Web-Conscious
Content Experiences
Luke Wroblewski
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?
The Site Burden
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
