"And just like that, poof –he was gone…."
Conveying the Big Picture: spell it out!
This weeks chapter is a reiteration of the To get it or not to get it…. question, focusing our attention on the Home page as the main catalyst for getting your sites point across. He reinforces (and literally spells out) what I had said in for the first weeks reading: (“If you can’t make a page self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.“ Ultimately, what this means is, eliminating question marks –e.g., 5 W’s attributed to potential site- should be the overarching practice. i.e., “Brevity is the soul of wit” but don’t outwit your viewer...or yourself.”)
A critical question he ends with in one of his many diagrams, is “Why should I be here –and not somewhere else?” Indeed. Often I find myself at a website, or a pop-up window that takes me down an aforementioned rabbit hole, and it takes me a few seconds to have an easy epiphany: “What the hell am I doing here and why am I wasting my precious time??” And *CLICK*, I’m outta there. It’s not an existential dilemma. It is all too easy to see your day fly by due to “browsing” the internet. Krug mentioned that was in part due to things being harder to read on a screen than on paper, but also due to our whimsical, cat like approach to the web. What’s this? And this? How ‘bout this? It borders on OCD, and all of us are susceptible to the ease of arbitrary, or plain curious clicking. That is the nature of the beast, sometimes it can’t be helped. But –and this is his point, we can design in a way that lends to more-comprehensive visual content that lets the user (or surfer, who could become a devout visitor) why they need not spend time clicking away at our site. And this is the power of the home page.
Hook, line, and sinker.
3 SITES RELATED TO READING:
OCnsidering what the internet has done to newspaper sales, news sites really have something to prove now, and it's a whole new ballgame. Subscriptions to Op-ed and other speciality items can be cancelled in a nano-second (well, if they design it that way, ahem). But most news sites make me want to leave them immediately, as I never know where to begin. So here's three, from best to worst
1. Al Jazeera
Best (truthful!?!) news, cleanest site. And they cover the globe, folks. Thankfully, W's intentions to bombing them off the face of the planet were never met to fruition.
Pretty clear-cut, very biased but honest about it and their news, usually funny, sometimes tacky. And they love gossip, but I think that's a hook. (ploy) Design is 3 columned, not to headachey. But just too much content on one page.
Do I need to say anything? (poof!)
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