Designing for extreme readers...
So a mainstream news site is often comprised of many hundreds - thousands - of individual news stories. These stories are mostly designed to fit into a pretty clear taxonomy which reflects "what the news site is for". This taxonomy is normally pretty clearly defined and normally has a pretty wide top level (the items that deal with the news alone are divided up into anything from seven to twelve sections - world, business, science, politics etc). Articles may be faceted or sit under several headings (heterarchical organisation), but the taxonomies concerned are fairly clear (often inherited from org-charts derived from parallel print products - but never mind, eh?). This kind of taxonomy results in the need for left-hand navigation (it's simply difficult to put large lists horizontally on a page). This kind of navigation, in turn, is well-suited to the kind of readers that a news site tends to get - people who have an ongoing relationship with the publication in question (ie. they knew of the site before they went there) and are therefore prepared to browse the site because they came to it as a specific first port of call for a kind of information or to answer a specific question.
Weblogs are very different beasts - particularly those weblogs which are based around single-entry archives. Firstly, they don't tend to have clearly definable taxonomies. Some may - but they are the exception, and tend to be the more professionally oriented. So there's no need for large navigational structures or organised heterarchies. Weblogs are also not first port of call sites when you're trying to answer a question or get a specific kind of information. They are specifically designed to be feeding out information as and when the publisher wishes, and not in direct response to anything going on in the world outside. You cannot guarantee that Jason's site - on any given day - will provide you with all the news you need to know about any subject. Nor is the site organised to make the finding of entries on a specific subject matter as simple as possible. This is not a flaw in Jason's site - nor is it a flaw in weblogging in general. It's simply the way the form is structured.
In fact, while news sites are a coherent whole into which individuals dip themselves, weblogs have two very different types of readers with two very different forms of interaction. Firstly, there are those with a long-term association or relationship with the person / site in question. Secondly, there are those who are directed to a specific internal page by a link from another weblog or via an unfortunate (or inspired) search request. These extremes are more radical than a news site. On a weblog, it's entirely possible that someone might find themselves on a specific internal page without having the slightest idea of the context of a post whatsoever - or anything about the site in question. This will be still more true about a site that allows people to publish individual entries to individual pages - like Movable Type.
Essentially, while a substantial group of readers are treating your site as an ongoing narrative centred around the presence of a singular human author, many other people are seeing nothing more than an infinitesimal slice of your content. For all they care, your weblogging application might not be producing one coherent site at all - in fact to any individual member of this second audience, your weblog will consist of just one of dozens / hundreds / thousands of bespoke self-contained and only loosely connected one-page sites that all happen to share a design. One of them might see "What Tom Coates did at the pub last night", one might see "Niels Bohr and the War in Iraq", another "Extreme Readers and Weblogging". This group further breaks down into two groups - the group that might be persuaded to hang around for longer and those who came for information and information alone.
Most weblogs are designed for the weblog-literate - who you might want to lure across the rest of the content on your site by supplying them with previous / next links or calendars ,or by illuminating your (probably fairly haphazard) taxonomies through displaying lists of categories. But the average member of the general public will understand the page that they find themselves upon only if you supply context - above and beyond that supplied by a standard news or article based website. They need to be able to assess your trustworthiness, they need to be able to estimate the value of your writing. They also need to be able to figure out precisely what kind of writing it is.
So here are a few recommendations to webloggers who wish to be comprehensible to these readers:
- Place a small piece of explanatory text on your individual archives explaining the structure of your site.
- Elucidate or link clearly to information about you - the author of said weblog - including any pertinent details that make you qualified to talk about what you're talking about (if it is a personal site, then that's qualification enough).
- For this audience it's important to recognise that you're not necessarily going to want to promote your own personal 'brand', so leave your navigational links simple, clean and self-explanatory.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
For a while I have been considering placing some kind of explanatory text on my individual archive pages. Since I moved from my own PHP-based system to Movable Type, I have had a dramatic increase in people searching for an obscure topic in Google, finding it on a 2 year old archive page on my site, and leaving a comment asking for help with the problem. Often these comments are written in language that suggests they believe my website is a help form or discussion board, not just my own random links.
