Experts Offer Tips On Usability

By: Steve Outing What's wrong with your Web site? Probably plenty.

For all the hoopla of the last few years and the maturing of the online media business, this is still a medium where the practitioners have lots to learn. These are still the pioneer days.

So as I look at news Web sites, in particular, I still see lots of room for improvement and experimentation. So do the self-appointed guardians of Web content quality, the usability experts and Web writing gurus. I recently asked several such individuals to make suggestions on how news-oriented sites can be improved -- how they can better serve their users and thus better evolve into viable independent enterprises.

Here are some of their best ideas gleaned that might help you make improvements on your site(s) -- or help you to realize that there's a problem or need for improvement in the first place. I've added my ideas into the mix, as well.

Don't look at your home page

"Ignore your home page for a week," suggests Keith Instone, an information architect and usability consultant. Why would you do that? Because that's where most Web site editors focus much of their attention, while often ignoring what's "inside." Take the week, Instone suggests, and have your staff focus only on improving the lowest-level pages of your site. You can make great gains overall by analyzing what's going on with other pages, and making improvements.

"Each of these pages is not that important," he says, "but if you add them up, there are big gains to be made."

Take a look especially at your navigation on inside pages, and how you use it to encourage and route people to other content on your site. This is an area where editors working in cooperation with online marketing personnel can make great improvements in getting users to click on additional content after they've read the content they came to see.

Get rid of the dead wood

Another Instone gem: Next time you redesign your site, get rid of something. Many sites get bloated as new features are added over time. By removing the less interesting stuff -- and that's simple enough to figure out by looking at your site's page usage logs -- "I bet the new version of your site will be better than the old one," he says.

At the very least, whenever you add a new feature to your site (that is, something that's always going to be there), take something that already exists on the site and get rid of it. The consequences of not doing this are that your site becomes bloated, and users can get overwhelmed deciding what to click on.

This is especially critical on your site's home page. Many news home pages contain hundreds of links, which many usability experts contend is going way overboard. (Examples include: The Times (London), washingtonpost.com, latimes.com, and CNN.com, to name just a few.) Bloated home pages are indeed the norm among news sites.

This is not to suggest that news sites need to mimmick Google, the wildly popular search site with perhaps the most streamlined home page on the Web, but the online news industry could stand to "go on a diet."

Among major news sites, I find MSNBC.com to be less intimidating than the typical big-newspaper Web site. You might argue that MSNBC.com's compact home page reflects its TV roots, whereas newspaper sites reflect their parent organizations. But then look at BBC News, another broadcast site that also sports a bloated home page.

They want the link NOW

Reconsider how your site links to others' content. It's increasingly popular to link to outside content not with inline links, but with a separate box or list in the right-side column or at the bottom of the page featuring all the links from within an article. (NYTimes.com does this, putting links at the bottom of articles: example.) The trouble with this approach is that it impedes the user in getting information. The user has to jump an additional hurdle. (If you're reading a paragraph and the writer mentions a Web site that you want to visit, you have to take another step rather than simply clicking on an inline link.)

"Respect links," says Lisa Price, a Web writing expert and author of Hot Text: Web Writing That Works. The make-them-jump-through-an-extra-hoop approach doesn't respect the value of links as part of the Web experience. Links add value to your content, she says, so use them as content. Don't view them as competition for your own work, but rather as an enhancement. She also suggests temporarily opening up your news archives to link to old articles of yours that are related to the new article -- not charging for these old articles temporarily even if you normally charge for archive access.

Many sites link a person's name to an e-mail address -- for example, a reporter's byline might be a "mailto:" link to that person's address. This is very common on news sites, but it's bad form from a usability perspective, says Jakob Nielsen, one of the Web's most well known usability gurus. "Users' expectations are that they will get information about something when they click it," he says. E-mail links on names confuse the user. Links on bylines need to go to the author's biography or other information about the author, such as a list of other articles written by him or her.

Where facts, figures go

Newspaper sites commonly mimic their old-media parents by using mostly text in paragraph form -- and not using enough graphical presentation. That's fine much of the time, but realize the differences in reading style between Internet and print readers, says Yvette Nielsen, an Australian Web content consultant and trainer who works with media companies worldwide.

She suggests that you pull facts and figures out from body text, because they're too hard to read and compare on a computer screen, especially. Much better is to present more data visually in tables, charts, diagrams, and maps. Do this more online than you would in presenting a story in print. Obviously, graphic presentation is important in print, too, but on the Web it's even more critical.

