Back in the early gold rush days of Internet marketing, I’m sure banner ads must have seemed quite an amazing innovation. Those glimmering rectangles of interaction: how enticing they were. Surely, people would find them irresistible, studded with the most motivating call-to-action every created.
“Click here” read the shiny button, sometimes enhanced with a Disney-esque twinkle harkening back to the era of Tinkerbelle and “Bibbidi-Bobbiti-Boo.” Entranced by the magic of hyperlinking, designers and marketers no doubt believed the urge to click would be so compelling, audiences wouldn’t notice the lack of value on the other side.
Flatland.
Today we know better. Fact is, it takes more than mechanical trompe l'oeil effects, jiggling credit cards or shimmying suburbanites to drive traffic to a landing page—and far more to convert that click through into a sale.
Yet strangely, the banner remains the less-than-gold standard of digital interaction on many Web pages. In many cases, at least, the number of banners per page has dropped, resulting in a proportional drop in distractions from the main content. In essence, however, their impact is still not too far removed from their ancestors, the painted signage that once graced Manhattan store fronts in a bygone era. It’s enough to shake your faith in marketing theory.
Of course, as the wizards at PointRoll will tell you, there are many potentially entertaining options that were not available even a decade ago, both in terms of video content and levels of interaction. Despite this, there’s one technology that still eludes even the sharpest of flash programmers.
I’m talking about relevance.
False parallels.
Part of the legacy of magazine and newspaper design, the online banner is, in essence, a space ad. But what has always passed as a mildly irritating interruption in print is transformed into an irrelevant blot online. On the face of it, you might expect the parallel to be perfect. In both cases a swath of text sits next to a rectangle of ad space.
As always, the crucial difference lies in the context. Some exceptions aside, print magazine ads have always tended to have higher production values than the article copy they jut into. Whether a shiny car or the darting eyes of a couple on holiday in Bermuda, print ads ad luster.
In digital space, the distinction between content and intrusion is harder to maintain, as the same tools are equally accessible to each. Besides the average digital marketer is shilling online precisely because costs are often significantly lower. They’re not about to invest in state-of-the-art design for a banner ad—it would only defeat the purpose.
Tired angles.
The result is a flat and often garish box filled with anything from blinky buttons to a squwunched up approximation of the brand’s current broadcast campaign. If anyone believes a badly cropped photo of a minor celebrity hawking a major car manufacture’s latest sale-a-thon is attracting much attention, I can only hope they won’t be out driving tonight. Worse still is the budget padding “media strategy” of placing minor variations of the same banner in two different locations on the same page.
In contrast to that appraoch are attempts to engage two different page areas in a kind of dialogue, as recently attempted by Apple, in which the “PC” character seemed to “run upstairs” to dissuade consumers from switching to Macintosh. Leaving aside, for the moment, Apple’s unbearably smug brand persona (ready as they are to stand in for the Dalai Lama at a moment’s notice), I’m not convinced that antics of this kind really do much to engage consumers.
For one thing, the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” campaign was already tired before its Web integration began. For another, consumers come to digital space to do stuff. Who has any interest in another installment in this faded reminiscence of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby road pictures of the 40s?
Box-cutters, anyone?
But I digress. The issue here is the future viability of the banner, this petty annoyance that does little to earn brands much in the way of equity with consumers. What’s the solution? Experimentation. What about corporate underwriting of a Web page? What about subtler forms of design that integrate themselves more seamlessly into a particular Web presence, mirroring it in copy tone, design standards and content?
At the very least, the spandex-model of banner advertising, stretching itself all out of shape to appear wherever today’s plucky media buyers can squeeze them should become a thing of the past. Like a factory spewing wastes in a residential neighborhood, ugly, flat and boring banners only pollute digital space, mooring it to a toxic past most of us only are too anxious to sail away from.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Beyond Mobile:
A Vision of Mentalnet Marketing
As a barometer of technology’s impact on everyday life, the triumphant progress of mobile telephony is already an epoch-demarking phenomenon. Forty-four years ago, this was the stuff of fantasy. We’d only just stopped chuckling over Don Adam’s “shoe phone” when William Shatner first said “Kirk to Enterprise” into an improbably thin handheld device.
