Readability
The 80s marketing term “user friendly” begat one of the classic Unix quips: “Unix is user-hostile” (or: “Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.”) Web portals, everyone’s favorite 90s busybox, very quickly became user hostile as distractions were, well, kind of their whole purpose.
Readability is a useful/controversial bookmarklet that strips away all the crap you find in typical web portals these days:
Even though AdBlock Plus has nigh-magical abilities to make certain websites bearable, the problem has gone beyond paid-placement ads as the site itself is screaming almost as loudly to draw you into another of its corners, like Wikipedia with colors. As the ALA article mentions, what should be an act of “reading” withers to “browsing”, a descriptor that was okay-I-guess in the era of black & white internet (which, ironically, grew out of a no-design, content-heavy, academics-only web.)
I don’t agree that publishers “just need to find something users are willing to pay for” (they won’t, and neither will they.) But I do think that a page could be taken from the attitude some forward-thinking internet music/game vendors have taken, which is to trust your users. While everyone else was DRMing everything up, these guys took a step back and said, “hey, if they’re already trying to pay us, why don’t we not assume they’re trying to steal?” The nuance in publishing is different, but the attitude is the same: goad the user into pursuing topics/authors further, and if you’ve done your job right, they probably will. “People get disinterested halfway through! We need to keep pulling them through to other pages!” Oh, boo hoo. They’ll probably be back tomorrow, and maybe next week. Until they figure out your content sucks and they move on to your competitors. You got the short-term ad bucks, but lost the war.
Tags: advertising, bookmarklets, content, design, trust your users, web
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