A related Yvette Nielsen recommendation is to provide a summary of each story (the significant ones; don't summarize briefs, of course). This is another common shortcoming among news sites. But Nielsen says that summaries are necessary because of the need to grab Internet users' attention quickly and get them engaged on the page. Web users tend to flit off to other sites quickly, so do everything you can to snare them.

Less is more

Here's one last (interesting) bit of advice for improving your Web site from John Rhodes, a Web usability consultant and proprietor of WebWord.com. He says examine your pages for any one thing that is "too loud" or "grabs too much attention," and thus is harmful to the user experience. He suggests getting some people to look over various pages of your site and report to you on anything that they find to be annoying. They can do this by first reporting the name of the one thing that grabs their attention the most, and second by rating the level of annoyance of that thing.

With this exercise, you may find some negatives on your site that need to be removed -- or at least fixed to eliminate the annoyance factor. Rhodes says many sites need to simplify, and eliminating annoying features or content is a means to that end.

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Letters

My last column, "Libraries Threaten Paid Online News Archives," prompted quite a few letters. Here are a few:

Why so complacent?

Normally, I'm violently shaking my head 'YES' as I read your column. However, in this last column regarding newspaper archives, I'm a little perplexed. You really aren't saying 'this should change' or 'do this and it will get better.' What's with the complacent attitude toward the people who continue to complacent themselves into slow extinction?

I see our traffic numbers on our archives also provided by NewsBank and think to myself, 'The only people who purchase these articles are the ones who absolutely need them.' With less than 5% purchase rates to search rates, there must be a better way to both show value for the content and provide the public a way to reach it. Yes, with a purchase price nearing $3 per article, it does show value to the article, but it also makes us, the newspaper, not NewsBank look like money hungry thieves. ...

By opening our archives we can accomplish much more than making a measly profit on the measly articles we are able to sell out of the archive. Another thought to consider is this, if it costs us $250 per article to produce (time, a place to write it, costs to print, benefits, etc.), regardless of how many copies we sell, if we sell 1,000 at $0.50 each, we've made a decent profit, versus selling 10 at $3 each, where we barely break even.

Customers often take the 'principle of least effort,' to turn around and walk right out the door. We as 'artists' tend to think of our work as priceless because it requires so much of our time, dedication, and hard work to become 'good' at what we do. However, the value of something is not what we will sell it for, but what someone will pay for it. On occasion we are surprised to find someone else value our work more than we do, but these are rare cases indeed, just as the consumer who pays $3 an article is quite rare compared to the number who wants the information.

You really should be advising your readers to use a little business sense to bring the number of purchases up and therefore bring the profits up, by bringing the price down to a reasonable level. Not all of our users are Rockefellers.

Karl Kittler
Webmaster
LancasterOnline.com

Archives aren't gold mines

Hey, I've been saying the same for years. Newspapers should not expect the archives to be gold mines.

The really frustrating thing is that ordinary citizens are discouraged by the fees when they do massive research for civic purposes (even just $2.50 here and there can add up). But special interest groups aren't.

If people could more affordably use newspapers as empowerment tools for PTAs and neighborhood matters and the rest, I think there would be at least a little more sympathy for the First Amendment.

David Rothman
Coordinator
TeleRead

If Reader A has to get to Tulsa...

I just read your column, and let me see if I understand the threat. Reader A goes to the newspaper Web site and buys an article from the archive. The newspaper site gets a piece of the action. Reader B goes to the library Web site and gets an article for free, but the library has had to pay (significant) royalty fees to a supplier such as NewsBank or ProQuest. The newspaper gets a piece of the action. Then the newspaper changes so its archives are free. Reader A goes to the site and downloads archives. The newspaper site has no revenue, but does have expense associated with providing the archives. The newspaper also convinces Reader B to no longer use the library site and come to its free site instead, so the royalties paid by the library decrease. The newspaper site still has the expense, and its royalty revenue has decreased.

Seems like the threat might be from a different direction than what your column suggested. I would venture that such a change in strategy makes sense only if your advertising inventory on the rest of your site is sold out and that you need the extra page views from your archives to support your banner ad sales volume. I don't think many of us are fighting that problem right now.

Robert Schafer
Director of Business Development
StarTribune.com/Star Tribune
Minneapolis

We'll take that bland money

As you have said it, the money is never going to be great, like in advertising. I agree. But you may be surprised if publishers really told you what they make. Soft revenues? Bland money? Well, we didn't have it before, we have something now.

