Re: Theory of Page Length

At 10:23 p.m. 08/28/98 +0100, Mark de Vries wrote:
>>"No one reads anything!"
>Everyone? Maybe if the page has no content you quickly skim it. Most
>of the time I expect the people who are looking for the content to do
>more than skim the page.

Actually, it's true -- people don't _read_ pages the way they _read_
printed material; they _scan_ it.  See, for example, a study by
Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes, which Jakob referenced in his October
1, 1997 Alertbox:  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9701a.html

>Those who are not looking for the content can
>do as they please. I am not on the web to win a popularity contest if
>it means to reduce the content to an animated tapdancing paperclip..

There's a middle line between 'put everything above the fold' and 
'expect people to read, not scan'.  Web authors need to understand
that text needs to be _scannable_, read quickly looking for
highlighted words, bullet lists, links, and so on, rather than
in long blocks of text.

Anchors and other logical means of navigating through data can be
provided with careful usability design.  Headings are great for
these kinds of things; it organizes your data and presents it in
a distilled, easily-used manner.

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn(at)idyllmtn.com>             http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton, California
For your user-defined stylesheet: .GeoBranding { display: none ! important; }

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