Anyone who also remembers Dick Tracy’s 2-way wrist radio, or Robert Vaughn and David McCallum's “cigarette-pack” transmitters, knows just how long American culture yearned for a convenient portable phone.
Naturally, when the communication millennium arrived and mobile devices started reproducing like rabbits, it wasn’t long before they became another medium for consumer engagement. Texting a number to a number—to vote on This or get a free That—is now as routine as brushing your teeth. Besides, there’s also a Mobile Marketing Association overseeing the medium, laying down guidelines and pushing this approach as the wave of the future.
The Next Generation
But in a reversal of fortune strangely reminiscent of a sci-fi time-travel subplot, mobile marketing’s evolution may be cut short by the very hardware developments it precipitated. After all, as smart phones become the standard, and continue to blur the distinction between TV, PSP and AT&T, it’s doubtful we’ll ever need to text so-and-so to such-and-such again.
As today’s high-end becomes tomorrow’s ho-hum, your audience will have hand-held access to the same Facebook app or whatever you originally built for a “computer.” In fact, with the advent of cloud computing, as many have already noted, the word “computer” is sure to become as obsolete as the word “manuscript” ought to have done 20 years ago.
Cortex Messaging
But now that I think of it, at the pace electronics and bio-engineering is developing, I wonder if we’d do better to plan farther ahead—and start developing the first generation of Direct to Cortex campaigns. For if the shoe phone was a joke, chances are the “brain phone” may not be.
Such a device would change not just the definition of marketing, but of humanity. Just imagine it: The transformative power of a human brain connecting directly to digital space would be staggering. As it is, we’ve already seen how connecting “the old fashioned way” is affecting our children—as rehab centers for video-game addiction spring up in South Korea and around the world.
Synapse Me No Questions
Of the many things that these emerging technologies suggest, the most relevant to this forum is the idea of transparency.
If, in the decades ahead, marketing itself survives, its phoniest ploys will have nowhere to hide. In a world of infinite cross-reference and instantaneous retrieval, the god of sales will take up permanent residence in the details of everyday life. Whatever doesn’t ring true will make a racket loud enough to drown out even an orchestra of Terms-&-Conditions-laden benefits.
Today, in this digital stone age we now call home, the clamor for accountability already requires us to think more deeply before speaking to consumers. In light of that, it’s time we prepared ourselves for the “mentalnet” to come. Because when the final barrier to communication comes down and we understand each other instantaneously, the only kind of deception left will be self-deception.
Anyone who also remembers Dick Tracy’s 2-way wrist radio, or Robert Vaughn and David McCallum's “cigarette-pack” transmitters, knows just how long American culture yearned for a convenient portable phone.
Naturally, when the communication millennium arrived and mobile devices started reproducing like rabbits, it wasn’t long before they became another medium for consumer engagement. Texting a number to a number—to vote on This or get a free That—is now as routine as brushing your teeth. Besides, there’s also a Mobile Marketing Association overseeing the medium, laying down guidelines and pushing this approach as the wave of the future.
The Next Generation
But in a reversal of fortune strangely reminiscent of a sci-fi time-travel subplot, mobile marketing’s evolution may be cut short by the very hardware developments it precipitated. After all, as smart phones become the standard, and continue to blur the distinction between TV, PSP and AT&T, it’s doubtful we’ll ever need to text so-and-so to such-and-such again.
As today’s high-end becomes tomorrow’s ho-hum, your audience will have hand-held access to the same Facebook app or whatever you originally built for a “computer.” In fact, with the advent of cloud computing, as many have already noted, the word “computer” is sure to become as obsolete as the word “manuscript” ought to have done 20 years ago.
