On Blogging Australia

I had an interesting lesson in visual hierarchy this afternoon at the Woden branch of St George Bank.

I walked in and stood for a couple of minutes before asking one of the staff sitting doing nothing where I should queue - the traditional “queue here” sign was missing. I was told that they now had a ticket system - to one side on the way in was a sign (in white 30 pixel print on a red sign) saying something to the effect of “please take a ticket and we’ll get to you as soon as we can”. I told the lady who told me that this was not really obvious and I hadn’t seen the sign on the way in. One of her helpful male colleagues said “Take a ticket, it is just like at the motor registry”.

Mate, if you’re reading this, please understand, it is not like at the motor registry. At the ACT Government Shopfronts (our local motor registry equivalent) you cannot get past the ticket machine without noticing it. The sign is in black and white, in big big letters, and you cannot get into the place without being confronted face-to-face by the ticket machine.

I swear on my life, within a minute of me taking the ticket, a lady walked in, past the ticket machine, and sat down, before getting up again to look for the sign. She noticed the ticket machine after about 30 seconds of searching, again un-helped by the available staff. I asked her after she got her ticket if she’d noticed the sign or the ticket machine on the way in, and she said that she had not.

When my number did come up, I asked the lady behind the counter if anyone else had the same problem. She admitted that a lot of people had. I don’t want to make more of this than necessary - let’s just say in 10 years of user-centered interface design, I haven’t seen too many worse failures in corporate information support or work practice design. The sign failed, and there was zero care on the part of the remaining support mechanism (the staff that watched uncaring as at least two customers missed the poor visual cue).

OK, rant over - what does this mean to us as bloggers?  This is what I recommended in the user-centered design for bloggers post:

Make individual posts findable within your blog
It is easy to argue that UCD doesn’t apply to blog postings - chances are, if you are viewing this blog for the first time, you are following a link - and findability of the next most interesting post after that should just be a matter of scrolling down, right? That is OK if the next posting down is just as interesting to the reader as the last post - but what if it isn’t? You’ve lost them. To make individual posts easily findable within your blog:

• list relevant categories and tags at individual posting level: these will encourage the reader to look at related posts. Better yet, get hold of one of the related posts plugins (Darren Rowse and a lot of other top bloggers use these when displaying individual posts - here is an example)
• make sure navigation links look clickable: clearly identifiable clickable regions are a must for web navigability, and this applies to blogs as well as any other content presentation mechanism. If it is a link, underline it and/or make it blue.
• have a blog-level search engine that works: this is not as silly as it sounds - when I moved domain names for Facibus Reviews the technorati search widget didn’t work because the index was pointing to the posts at the old server address.

Use the power of visual hierarchy
Look at a newspaper - you expect the headline to be the largest font, and to be at the top of each story block. You also expect it to be descriptive of the content that it is grouped with. It works the same in webland - the title should be larger than the text it supports, and the text in turn should fulfil the promise made by the headline. Most blogging platform software does this by default - but you can still force poor visual hierarchy in two ways:

1. By using a theme that buries your headlines (which is easy to fix - if you can’t change the CSS yourself, change the theme).
2. Writing a headline that doesn’t support the text beneath it: if in doubt, I recommend that you read the very good article on writing effective headlines for different audiences over at copyblogger.

Please group things so that the key message is always the easiest to find - which leads me to the next point - keeping the most important stuff above the fold.

Keep the most important stuff above the fold
Think about the newspaper metaphor again: where does the editor put the most important information? On the front page, at the top where it will grab your attention. When a newspaper is folded in half for selling at your newsagent/news stand, it is the information placed above the fold that will attract the attention of a casual browser.

You can do the same with your blog, by putting the key posting of the week at the top of the front page. Zern Liew (co-author of Cubicle Commando) does this with his eicolab blog.

Where to from here?
Each of the three ways above is worth thinking about - look at your own blog, then look at those of others - a bad web resource of any kind may still be read by someone who has to read it (such as required reading for a course), but who amongst us is unique enough in their own blogging niche to assume that people will read their postings anyway, regardless of how well or poorly they are presented? If you write enough content, people are going to stumble onto it sooner or later. Make it easy for prospective readers to find and read your postings, and they might come back.

Don’t be St George - care about your readers.

• Make the important stuff easy to find.
• If you hide the important stuff, don’t react with surprise when people leave your blog never to return.
• Make it easy for people to read what you have to say.

Zern Liew has good and bad examples of effective signage. It is worth having a look.

Has anyone else ever been confused by poor signage?