→ Posted by: gjw at March 23, 2003 11:55 PM
I've often thought about the visitors who come to the individual entry pages of my site via search requests. Like most webloggers, I do include main navigation on every page. This navigation includes a link to my "about" page. I also list my categories on these individual pages.
However, after reading this, I wonder if I too should place a little bit of explanatory text on my individual pages. People probably don't know what the heck my categories mean (even though I try to make them as self-explanatory as possible), nor do they click on my "about" link so they know what the heck they stumbled across when visiting my site. I don't even do that on my home page -- now I am wondering if I should.
→ Posted by: Dawn at March 23, 2003 11:59 PM
I'm in the process of redesigning my blog right now with Movable Type and one thing that I'm trying to address off the bat is the problem (if it can be called a problem) of users stumbling across individual archived entries of mine. Usually they are not part of a bigger scheme although sometimes I have been known to issue series, so I am including on each page a little bit about my site so that users don't have to click through an extra link to find an "about me" page and can get a more basic understanding of where all the stuff they're reading had come from.
→ Posted by: Xavier at March 24, 2003 4:52 AM
Wow, you don't half go on about not a lot.
How about a brief summary for each blog, that way we can get to the gist of entries quicker without having to skim read the lot.
(As you can guess, I have not read this article at all but gave a cursory glance at the title and started to prattle on in the comments section, hence contradicted myself entirely.)
We live in the MTV generation, where people have less-than-goldfish attention spans. Get to the point! Life's too short.
→ Posted by: Neave at March 24, 2003 12:07 PM
Weird one this, Neave. A fair few other people have e-mailed to tell me this piece was particularly useful for them. I tend to think it's a bit overlong as well, but then we're not always the best judges of these things.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 24, 2003 1:34 PM
An important issue, perhaps, but a ridiculously easy one to address. I have "Weblog" written at the top of my weblog, and "Weblog - Individual Entry" written on each individual entry page. Anybody who doesn't have the presence of mind to click on the "About" link to find out more about the weblog author should probably be kept away from sharp objects like computers.
→ Posted by: Marcus at March 24, 2003 4:53 PM
If I ever see another weblog entry about weblogs I'm going to jump out of the fucking window
→ Posted by: Dave at March 24, 2003 5:08 PM
To be fair, Dave, this weblog is partially about weblogs - although I understand your frustration. Often when at news.bbc.co.uk, I become overwhelmed by the irritating number of apparently impartial factual and timely pieces of writing there... Damn them!
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 24, 2003 5:55 PM
(Tee hee to the both of you).
One thing I would say, as a point of constructive criticism - I don't think the red links overlay very well on the blue background. The red bleeds quite badly on my screen, anyway. I'd suggest black and underlined or something similar.
→ Posted by: Marcus at March 24, 2003 9:03 PM
I'm with Neave on this one. It continually baffles me why anyone with such an obvious interest in weblog usability would continually hector their poor readers with the kind of interminable prose that you do.
You've got an excellent grasp of matters concerning layout and navigation - and you've obviously got a much better than average grasp of the English language - but your communication is continually apalling, the worst kind of academic babble.
This is the Internet. Brevity is vital. Clarity is key. You get neither here.
→ Posted by: Kennedy at March 24, 2003 9:15 PM
Are weblogs really that difficult to fathom for the uninitiated? To be honest, I think the terminology surrounding weblogging is more baffling to newbies rather than the the stucture of the content itself...
→ Posted by: s3d at March 25, 2003 12:30 PM
"This is the Internet. Brevity is vital. Clarity is key."
Speak for yourself.
→ Posted by: Martin Wisse at March 27, 2003 4:06 PM
No offense, Kennedy, but you're talking about a specific kind of writing designed for a very specific type of audience. This post was clearly designed for a different group of people than much of my other stuff - it was more directly aimed at Information Architects and the like who may be taking weblog-style posts into the mainstream. As to 'this is the internet, brevity is vital, clarity is key' - well brevity is always important - clarity is always important. But precision is just as important - and for this particular audience on this particular subject precision, explanation and context trumps brevity. On a related note - plasticbag.org remains my personal site. I answer to no-one, so I write precisely as I wish to and however I feel is appropriate. My readers (both of them) also have no obligation to keep reading the site and yet do so anyway. I must be doing something right...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 27, 2003 4:30 PM