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Doing consulting work in the newspaper industry has keyed me into one of the major problems for newspapers as they transition online. They don’t use web designs that are user-friendly.
If you were to look at the recent redesign by our local Charlottesville daily, The Daily Progress, you might, from a consulting standpoint, believe the site is a well-designed site.
It has all the bells and whistles, flash intro pages, monetization spots, widget partnerships, tags, featured readers, etc. The problem, and most of my peers agree, is that a site like this is horribly difficult to navigate. I do appreciate what the Roanoke Times (a close by award winner) has done with their site design, but still as a casual reader, the amount of content and the complexity of the layout scares me and most anyone else away.
Site design should be about minimalism and simplicity. Why? Users have the worst ADD on the planet right now and it’s going to get worse as they are bombarded with more and more online content. I do have evidence to support this.
Take a recently published study titled “Not quite the average: An empirical study of Web use.” I highly suggest you read this PDF if you are involved in web design. The authors studied detailed browsing patterns of 17 to 30 year olds. My favorite finding is:
More than 17% of all new pages were still visited for less than 4 seconds, nearly 50% were shown for less than 12 seconds and 11.6% were displayed for more than 2 minutes (median: 12.4s). However, a fifth of the 11.6% were visits of over 30 minutes to up to 5 days—most of these events are most likely created by unattended browser windows that were left open in the background of the desktop.
50% of page views are for less than 12 seconds!? That hardly gives your site enough time to read the article, let alone hundreds of menu and widget items. It sheds some light as to why twitter has gotten so popular recently: simplicity wins when there is too much information.
How do you balance simplicity and user design elements for your site?
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