Designing Large Information Spaces

Marc Resnick, Ph.D.Institute for Technology Innovation

Florida International University(305) 348-3537

resnickm@fiu.edu

Usability SolutionsUsability Engineering is about crafting technology

so that it is easy to learn for beginners, easy to use for experts, and creates satisfied customers.

We help companies develop strategies to: modify products and services to better meet customers

needs design sales systems that delight and persuade

customers and create long term relationships create web strategies that attract more than your

customers’ eyeballs, but their hearts and minds as well.

Usability Solutions We work with clients to perform customized

assessments that result in effective and successful designs.

We conduct broader studies that look at design tradeoffs in general and generate industry-wide guidelines.

Large Information SpacesThere are many web-based information spaces

that easily grow beyond simple information architectures

blogs wikis product inventories article corpuses customer reviews press releases and other corporate information

Large Information SpacesTo make these spaces usable, it is important to

consider how users navigate through them to find what they are looking for

navigation architecture page length unit truncation

Today’s Talk We did an extensive study looking at:

blogs personal technical entertainment news

design of the space page length unit truncation

user context time pressure user interest

Examples CNN Money has short page with simple truncation. Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s blog uses long page with full

post. Science blog has longer descriptions and links to

additional pages. 5-Minute Herald uses a long page with truncated and

tabbed units.

Method Created four versions of four different blogs

that were controlled for length and visual design.

Observed users completing naturalistic tasks. Conducted an immediate recall quiz to

evaluate how much they remembered about what they read.

General Findings Women remembered more of what they read than men. The total amount of information read was not very high,

especially when interest was low. Even when material was read, it was not always

remembered - even minutes later.

Your content must engage users, or it is wasted.

Some Interesting Findings Users read more content they were interested in. Users read more content directly related to a task. Users read more content that was easy to read. When content was technical, users stuck to what was

task-related. When content was personal, users were more likely to

read non task-related content. But this also decreased task performance.

We are lazy – we only read what we have to.

Some More Interesting Findings

Users rarely read an entire post, except in personal blogs.

Longer posts slowed users down, but did not increase recall – so keep pieces short.

Even when visual quality is high, users don’t read well online. Preference ratings were lowest for long posts.

Users read more on longer pages. They don’t click on <more> unless they know the additional content is useful. Truncation only works if the summary is descriptive.

TitlesIs that what I

am looking

for? Too

risky!!

Even more interesting findings

As expected, people like to skim. News style headline teasers did not encourage clicking to additional content.

Time pressure does not decrease the amount read; it increases the speed of reading. And the faster reading did not reduce comprehension unless the content is technical. We can speed read most casual content.

So how can you use this???? What content are you showing?

make technical content very task-specific and short support browsing with personal content and go long if

you want Clearly define summaries and headlines. Teasers

don’t work. If users may be time constrained, support quick

skimming. Use longer pages. Don’t expect users to navigate

to additional pages without a clear reason.

Quick TakeawayThink about your users goals, not just yours. If the customer is there for a quick bite of information,

don’t try to sucker them into a 7-course meal. Even if it means losing ad views.

Make stuff easy to find. If they click on the wrong thing, you may get an extra ad-view but you may lose a customer.

Its better to have loyal customers that consider you a reliable resource than to get short term clicks who never come back.