"findability" in Weblog

After seeing Sources of Power referenced by two of my favourite books, Don’t Make Me Think and Blink, and having it recommended to me by a chap at work I finally got around to reading it. In the book Gary Klein studies the decision making process exhibited by people under time pressure: firemen, tank commanders, chess players and the like. Conventional wisdom tells us that people weigh their choices and then make a rational decision based on the result. What Klein and his researchers found though is that, under pressure, people subconciously recognise patterns from their experience and use them to reach a decision without any consideration for the alternatives - there just isn’t time. If that option doesn’t work out then they’ll jump to the next most reasonable one. This they called the RPD model - Recognition Primed Decision-making Model.

Reading the details of Klein’s RPD model really reminded me of the way I use the internet. I am an impatient and impulsive user and I have also seen this behaviour exhibited by users during testing. Not all users though… From what I’ve seen, experienced users, in particular, tend to be impulsive.

I suspect that this is because as we use the internet we build these usage patterns into our subconcious. The more we use it the more we rely on these conventions. And, in certain circumstances anyway, we are under self-imposed time pressure. We know that there is a lot of content on the internet and often what we are looking for isn’t of great value so we move on if we don’t immediately find what we want. We don’t commit a lot of time to any one task. As web users I believe that we often fit into the ‘time pressure’ category studied by Klein.

A quick look at the Eye Tracker article on The Google Effect shows the RPD process in action. We have become programmed to believe that the top few Google results will be what we are looking for and we employ the pattern recognition to dictate our actions the first time we see the results page. I, for one, will click on the top link that looks hopeful and quickly scan that page for something that signals that I am closer to my goal. If not then I will go back to the results page and start reading the results items. My behaviour switches drastically - to an comparative, evaluative model.

Support for the spread of this recognition primed behaviour on the web is the recent iProspect/Jupiter media study. In 2002 48% of users clicked on a link on the first page of their results. Today that figure has risen to 62%. More and more people are acting like experienced web users, displaying impulsive behaviour and, I think, behaving as if they were under time pressure. Our users are likely to become more and more impulsive, clicking first and reading later.

So what’s the point of all this?

• Use conventions wisely. If people regognise a pattern they are likely to click without thinking.
• Front and top load everything for quick scanning.
• Use sensible link text and headings for decision making out of context.

To be honest, I don’t think this is anything really new but it does add weight to the rules most of us obey already. I now think that I understand why my users behave the way they do and having this sitting in the back of my mind makes me think very carefully about the way I design my information…

In my redesign post I mentioned this ‘zooming content’ idea I’ve adopted. I don’t think the concept is new but I’ve not seen anyone write about it so I’m jumping in… Each page is based on what I’m calling a ‘zooming’ layout. By that I mean that the information view and relevance on the page zooms out as the page goes down. This is influenced by three things:

1. Derek Powazek’s Embrace your bottom! article.
2. Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability.
3. The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes.

The Eytracker III study from a couple of years ago found that people aren’t afraid to scroll below the fold but that their scanning became more rapid. To cater to this behaviour I have limited the amount of information in the lower sections of the page. The page content becomes more and more brief and scannable as the page goes on. Take the weblog index for example: it starts with a complete entry, then moves to summaries of 5 recent entries, along with access to the archives, and finally to external links.

Every page follows this pattern. The top of the page deals with specifics and details while the bottom of the page presents an overview, encouraging scanning and, hopefully, giving people what they want, when they want it.

Why have I done this instead of going for the more conventional two column blog layout? Conventions are our friends, after all…

In Ambient Findability Peter Morville calls web pages ‘discreet findable objects’ that can be accessed out of context via search engines… Basically, there’s a very good chance that people are coming to a content page from Google having performed a search on a specific keyword phrase. The standard two column layout presents these nice new visitors with a lot of information they’ve not asked for and are probably not interested in. I wanted to let people get what they came for before bombarding them with choices, in line with Derek’s suggestions.

