From the Financial Express comes this interesting data point:
The average time spent on the internet is on a rise. From 58 minutes on weekdays in the Indian Readership Survey (which tracks media consumption) July-December 2003, it increased to 63 in IRS July-December 2005.
While 63 minutes sounds like a lot, email and instant messaging probably take up the lions share of the time.
What is left is very little time and attention, possibly as low as 10 minutes. All content creators (including blogs) are essentially competing for this small slice of time before the Internet user “switches off” and returns to her real life.
This leads to the following rules for creating web content:
1. Be pithy! – No one has time to read/watch/listen to long anything any more.
2. Keep it simple – Busy pages are a turn off for Internet users, as surely as a long queue is a turn off for a traveller or a shopper.
3. Dont make the user register for free content – “Free registration” is not really free because it makes the user give up his most precious asset – time!
4. Be easy on the eye – Use easy to read fonts and pleasing color schemes – make sure your ads comply to the same guidelines.
5. Summarize, organize and itemize – Make your content easy to skim through, because thats all you are going to get anyhow.
I am sure many of these rules are fairly obvious – but I am continually amazed by the number of websites that dont get it.
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What you say about simplicity is essentially true and makes logical sense. Yet, there are exceptions – Rediff.com being a case in point – its cluttered, noisy, ‘busy’, has too many colours and yet is one of the most visted pages in India. Its somehow not even too tough to read “what u’re looking for” on it unlike the Indiatimes main page.
I guess user experience and design is a tough and uncertain art ….
I think that the scarcity of attention is a larger phenomenon applying not just to websites but whole media industry at large.
And this aspect has been best summarized by Herbert Simon way back in the 70’s
” What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)
In the specific context of websites, the ideas from Peter Morville( one of the founding father of IA) is very interesting to tackle the problems of information overload, ‘Ambient Findability'( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596007655/qid=1130528314/sr=8-1/103-0701297-6152639?n=283155)
Rajan