Yahoo! Inc. | luke@lukew.com
Ted stared at the looming input field in front of him, its importance clearly enhanced by the stark emptiness around it. No sense hesitating any longer. A few taps on the keyboard produced the phrase that came to his mind first: “chicago olympics.” He then shot the mouse to the biggest button on the page and clicked “search.” The screen refreshed and he furiously scanned a list of hyper-links brimming with bright blue underlines. A second later he had made his choice…
As she hunkered in her cubicle, it was clear Sandra was becoming increasingly bored of her inbox. Time for some inspiration, she decided, and pointed her Web browser to her social news site of choice. “What’s everyone looking at now?” she wondered, anxious for a diversion from her email triage. As the site loaded, something caught her eye: “City Celebrates Olympics Bid Win.” Her mouse moved toward the link with curiosity…
Though he had just left three open conversations in his instant-messenger client to attend to an SMS message on his phone, the “ding” of a new conversation invite pulled Arthur back to his chat application. It was Linda, and she had a recommendation: “Thought you’d like to see this article.” Linda didn’t
point him toward content often, so the link she included in her message grabbed Arthur’s attention for the moment…
Three different people from three different contexts but all heading to the same Web page— what will they find?
Hopefully they’ll get a well-written article that answers their question, entertains them for a bit, or provides them with new information. But what else will greet them on their arrival? An onerous website navigation menu or two; promotions for irrelevant services or content; an overabundance of choices?
In the case of Ted, Sandra, and Arthur, what greeted them was a news story from a newspaper site and it had onerous navigation, promotions for irrelevant content, and choices aplenty (Figure 1).
In fact, on an average 1024x768 display, 75 percent of this Web page’s screen real estate was devoted to elements other than the primary content of the page. This wasn’t just an annoyance for these people—it was a missed opportunity for the website as well.
In today’s search-driven, social, and distributed Web, people are finding their way to content through an increasing number of distinct experiences.
Content-aggregator sites like Digg and del.icio.us, display surfaces like Facebook and MySpace, content creation sites like blogs and wikis, search engines like Google and Yahoo!, and communication tools like email and instant messaging are all responsible for an increasing amount of traffic to Web content pages.
But when people arrive, the Web page they get isn’t optimized for these circumstances. Instead, the vast majority of content pages online remain more concerned about their place within a website rather than their place on the Web. These pages are designed as if they were primarily accessed from a website’s home page or a carefully thought-out selection from the site’s information architecture and, as a result, remain focused on addressing:
• How many features of the site can be merchandised to people on this page?
• Will people know what site (or page) they are on so they know how to get back?
• How can people get to every place on the website from this page?
While these are all worthwhile considerations, they go only so far. In fact, studies conducted on content pages have shown that too much of an insular approach can actually prevent sites from achieving their goal of increased
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