Nielsen on the "Usability Divide"

Nielsen on the "Usability Divide"
Here's an excerpt from Digital Divide: The Three Stages (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox): Far worse than the economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn't use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don't achieve the modern world's full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand. Almost 40% of the...

Here's an excerpt from Digital Divide: The Three Stages (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox):

Far worse than the economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn't use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don't achieve the modern world's full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand.

Almost 40% of the population has lower literacy skills, and yet few websites follow the guidelines for writing for low-literacy users. Even government sites that target poorer citizens are usually written at a level that requires a university degree to comprehend. The British government has done some good work on simplifying much of its direct.gov.uk site information, but even it requires at least a high school education to easily read.

Lower literacy is the Web's biggest accessibility problem, but nobody cares about this massive user group.

This really is a critical problem. It's one reason why I argue for keeping readability levels as low as possible. It's not dumbing-down the text—it's opening it up to people who can use it if only they can understand it.

Nielsen's post has a link to his guideline for writing for low-literacy users. I also recommend Readability.info, which can give you several good ways to assess your text readability. You can also find a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list, down in the left-hand column.

100 million sites
CNN.com reports that the Web now has 100 million sites. The report is based on a story in Netcraft, a site I will include in the Webwriting Resources list. I suspect we will hit 250 million sites before we realize what a profound revolution Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched upon an unsuspecting world back in 1989....

CNN.com reports that the Web now has 100 million sites. The report is based on a story in Netcraft, a site I will include in the Webwriting Resources list.

I suspect we will hit 250 million sites before we realize what a profound revolution Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched upon an unsuspecting world back in 1989.

Links to the New Edition
Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group. In the next few days...

Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group.

In the next few days I'll add some resources here that are available as a CD in the book...but only for PC users. So Mac users can download those resources here.

Poynter Online's EyeTrack07 Attacks the Myth of Short Attention Spans
I haven't had time to read it yet. But here's the story from Poynter Online - EyeTrack07: The Myth of Short Attention Spans. Excerpt: You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly. And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is...

I haven't had time to read it yet. But here's the story from Poynter Online - EyeTrack07: The Myth of Short Attention Spans. Excerpt:

You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C.

Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.

And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is even stronger online than in print.

At a time when readers are assumed to have short attention spans, especially those who read online, this qualifies as news.

That was the predominant behavior of roughly 600 test subjects -- 70 percent of whom said they read the news in print or online four times a week. Their eye movements were tracked in 15-minute reading sessions of broadsheet, tabloid and online publications. Evidence from these sessions revealed how long readers spend with the stories they pick, as well as a host of other details about reading patterns.

This should be a very interesting report.

From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0?
Via the International Herald Tribune, a long and interesting article about where Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants the Web to go: A 'more revolutionary' Web. Excerpt: Just when the ideas behind "Web 2.0" are starting to enter into the mainstream, the mass of brains behind the World Wide Web is introducing pieces of what may end up being called Web 3.0. "Twenty years from now, we'll look back and say this...

Via the International Herald Tribune, a long and interesting article about where Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants the Web to go: A 'more revolutionary' Web. Excerpt:

Just when the ideas behind "Web 2.0" are starting to enter into the mainstream, the mass of brains behind the World Wide Web is introducing pieces of what may end up being called Web 3.0.

"Twenty years from now, we'll look back and say this was the embryonic period," said Tim Berners-Lee, 50, who established the programming language of the Web in 1989 with colleagues at CERN, the European science institute.

Very much worth reading.

BlogWrite for CEOs
Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well....

Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well.

A new French-language resource
I've belatedly discovered écrire pour le web, a blog produced, I believe, in Belgium. Even with my rudimentary French I can see it's a good site, and I've put a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list. (It's way down at the bottom of the list, thanks to its lower-case text.) This raises another point: staying up to date. If you're running a site that deals with webwriting (at...

