account. Those who want to see my Austin tweets can thus opt-in, and all those who don’t can do nothing and won’t be deluged with “Tihs bar is so quite tonight” tweets over the weekend. Not from me, at least. (I stay out about as late as a teetotaling grandma, so my tweets are pretty tame, but still.)

It’s an experiment in not being irritating. I’ll let you know how it goes.

More and Better Ideas

  • Peter, in the comments section below, suggests at-replying SXSW-specific posts to @shhxsw. If everyone who wants to see SXSW tweets follows that account, presto, opt-in tweets. (Hey Peter, since we, uh, share an apartment, you should tell me these thoughts in your brain, dude.)
  • Erin Kurtz suggests tagging the most interesting/inspirational/cautionary tweets about SXSW with #sxswlesson—they will then show up at http://sxswlesson.com/. I think that’s a clever idea.
  • WD45, aka Clinton Forry, points to muuter, which I now plan to use every week when youse start discussing the newest Lost episode days before I see it. Score.
  • Amber Simmons (@ambersimmons) suggests Tweedact. How have I not been using these things all along?! Yes, interrobang.
  • Got more Twitter hacks or SXSW communication tricks? Put ‘em in the comments or tweet at me. I’ll collect everything I see here.
Publish date:
March 10th, 2010
Discussion:
6 Comments
Posted in:
Content Strategy
Usability

A Tale of 3 News Apps

I used to read The New York Times online. Granted, the NYT can be weirdly insular, mesmerized by the trappings of wealth, and bad at covering literature, but I like newspapers, I like plenty of the NYT‘s national and international coverage, and I live in New York.

Over the last year, I’ve found myself doing almost all of my carefully limited news consumption on my phone. It’s the kind of reading I can do while sardined into an uptown 6 train during rush or standing in the eternal line at Trader Joe’s, and it doesn’t intrude on the precious blocks of uninterrupted reading time I try to spend on other things. And there’s an NYT app for the iPhone, so…great, right?

Well, no.

Good Is Better Than Early

The NYT’s iPhone app was released in July of 2008. After 18 months of frequent updates that often failed to fix the app’s glitches, crashes, glacial download times, tendency to fail to download content for offline reading, and increasingly intrusive ads, I’ve given it up. The last time it successfully launched on my phone was in December, and when updating my phone again and updating the app didn’t fix the problem, I declined to start over (again) with a fresh install and just deleted it.

I now read news on my phone via the Guardian‘s iPhone app, which was released in December 2009, and the difference is like walking out of a stuffy cubicle lit by flickering fluorescents and into a bright spring afternoon. The Guardian app is beautifully designed for readers and includes intuitive and useful ways to discover and read related content, as well as a fully customizable menu of content; fast, configurable, and reliable offline reading features; a useful search feature,  and glorious photography sized for my phone. It even has great audio content.

Screenshot of Guardian app

Pretty, too

The NYT app is free. The Guardian app costs $2.99 in the US and £2.39 in the UK. One of these applications wastes my time and often disappoints me; the other is fast and transparently easy to use, and it doesn’t leave me with a “This article was not downloaded” message while I’m squished between a sweating shouty person and a tissueless sneezer on the train and am desperate for a mental escape.

It’s an easy choice, and I hope the Guardian makes a lot of money. But the part that media leaders should be thinking about is that I now read the Guardian, rather than the NYT, at my desktop computer, and I’m probably not alone in that. (Granted, this ad campaign alone makes me want never to visit the NYT site again.)

Worst in Class

Oh, and the third app. That would be the iPhone application released this week by The Washington Post, which is the other national US newspaper I tend to read. It costs $1.99 and apparently snuffs itself after a year, so you have to re-purchase it. This last fact is only visible if you click a “read more” link in the iTunes store and go to the very end of the list of features.

I’ll happily pay twice as much as the Post is charging if I get a great app in return, but the annual re-download nonsense suggests bad things about the Post‘s notion of good practices for online publication; it’s too similar to Amazon’s incredibly creepy ability to snatch back content from your Kindle if they decide to do so. More importantly, it’s so buggy, crashy, crippled, and generally lousy that the paper’s own tech columnist gave it a terrible review.

The Guardian seems to have learned something from the last ten years of the web, and its app radiates confidence in and goodwill toward its readership. The NYT and Post, on the other hand, are clinging to the idea that putting revenue first and readers (a very distant) second will lead to long-term profits. I still have a soft spot for the NYT, but were I investing in media companies, I know where I’d be putting my money.

Further Reading

Publish date:
March 4th, 2010
Discussion:
4 Comments
Posted in:
Design for Reading
Publishing
Usability