Cortex Messaging
But now that I think of it, at the pace electronics and bio-engineering is developing, I wonder if we’d do better to plan farther ahead—and start developing the first generation of Direct to Cortex campaigns. For if the shoe phone was a joke, chances are the “brain phone” may not be.
Such a device would change not just the definition of marketing, but of humanity. Just imagine it: The transformative power of a human brain connecting directly to digital space would be staggering. As it is, we’ve already seen how connecting “the old fashioned way” is affecting our children—as rehab centers for video-game addiction spring up in South Korea and around the world.
Synapse Me No Questions
Of the many things that these emerging technologies suggest, the most relevant to this forum is the idea of transparency.
If, in the decades ahead, marketing itself survives, its phoniest ploys will have nowhere to hide. In a world of infinite cross-reference and instantaneous retrieval, the god of sales will take up permanent residence in the details of everyday life. Whatever doesn’t ring true will make a racket loud enough to drown out even an orchestra of Terms-&-Conditions-laden benefits.
Today, in this digital stone age we now call home, the clamor for accountability already requires us to think more deeply before speaking to consumers. In light of that, it’s time we prepared ourselves for the “mentalnet” to come. Because when the final barrier to communication comes down and we understand each other instantaneously, the only kind of deception left will be self-deception.
Friday, February 12, 2010
In Praise of a Minor Web Feat
Is there anything more boring than insurance—that is, unless you’re an AIG field rep? Last year’s horror show aside, as a topic it’s one of the more potent sleep aids known to man—with the snores starting long before you get to the fine print.
My confidence in this as a consensus point enables me to make a leap of faith and suggest that this is the reason Geico and Aflac use anthropomorphic animals as celebrity spokes creatures. The one, a talking lizard, doles out common sense in the affable tone of an emotionally centered, rational adult. The other, a talking duck, is a bit less wordy but still more articulate than many a former US president.
Like an eight ounce glass of water in a desert, they make the unbearable bearable, if only for a moment. As such, they cross over from mere advertising to become a branded experience. In digital space, Aflac has found an especially engaging way to continue that experience and, in the process, exploited the medium’s potential as few comparable sites do.
Idiomatic
It’s not about the duck, although that avian presence, discreetly animated, does help set the tone. Rather, the site succeeds because of the effective way it stages its messaging. Here, interactive flash development, combined with a beautifully backlit color palette, create an environment that grows directly out of the basic building blocks of digital technology.
The total effect is something no other medium can achieve, giving users a new way to read. While conveying all the information needed to make the sale, it does so outside of traditional text-slab-and-jpeg tabling.
The site is equally remarkable for borrowing bits and pieces from gaming design without losing focus. Nowhere, even in the serious fun of the interactive quiz, does the user experience stray from its one and only purpose: enticing you to sign up. And while we’re on the subject of enticement, one of the most successful aspects of the site is its sense of humor.
Human
By that I mean it succeeds precisely because its humor is neither a bad imitation of faded standup comedy stars nor the smudgey xerox of underground social commentary found in South Park or The Family Guy. Instead, the site’s humor expresses itself through a quiet understanding of the struggles of everyday life. Like Daffy Aflac, we’re all straining to be heard over the din of mundanity that surrounds us.
But the site mines this vein more deeply and, in fact, this view of life emerges as the brand’s “deep structure.” What we all need, Aflac wants us to know, is something to fall back on when life—as it will—goes all screwy. Enough of denial, it seems to say, enough of the cowboys and hardboiled dames of the last century. When there’s trouble, it’s OK to quack about it and, more importantly, to prepare.
In fact, the site’s messaging strategy has been thought through—and felt— so thoroughly that even on the grittiest of drilldown pages, the spirit of the home page prevails.
