The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.

Obviously from the results above none of the survey respondents indicated that navigating a blog was very difficult. However I would consider the most interesting statistic from the survey that 30% think it’s neither difficult OR easy, and 9% think it’s difficult. It would have been quite easy to assume that a majority would consider navigating a blog to be very easy, which isn’t the case. It’s surprising considering the high possibility that the survey respondants were experienced users.

The other 4 question results, and comments from bloggers/readers are discussed below.

These results suggest that despite RSS feeds and RSS readers, blog readers still hold easy navigation and the visual appeal of your blog as important to them.

However, 55% of respondants indicated that it IS important that the content of a blog post is visually appealing, and 26% indicated that it was very important to them. To keep your readers coming back for more, concentrating on both the overall design AND the layout of your blog posts is important.

31% indicated a preference for webpage navigation over blog navigation. However, 42% indicated no preference to either. Good news for bloggers and web designers alike.

From the Comments…

Sarah said:
I know from experience that a lot of people find blog navigation difficult, there is an album blog I run for Live Drive called Critical Junctions that generates a certain amount of listener traffic but while listeners will comment on the album choices by text or on the shows forum, they don’t seem keen to comment on the actual blog. Meanwhile they use the forum to request albums we have already done as the blog format doesn’t allow them see that it’s already been done.

Rick said:
I always presume my posts from longer than a few weeks ago are as dead as if they had never been written.

There were quite a few comments like this that highlighted the temporal nature of blogging, which is perfect for a diary style blog, but not ideal if you want readers to read your older entries. Unless, of course, you make the navigation of your blog as important as the content. Otherwise, your posts will be “dead”, pushed into archives where it’s difficult to find. It’s often assumed that readers use categories and tags to navigate.

Lottie said:
I never use categories or tags when searching a blog unless it’s a blog I am familiar with and I am looking for a specific post. Otherwise I tend to simply read some of the latest posts.

Blogs might not be breaking the web, but how users actually interact with them could be misunderstood. It has been suggested to me that many people use search as a way to navigate a blog, but search only works if you know exactly what you’re looking for and makes the reader task orientated (leading to high bounce rates) as Frank pointed out in his blog post:

Frank said:
If your blog does not lead users to further information they are interested in, they won’t even attempt to navigate. In my experience bounce rates on blogs are very high. Most traffic will arrive at a blog through long tail google searches, scan the page and either find what they are looking for and leave, or realise it’s not what they were looking for and leave.

Steps can be taken to decrease the bounce rate on your blog, it’s worth considering that a majority of them could be navigational in nature.

To help answer the question I’ve created a short 5 question survey, which I’d be delighted if you would fill out. I’ll keep it open for a week and post the results here and provided some commentary. If you have anything you’d like to add on the topic of blog navigation and design, please add your comments here.

The first few blog posts came faster than I expected and even included photos of the girls. Though she has always been slightly more technical than most, she did manage to bork the blog as soon as I took my eye of it. For some reason she went and turned all of her blog posts into pages, in the process breaking the theme she was using, as it could only handle 3 short page names/links in the navigation.

The next time I visited I offered to show her how to fix the blog (let’s just say she’s still in the process of fixing it). I asked her about changing the posts to pages and she explained “My blog posts we’re appearing in the menu” and when I explained to her about the linear nature of blogging she asked “How would anyone know that my other blog posts were there?” It was then my task to explain how categories and tagging worked, but this surprised me because I knew that she was an avid blog reader and internet user.

It was then that I began truly questioning the usability of blog navigation. We assume that readers are using tags and categories as navigational tools, but what if they’re really stumbling through the content, using the awkward archives and calendar tools? Or simply reading from finish to start? If a user enters a blog via a google search can they successfully navigate back to the home page? If every blog has its own list of different categories, how do users know where to look? Is your blog taxonomy even understood?

I recently read, on the iQcontent blog, about how visually impaired users must listen to every piece of navigation on a webpage with their screen-readers. This immediately made me wonder about the persistent nature of blogrolls, how they feature on the majority of blogs and on every single page. Are they successful at getting hits for other members of your blogosphere? Or are they just social badges, worn to show off your affiliations?

Blogs make it easier for everyone to publish to the net, but does this, in turn, make navigating the web harder for everyone else? This is something that requires further investigation, especially considering that there is a shift occurring online where entire websites are being replaced by blogs. But are they in fact borking the entire web?

Bad Error Messages

A family member was struggling with a basic task in Gmail. Sending an email. Attached to this email were a number of high quality digital photos. When they attempted to send this email the following error message was displayed.

The immediate reaction from the user was to try again, and again, each time the same error message appeared, and again, until finally the task was abandoned all together.

The reason this could be considered a bad error message is because it stranded the user, it told them a problem had occurred but did not explain how to fix it. From an experienced user’s perspective it might seem obvious to us that the email attachments had exceeded the 20mb limit imposed by Gmail. To an inexperienced user this information is not available. Yes, it’s available on one of the Gmail help sections. But as demonstrated by the user, they abandoned the task without even considering that there could be a solution.

By simply creating a link to this troubleshooting page from within the error message it would be one step towards a more usable design. A step further would be to provide the information in the error message itself. If the system can tell you the error code, surely it can advise you on a course of action.

Gmail has been in beta, and in development for many years now. Perhaps they should take a step backwards and resolve its basic usability issues before crowding the interface with even more features.

Psychological Aspects of Cyberspace: Theory, Research, Applications: This blog contains each individual chapter from the newly published book of the same name. Readers are invited to read each chapter and comment or ask questions of the individual writers. Topics covered include privacy and trust online, internet abuse, flow states, cybertheraputic theory and techniques and sexual activities online. It’s wonderful to see an entire book on the topic of Cyberpsychology readily available online and open to discussion. Very much looking forward to reading all of these chapters.

For your eyes only: Custom interfaces make computer clicking faster, easier: University of Washington engineers discuss a new approach to software design. They propose that instead of standard off the shelf user interface designs, that by putting the user through a brief skills test a mathematically-based version of the user interface could be generated that is optimized for the user’s vision and motor abilities. This research is especially important for the disabled, elderly or anyone that has difficulty using a computer mouse.

The Effects of Background Television on the Toy Play Behavior of Very Young Children: This research study found that background television, disrupts very young children’s play behavior even when they pay little overt attention to it and even when tuned to adult themed shows. Background television was found to cause short play episode lengths, which are a marker for poor developmental outcome. These findings are important because play is directly related to healthy cognitive and social development. Related Article: TV Really Might Cause Autism

Internet users refuse to put up with intrusive ads: From 1000+ internet users sampled 59% indicated that they had stopped visiting a website because of irrelevant, annoying and intrusive online ads (including pop-ups that cover web content, loud noises and ads that were difficult to close, minimise or click away from). This study relates back to my own undergraduate research on pop-up advertisements, where I found that the more experienced a user the more likely they are to actively attempt to remove pop-ups from their online experience. Web designers need to start paying attention to research and surveys such as these, or as demonstrated, users will stop visiting certain websites completely.

If anyone has anything they’d like to contribute to the next digest, or related articles for this volume, feel free to drop me a comment or an e-mail – Sinéad.

Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4

It’s just another fine example of Irish web design firmly stuck in web 1.0. The .ie domain is virtually (no pun intended!) littered with them. I’m sure there are plenty more examples of badly designed Irish sites (not necessarily .ie) and would be thrilled to hear everyone’s own personal “favorites”.

Eircom.net is another firm favorite of mine for its sensational orange menu with white text, and dark grey text on a grey background for its sub-menu. Wonderful stuff.