Content is king and will govern both incoming links and page weighting by the engines. If someone gets to one of my pages it will probably be thanks to the content so I’ve made sure I give that up front. The article, blog entry or portfolio item is there in full at the top of the page with nothing else in the way. The main navigation gives a broad overview of the site and the metadata to the right suggests the presence of more local and related posts but I’ve tried very hard to keep noise to a minimum. I’m hoping that I’ve left enough wayfinding and orientation hints at the top of the page to let the user reach a decision about the context of the site and content before continuing down the page.

After the full entry I zoom out one level.

On the index pages this steps out to an overview of the most recent posts, kept short and scannable; On the content pages this is lists of two different types of entry: the most recent ones, which I’d obviously like to promote to new visitors, and related (and hopefully relevent) posts, which are an attempt to push old content. (This second group is found by passing the article title into my site’s search and listing the top results.) Derek Powazek advocates using the bottom of the page to give readers somewhere to go but I had one more question I thought people might ask: Why should I believe the post I’ve just read? By providing a list of links to other things I’ve written I am trying to establish credability with my readers as well as cross-sell content. That’s also what the slightly anomolous ‘about me’ snippet is trying to suggest - that I do have some idea what I’m talking about.

The final portion of the pages is for less relevant or less valuable information - external links, comments, that sort of thing.

I don’t think this is a radical idea - far from it - newspapers have been doing this sort of thing for ever, but I am very surprised that it’s not been applied to more websites. When I sat down to think about what information I should be presenting to my users at any one time this zooming idea just seemed to make sense. My biggest concern with the approach is the way it dresses up normal in-site navigation to look like more content. When I first sent the new design round to people I was expecting lots of complaints about access to the archives. So far no one has said anything about that…

To sum up: people tend to scan the page below the fold so the further down they go how about offering them more scannable content? Zoom detail to overview.

Last week Keith Robinson published a great article on the concept of site maps and how best to serve users’ needs. He questions the use of the home page and the inevitable arguments that follow amonst the stakeholders and information architects when trying to tie down what ‘belongs’ on it. He suggests a more freeform approach to organisation, with close attention paid to meta tagging to allow for better ‘related content’ grouping, which sounds just fine to me.

An interesting upshot of the article is Mike Davidson, Nick Finck and Thomas Baekdal’s discussion of the 404-as-a-portal concept. I’ve had a go at this myself (although I got bored before finishing it off) but a recent project was completely based around it and when done properly I’ve been really impressed. I’ve got vague thoughts of recomposing content based on friendly urls but either way their discussion has showed me that I need to rethink my site architecture… I’m still using unfriendly querystring parameters, which is just plain lazy.

Roger Hudson goes back to fundamentals for his Web Essentials 04 talk on web navigation. Everyone needs to be reminded of this stuff.

UPDATE 4 June 2009: Apparently Hackney Council have updated their website and there’s now a full list of polling stations available as a PDF.

Right, I’m frustrated. It’s the Mayoral elections tomorrow along with voting for the European parliament and the London Assembly. There’s been a lot of fuss made about postal voting and the polling cards being overly complicated. To be honest, I welcome the opportunity to vote by post - it saves me a queue at least. It does deprive me of the experience of participating in democracy but I’ll get over it. And as for the voting papers themselves, I read the instructions, drew some crosses and that was that. Simple.

But… My housemate is voting in person. He asked me what on the surface appeared to be a simple question: Where’s the nearest polling station? So I hit Google for what I thought was the most sensible query. I then spent 20mins going around the various local authority sites including Hackney Council and London Elects, amongst others, only to be confounded every time. I found loads of information about the mechanics of filling in the forms but nothing about polling stations, save a phone number which will undoubtedly be busy all of tomorrow. I admit that I wasn’t reading particularly carefully but that’s what good site design is all about - allowing users to find information quickly and accurately. The Hackney Council site homepage didn’t even mention the elections and the London Elect site’s ‘How do I vote’ section lead me to a phone number.

I eventually gave up… I can’t remember the last time I couldn’t find something on the internet! It’s an absolute disgrace that this information isn’t readily available considering current voter apathy and limited attention spans. All it takes is a little bit of thought, a splash of planning and some consideration for the user.