Fresh
A significant part of site’s success, as I see it, lies in the staging and pacing of the text. In a marvelous confluence of proportion, color and weighting, the eye always knows where to look. Besides, even the scariest percentage points look good enough to eat. One emerges from the experience with the feeling that, arcane as the backend number crunching might be, the product is accessible, practical, “doable.”
Now, I’m in no position to evaluate Aflac’s brand promise. What I know about actuarial tables would fit inside a gnat’s whisker with room to spare. But I do know this modest site opens a window onto what the digital experience could become—once more brands transcend the tattered legacy of print, TV and telemarketing and have the courage to strike out into fresh territory.
My confidence in this as a consensus point enables me to make a leap of faith and suggest that this is the reason Geico and Aflac use anthropomorphic animals as celebrity spokes creatures. The one, a talking lizard, doles out common sense in the affable tone of an emotionally centered, rational adult. The other, a talking duck, is a bit less wordy but still more articulate than many a former US president.
Like an eight ounce glass of water in a desert, they make the unbearable bearable, if only for a moment. As such, they cross over from mere advertising to become a branded experience. In digital space, Aflac has found an especially engaging way to continue that experience and, in the process, exploited the medium’s potential as few comparable sites do.
Idiomatic
It’s not about the duck, although that avian presence, discreetly animated, does help set the tone. Rather, the site succeeds because of the effective way it stages its messaging. Here, interactive flash development, combined with a beautifully backlit color palette, create an environment that grows directly out of the basic building blocks of digital technology.
The total effect is something no other medium can achieve, giving users a new way to read. While conveying all the information needed to make the sale, it does so outside of traditional text-slab-and-jpeg tabling.
The site is equally remarkable for borrowing bits and pieces from gaming design without losing focus. Nowhere, even in the serious fun of the interactive quiz, does the user experience stray from its one and only purpose: enticing you to sign up. And while we’re on the subject of enticement, one of the most successful aspects of the site is its sense of humor.
Human
By that I mean it succeeds precisely because its humor is neither a bad imitation of faded standup comedy stars nor the smudgey xerox of underground social commentary found in South Park or The Family Guy. Instead, the site’s humor expresses itself through a quiet understanding of the struggles of everyday life. Like Daffy Aflac, we’re all straining to be heard over the din of mundanity that surrounds us.
But the site mines this vein more deeply and, in fact, this view of life emerges as the brand’s “deep structure.” What we all need, Aflac wants us to know, is something to fall back on when life—as it will—goes all screwy. Enough of denial, it seems to say, enough of the cowboys and hardboiled dames of the last century. When there’s trouble, it’s OK to quack about it and, more importantly, to prepare.
In fact, the site’s messaging strategy has been thought through—and felt— so thoroughly that even on the grittiest of drilldown pages, the spirit of the home page prevails.
Fresh
A significant part of site’s success, as I see it, lies in the staging and pacing of the text. In a marvelous confluence of proportion, color and weighting, the eye always knows where to look. Besides, even the scariest percentage points look good enough to eat. One emerges from the experience with the feeling that, arcane as the backend number crunching might be, the product is accessible, practical, “doable.”
Now, I’m in no position to evaluate Aflac’s brand promise. What I know about actuarial tables would fit inside a gnat’s whisker with room to spare. But I do know this modest site opens a window onto what the digital experience could become—once more brands transcend the tattered legacy of print, TV and telemarketing and have the courage to strike out into fresh territory.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Boxological Constant
Back in the early ‘60s, when the protest movement was in its infancy and “folk music” (i.e., a comercialized similacrum of traditional American idioms) was one of its leading voices, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song called “Little Boxes.” The song decried the sameness of Los Angeles area tract housing.
As such it became a symbol of mindless conformity to what a later generation would call “The Man.” The mocking refrain contained these telling words:
"And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same."
Looking at current Web design, I can’t help but wonder if Ms. Reynolds was more prescient than she realized. More likely, she had simply honed in on a basic tenet of modern life: Rootless, cultureless people running frantically from one ideological safe haven to another. In the financial world this has recently lead to the near-collapse of our economy.
