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SI - Site Forums : Silicon Investor - Legacy Interface Discussion (2004-2011) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SI Bob who wrote (2712)	11/29/2004 3:10:26 PM
From: Hoatzin	Respond to of 6035

From Chapter 2 of “Don’t Make Me think – A common Sense Approach to Web Usability” by Steve Krug: FACT OF LIFE #1: We don’t read pages. We scan them. One of the very few well-documented facts about web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye. […] The net effect is a lot like Gary Larson’s classic Far Side cartoon about the difference between what we say to dogs and what they hear. In the cartoon, the dog (named Ginger) appears to be listening intently as her owner gives her a serious talking-to about staying out of the garbage. But from the dog’s point of view, all he’s saying is “blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah.” So your average SI user, who, for the purposes of this analogy only, is the dog, clicks on an active link expecting to read a post, but instead sees what you think of as “the Upgrade page.” At least 60 percent of this page is white, and there’s scary big BOLD RED text at the top, that says something like “page blah blah tried to access blah blah blah not available blah blah…” And there’s a blue link towards the end or the text there, but I’m not clicking on that thing, no sir, I don’t want to buy the Special Edition DVD, or pay for faster shipping than I have to, or send my error to Microsoft, I’m hitting that back button right now and not reading another word. (Then I’m going to click on the same link again, just in case it will work differently the second time, then click on some other profiles in case it was just that one person’s profile that was whacky, but that’s a different problem.) If I did that, most people would have no idea that it's an available feature. Is that a feature that would tip a free-loader into paying status? Is it worth writing out all those active anchor tags that are non-functioning (from the canine point-of-view)?