I've belatedly discovered écrire pour le web, a blog produced, I believe, in Belgium. Even with my rudimentary French I can see it's a good site, and I've put a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list. (It's way down at the bottom of the list, thanks to its lower-case text.)

This raises another point: staying up to date. If you're running a site that deals with webwriting (at least in part), please get in touch. It's time to do a serious overhaul of the links and resources available here. Non-English sites especially welcome!

Previewing EyeTrack 07
At Poynter Online, Sara Quinn has an article worth reading: Looking back at EyeTrack is actually a look ahead at the latest of these Poynter studies. Obviously webwriters should understand how people read online, and EyeTrack 07 will therefore be of importance to us all. Excerpt: A systematic look -- that's what Poynter EyeTrack07 is all about. It's the largest of four eye-tracking studies conducted by Poynter and the first...

At Poynter Online, Sara Quinn has an article worth reading: Looking back at EyeTrack is actually a look ahead at the latest of these Poynter studies. Obviously webwriters should understand how people read online, and EyeTrack 07 will therefore be of importance to us all. Excerpt:

A systematic look -- that's what Poynter EyeTrack07 is all about. It's the largest of four eye-tracking studies conducted by Poynter and the first with the distinct focus of comparing print and online news reading.

We've almost finished analyzing the data. Key findings will be released at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington, D.C., on March 28. The full debut of the findings will take place April 10 to 12 at a Poynter conference in St. Petersburg, Fla.

To give you a little background, this was a test of 600 regular readers of news. That's a large number in the research world, and it was necessary in order to get what we needed. We wanted to look through readers' eyes as they read live publications to see what attracted and held their attention. A second part of the study involved six versions of a prototype and an exit interview, which gave us insight into comprehension, and retention of information.

Using eye-tracking equipment we noted the number of times readers viewed more than 350 specific elements, such as headlines, photos, cutlines, stories, graphics, blogs, listings and ads.

The data totals more than 102,000 "eye-stopping events." That's research speak, but it means we've watched every eye movement of 600 readers over the course of about 9,000 minutes of reading 30 days' worth of news publication.

We conducted the study in four U.S. markets, working with the St. Petersburg Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune in Minnesota, the Philadelphia Daily News in Pennsylvania and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colo. Each subject read the actual publication for 15 minutes, then read a prototype for another five minutes.

You may reserve a copy of the EyeTrack07 report and find more details about the upcoming conference at eyetrack.poynter.org. Go there to get a glimpse of the project in a video as well, while we continue to crunch the data.

Sir Tim Warns Us About Online Fraud
Via the Guardian Unlimited: Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats. Excerpt: The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness. His creation...

Via the Guardian Unlimited: Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats. Excerpt:

The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.

His creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business, and entertain themselves.

But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way".

He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.

Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what."

The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.

Beyond Wikipedia: Citizendium
Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt: Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little...

Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt:

Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little brat of online encyclopedias.

Sanger is staging an electronic coup d'état with a new wiki called Citizendium, to be launched early in the new year. But there's a twist: the site will start out as a mirror image of the English version of Wikipedia through a process called "forking."

By making a replica of Wikipedia, Sanger hopes to attract a bevy of experts to the project, who will then refine the wobbly content pulled from Wikipedia's infinite pages to create a resource that is authoritative and reliable. ("We descend upon their content, red pens in hand and start our own new community," he recently wrote.)

"On the day of launch, we have over 1,000 people ready to get to work, and a large portion of them are professors, graduate students, research scientists, legal scholars, technical thinkers and assorted other intellectuals."

Question is, how far will his highfalutin model go in the unruly hurly-burly of cyberspace, where the wisdom of the crowds rules the day?

I've put a link to Citizendium in the Webwriting Resources list, and the article itself has a link as well.

A Freelance Job in Vancouver
This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest: The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December...

This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest:

The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December 14, 2006 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.); turn-around time for reports is three working days.

To learn more about our company please visit The Conference Publishers.

If you are available and interested, please contact Biljana Zelenovic at biljana@theconferencepublishers.com or 1-800-265-3973 x226.

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