And in the world of digital marketing, too, nothing sells like conformity.
Behold the Box, Keeper of Content.
Doesn’t matter what kind of content, doesn’t matter what kind of Web presence. Boxes are everywhere. Despite a dozen years of “user experience design” theory we still seem unable to accomplish anything approaching true out-of-the-box thinking.
So, site after site, boxes reign supreme. Take a careful look and you can find many site designs that at least mitigate the problem with judicious attention to proportion and spacing. More often than not however, the average Web site is a crazy quilt of misaligned quadrilaterals offering new visitors no sense of hierarchy, no clear point of orientation.
Oh, yes, font sizes help, as do color schemes and decorative design elements, not the mention the archaic, yet strangely persistent “Click Here” (911,000,000 results).
Somehow I doubt this is what Don Norman had in mind when he inaugurated a new era of design in the ‘90s. In any case, no aspect of Web design suffers more from this fundamentalist “box-ology” than copy. Jammed into ill-fitting columns, subjected to bad line breaks, superimposed on neo-psychodelic backgrounds, copy becomes unreadable.
Language: The Ultimate Non-Conformist.
Of course, in the boxological worldview, copy has only itself to blame for being composed of Language. Language has the audacity to follow rules of its own that exist outside the confines of cherished usability studies. “I mean, come on,” goes the unstated complaint, “what was Language doing for the last 10,000 years that it didn’t come up with a decent design strategy for itself?”
Now, if the only issue were copy I wouldn’t expect anyone beyond a few copy fundamentalists to care. But when digital space is dominated by a design strategy that virtually disables one of its key components, everybody loses.
Does Nielsen assert people jump away after only 56 seconds? Let’s not be so quick to attribute it to ADHD, which, despite its seriousness as a medical condition, hardly affects every member of your target audience. The root cause may be simple aversion—to row upon row of identically weighted little boxes, that all look just the same.
As such it became a symbol of mindless conformity to what a later generation would call “The Man.” The mocking refrain contained these telling words:
"And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same."
Looking at current Web design, I can’t help but wonder if Ms. Reynolds was more prescient than she realized. More likely, she had simply honed in on a basic tenet of modern life: Rootless, cultureless people running frantically from one ideological safe haven to another. In the financial world this has recently lead to the near-collapse of our economy.
And in the world of digital marketing, too, nothing sells like conformity.
Behold the Box, Keeper of Content.
Doesn’t matter what kind of content, doesn’t matter what kind of Web presence. Boxes are everywhere. Despite a dozen years of “user experience design” theory we still seem unable to accomplish anything approaching true out-of-the-box thinking.
So, site after site, boxes reign supreme. Take a careful look and you can find many site designs that at least mitigate the problem with judicious attention to proportion and spacing. More often than not however, the average Web site is a crazy quilt of misaligned quadrilaterals offering new visitors no sense of hierarchy, no clear point of orientation.
Oh, yes, font sizes help, as do color schemes and decorative design elements, not the mention the archaic, yet strangely persistent “Click Here” (911,000,000 results).
Somehow I doubt this is what Don Norman had in mind when he inaugurated a new era of design in the ‘90s. In any case, no aspect of Web design suffers more from this fundamentalist “box-ology” than copy. Jammed into ill-fitting columns, subjected to bad line breaks, superimposed on neo-psychodelic backgrounds, copy becomes unreadable.
Language: The Ultimate Non-Conformist.
Of course, in the boxological worldview, copy has only itself to blame for being composed of Language. Language has the audacity to follow rules of its own that exist outside the confines of cherished usability studies. “I mean, come on,” goes the unstated complaint, “what was Language doing for the last 10,000 years that it didn’t come up with a decent design strategy for itself?”