What are we going to do? No, I would never demand that our public libraries don't offer free archive access. But I can request, without any problem and nicely, excuse me, that my distributors don't offer free ONLINE access.

Laura Soto-Barra

Hey, those are OUR archives!

Your last column was interesting and reminded me of the power of these archives that I have pretty access to now as a newspaper scribe-turned-academic. Of course, the irony is that E&P now demands a fee for your earlier columns -- a situation that I'm sure is out of your hands. I often use some of your writings to inform my research, so I increasingly find myself printing out or saving electronically a copy of certain columns you've written, just so I don't have to deal later with archives. So now I just need to figure out which databases will offer up E&P archives.

Bill Sutley
Auburn University

You go, library!

As a relatively new librarian of reference, I say it's about time the libraries threaten something. We do a great deal of service for not much recognition. When it dawns on someone that our budgets are exceedingly low and that we can't get something for them, they are stunned. Then when asked to support us in our calls for more in our budget they fade into the woodwork, only to reappear with another request two days later -- which we fill if we can. I love the ability to seek, find, and fulfill these requests BUT...

That is another point. Here's another. In your article while you touted the 'freeness' of this library service over and over, ... there are a few items you forgot to bring up or perhaps don't know about. The service may be 'free' to the patron, but it isn't to the library which pays for the database, and the Full Text privilege. ... These databases are not cheap, and the price goes up every day. In addition, if the patron is at the library and prints -- for free -- well the library is paying for the paper, the printer, the printer maintenance, the cartridge for the printer maintenance -- and I could go on. The library is also paying for computer peripherals and networking and upgrades and servers, and so forth. So while I'm proud to offer this service and I'm pleased that you appreciate it and want to get the word out, I also want to note that it's a benefit to the public, but definitely not free somewhere. I am glad that you noted their tax dollars are paying. That's a question always asked, and here is one good answer.

Another point is that perhaps the newspapers are getting a double 'royalty' in that many of them negotiate with database aggregators for content. In that sense if the same stuff is on both free and paid sites they are getting double. When the library pays for the database, and when the consumer pays for the article through the paper's Web site. I applaud the papers that are offering 'free' content.

I taught Citizen Kane in my other incarnation as a college professor as well as All the President's Men. I have taught journalism and been a journalist. As a librarian I have seen another side of the archives and newspaper culture. It is fascinating -- but it ain't free.

Denise M. Marshall
Reference/Public Services
Kettering University

The amazing Library World

Oh Steve! Think about it.

Following your logic: Are we a threat to booksellers everywhere also? Not only newspaper articles, but you can get a copy of the latest Grisham novel or a Chilton's car repair manual at your local library also! Are we a threat, then, to all car mechanics? You can read Time and Newsweek, and hundreds of other current magazines in a library. Are we a threat to Hearst then? None of this is 'free,' which you acknowledge finally, after your sensationalistic statements have been stated and re-stated re: our threat to the free enterprise system of newspapers.

Marketing whizzes? No, neither are institutions like churches or universities. You have to WANT to know, you have to take the initiative because we don't advertise on ESPN or MSNBC -- can't afford it! We're non-profits. When someone decides to rub two gray cells together and find out, like you did, that libraries are a real bargain, it's the COOLEST idea. We take a relatively small amount of public support via taxes (and at colleges, tuition monies) and make it go a long way to provide lots of materials that thousands of people every year get to borrow or read on-site. For 'free.' AND by the way, we pay plenty for access to databases (much more than an individual would) and we also pay much more for magazine subscriptions -- institutional rates because those items will not be read by one person but many.

Go talk to your local professional librarians. There are a lot more stories -- very interesting mega-million dollar industry, the Library world!

You'll get a lot of feedback here. Thanks for helping with our promotion but by using the tried and true but boring 'create a conflict where there is none' journalistic ploy, you sell your creativity and writing skills short.

Pamela Spooner
User Education Librarian,
Sul Ross State University (Texas)

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Other recent columns

Libraries Threaten Paid Online Archives, Wednesday, May 29
Content Publishing Systems Squash News Design, Wednesday, May 8
Have u 4gotten IM?, Wednesday, April 24
News Sites Repeat Mistakes Of the Past, Wednesday, April 10
USC J-School To Teach Convergence To All, Wednesday, March 27
Interactive News Is Newspaper-Wide Effort In Spokane, Wednesday, March 13
Previous columns

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If you have a newsworthy item about the online news media business, please send me a note.