Now, if the only issue were copy I wouldn’t expect anyone beyond a few copy fundamentalists to care. But when digital space is dominated by a design strategy that virtually disables one of its key components, everybody loses.
Does Nielsen assert people jump away after only 56 seconds? Let’s not be so quick to attribute it to ADHD, which, despite its seriousness as a medical condition, hardly affects every member of your target audience. The root cause may be simple aversion—to row upon row of identically weighted little boxes, that all look just the same.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Focus on Reality
On the face of it, testing creative concepts in a focus group before developing them fully might make sense. In theory, you should save oodles of time and money and guarantee that nothing you produce will turn off your customers. As I see it, however, the premise is false for two reasons. First, you’re not actually testing the finished product. Second, you’re gauging audience reactions in a completely unrealistic setting.
As with every other form of human communication, creative ideas take their meaning in large part from their intended context. At the same time, asking consumers to evaluate a rough mockup assumes they have both the training and the creative intuition to fill in the blanks. You might as well ask medical patients to evaluate their own surgery. Whether they feel better or worse, their evaluation is meaningless in medical terms.
“Artificial Intelligence”
Besides, there’s no correlation between how consumers will react to creative on their own, unobserved, and how they will react in a focus group. Sitting in a fishbowl, knowing their responses are being monitored, the temptation to grandstand is irresistible. Goaded on by a moderator’s leading questions, people in groups are prone to seek a group consensus. After all, nobody wants to be known as the loser who can’t see the emperor’s new clothes.
At the other end of the spectrum are the classic egomaniacs focus groups attract. They’ve learned long ago that the best way to grab attention is to buck the trend of the room. They’re all too eager to usurp the role of a creative innovator without the requisite expertise and without accepting the concomitant risk to their reputations.
Questionable Answers
Finally, let’s consider the impact of interrupting the creative process by putting a teams’ incomplete work up for evaluation. Once “the feedback’ has been absorbed, that process is forever disrupted, as the creative team is urged to ignore its instincts, honed over years of experience, and “go with the data.”
Now, don’t get me started on whether this “data” is even remotely analogous to true scientific data. The samples are too small and the conditions aren’t tightly controlled. Science? I don’t think so.
So as far as I’m concerned, creative concepts modified to conform with doubtful “research findings” are always suspect. Tainted goods, they’re potentially toxic to a brand’s relationship with its audience—as the sour taste of poorly conceived messaging slowly undermines consumer appetite for the product.
Lessons Lost
Marketing to consumers means accepting risk. Giving anxious clients false reassurance with doubtful “clinical trials” is irresponsible and bad for business. The only way to know what works is to try it out on the big stage. Anything less cheats agency and brand alike of the invaluable lessons we can only learn from unfiltered failure and honest success.
As with every other form of human communication, creative ideas take their meaning in large part from their intended context. At the same time, asking consumers to evaluate a rough mockup assumes they have both the training and the creative intuition to fill in the blanks. You might as well ask medical patients to evaluate their own surgery. Whether they feel better or worse, their evaluation is meaningless in medical terms.
“Artificial Intelligence”
Besides, there’s no correlation between how consumers will react to creative on their own, unobserved, and how they will react in a focus group. Sitting in a fishbowl, knowing their responses are being monitored, the temptation to grandstand is irresistible. Goaded on by a moderator’s leading questions, people in groups are prone to seek a group consensus. After all, nobody wants to be known as the loser who can’t see the emperor’s new clothes.
At the other end of the spectrum are the classic egomaniacs focus groups attract. They’ve learned long ago that the best way to grab attention is to buck the trend of the room. They’re all too eager to usurp the role of a creative innovator without the requisite expertise and without accepting the concomitant risk to their reputations.
Questionable Answers
Finally, let’s consider the impact of interrupting the creative process by putting a teams’ incomplete work up for evaluation. Once “the feedback’ has been absorbed, that process is forever disrupted, as the creative team is urged to ignore its instincts, honed over years of experience, and “go with the data.”
Now, don’t get me started on whether this “data” is even remotely analogous to true scientific data. The samples are too small and the conditions aren’t tightly controlled. Science? I don’t think so.
So as far as I’m concerned, creative concepts modified to conform with doubtful “research findings” are always suspect. Tainted goods, they’re potentially toxic to a brand’s relationship with its audience—as the sour taste of poorly conceived messaging slowly undermines consumer appetite for the product.
Lessons Lost
Marketing to consumers means accepting risk. Giving anxious clients false reassurance with doubtful “clinical trials” is irresponsible and bad for business. The only way to know what works is to try it out on the big stage. Anything less cheats agency and brand alike of the invaluable lessons we can only learn from unfiltered failure and honest success.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Babel of Contents:
Misreading What Works in Digital Space
Since their origin in the 18th century, print magazines have captured the attention of millions of subscribers, offering news, gossip, advice, entertainment and even spiritual guidance.
Over time, magazines thrived, generating billions in advertising income. Initially, I’m sure, publishers assumed it would be easy to duplicate that success in digital space. Putting a popular product in a popular medium ought to have been a no-brainer.
It hasn’t worked out that way, but I’m not convinced it has to do with an actual lack of interest in reading online or off. Or rather, it’s not so much about reading per se, but about format and presentation.
Take, for example, the layout of People Magazine’s digital counterpart. Here’s an inchoate mishmash of mismatched sizes and styles. It’s a look one could easily achieve offline with a pair of scissors and a jar of what used to be called “library paste.”
Calling California Closets.
Where does the publisher expect users to look? Despite decades of market segmentation theory, there’s no effort to guide targeted users to targeted segments. Oh, sure, there’s a navigation bar, but this confusing array of misaligned photos competing with undifferentiated stacks of story links is an invitation to click away.
Though similarly cluttered, the grid-like design of the Sports Illustrated home page divides the page more convincingly into interest areas. Instead of compelling users to take everything in at once, the layout encourages them to take it step by step. Meanwhile Time's judicious use of white space and better feeling for proportion creates a buffet effect: disparate items arranged in a slightly more appetizing way.
A different tack is taken by O Magazine, where several featured items are each given the same weight, making them easier to grasp. Fighting this somewhat more elegant look is a feature found in Web sites of all categories: the independent right sidebar.
Often, such sidebars are in an unrelated style and crammed with an unpleasant jumble of offers, promotions and teasers. Here, at least, there’s an effort to give this sidebar material a unified look but, as a whole, it simply does not resonate with the remainder of the home page.
Read me (Some assembly required).
Ultimately, what these layouts have in common is an atomization of content, resulting from an unreasonably dense array of content modules. While I understand the desire to lure users into interior pages with the promise of riches to come, I believe a home page has a more important task: To create a welcoming environment.
In other words, brands need to recognize that a successful Web site is a multidimensional experience, not a static list of “offerings.” People come to People magazine for gossip. There’s a buzz, a thrill that people.com lacks entirely. If, instead of that excitement, users find a slapdash array of words and pictures, is it really any wonder “no one reads online?”
Dictating copy with “natural law.”
As I see it, this confusion of cause and effect is destined to perpetuate the very trend publishers and journalists bemoan. In the last few years, for example, a well-regarded user experience theorist has conducted what appear to be exhaustive eye-tracking studies, demonstrating how people read online. Based on such evidence he has developed an exhaustive theory of how one should write for the web. In fact, he has a rule for everything.
As cogent as his analysis might be on one level (and perhaps some of his insights may prove useful in some contexts) it has a fatal flaw. His conclusions take no account of the impact of visual organization on readability, comprehension or retention. It’s as if he believes that current Web design practice were born of some immutable Natural Law to which Copy must conform.
Excuse me, but that’s absurd.
If we believe people have trouble reading online, the solution is not to “write for the Web,” but to create layouts that actually function, layouts that allow people to do what they have done since the first magazines were published over 200 years ago: Read.
While it’s true that digital space is a new medium and, as such. is rapidly creating its own written idioms, we can’t address the problem by subjugating Copy to the demands of Design. And certainly not Design as practiced by Newsweek, where boxes of content appear in a jumble of weightings, categories, sizes, proportions and meanings. If we really believe the consumers aren’t paying attention, we’ll need to take a better read of the challenges ahead.
Over time, magazines thrived, generating billions in advertising income. Initially, I’m sure, publishers assumed it would be easy to duplicate that success in digital space. Putting a popular product in a popular medium ought to have been a no-brainer.
It hasn’t worked out that way, but I’m not convinced it has to do with an actual lack of interest in reading online or off. Or rather, it’s not so much about reading per se, but about format and presentation.
Take, for example, the layout of People Magazine’s digital counterpart. Here’s an inchoate mishmash of mismatched sizes and styles. It’s a look one could easily achieve offline with a pair of scissors and a jar of what used to be called “library paste.”
Calling California Closets.
Where does the publisher expect users to look? Despite decades of market segmentation theory, there’s no effort to guide targeted users to targeted segments. Oh, sure, there’s a navigation bar, but this confusing array of misaligned photos competing with undifferentiated stacks of story links is an invitation to click away.
Though similarly cluttered, the grid-like design of the Sports Illustrated home page divides the page more convincingly into interest areas. Instead of compelling users to take everything in at once, the layout encourages them to take it step by step. Meanwhile Time's judicious use of white space and better feeling for proportion creates a buffet effect: disparate items arranged in a slightly more appetizing way.
A different tack is taken by O Magazine, where several featured items are each given the same weight, making them easier to grasp. Fighting this somewhat more elegant look is a feature found in Web sites of all categories: the independent right sidebar.
Often, such sidebars are in an unrelated style and crammed with an unpleasant jumble of offers, promotions and teasers. Here, at least, there’s an effort to give this sidebar material a unified look but, as a whole, it simply does not resonate with the remainder of the home page.
Read me (Some assembly required).
Ultimately, what these layouts have in common is an atomization of content, resulting from an unreasonably dense array of content modules. While I understand the desire to lure users into interior pages with the promise of riches to come, I believe a home page has a more important task: To create a welcoming environment.
In other words, brands need to recognize that a successful Web site is a multidimensional experience, not a static list of “offerings.” People come to People magazine for gossip. There’s a buzz, a thrill that people.com lacks entirely. If, instead of that excitement, users find a slapdash array of words and pictures, is it really any wonder “no one reads online?”
Dictating copy with “natural law.”
As I see it, this confusion of cause and effect is destined to perpetuate the very trend publishers and journalists bemoan. In the last few years, for example, a well-regarded user experience theorist has conducted what appear to be exhaustive eye-tracking studies, demonstrating how people read online. Based on such evidence he has developed an exhaustive theory of how one should write for the web. In fact, he has a rule for everything.
As cogent as his analysis might be on one level (and perhaps some of his insights may prove useful in some contexts) it has a fatal flaw. His conclusions take no account of the impact of visual organization on readability, comprehension or retention. It’s as if he believes that current Web design practice were born of some immutable Natural Law to which Copy must conform.
Excuse me, but that’s absurd.
If we believe people have trouble reading online, the solution is not to “write for the Web,” but to create layouts that actually function, layouts that allow people to do what they have done since the first magazines were published over 200 years ago: Read.
While it’s true that digital space is a new medium and, as such. is rapidly creating its own written idioms, we can’t address the problem by subjugating Copy to the demands of Design. And certainly not Design as practiced by Newsweek, where boxes of content appear in a jumble of weightings, categories, sizes, proportions and meanings. If we really believe the consumers aren’t paying attention, we’ll need to take a better read of the challenges ahead.
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