Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

Our analysis sheds light on a variety of heretofore neglected, user-experience related design challenges associated with blogs’ potential to become a mainstream medium for Internet users. Link >>

The Catalyst Group in New York City has posted the results of a rather sobering usability study on blogs, which can be downloaded here (.pdf).

Among other things, the study found that:

• No participant understood the mechanisms associated with RSS/subscribing to a blog – not even the minority familiar with the term “RSS.”
• Few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog – and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented.
• A minority of participants understood how to navigate within the blog itself – with most being confused by areas for recent posts, categories, trackbacks and even the comments and archives functions.

For Boyink.com, I immediately took this study to heart, and made the following changes:

• Added a link to whatisrss.com under the links to my RSS feeds.
• Added a “How to Use Boyink.com” section with plenty of screenshots to my About Boyink.com page.
• Added more direct links to that content in the “About” blurb that appears at the top of the right column in many areas of the site.

Any other suggestions?

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Tim Bednar on July 19, 2005

   I’ve always thought that Really Simple Syndicate is an ironic acronym; and blogs thats an equally stupid term. I look forward to reading this study.

2. Tim Bednar on July 19, 2005

   Okay, I read the study. I think the observations are pretty good, but it really is about how a “blog” integrates with an existing business magazine site. The BusinessWeek blogs are business blog in the sense they are about business, but they are not blogs written by businesses for their customers. This seems to be an important thing—the study seems to more rightly point the the problems the magazines/newspapers/journalism has with integrating blogs with its normal “edited” content.

   So, the study has limited application in my view.

3. Dave J. on July 19, 2005

   Tim, I still think the wake-up call this study makes is useful for us bloggers.

   How do we get that new visitor from Google to be a subscriber?

4. Michael Boyink (Author) on July 19, 2005

   Always the critic…;)

   For me, seeing that the hallmarks of blogs - top-down flow, commenting, partial and full posts, etc - were confusing for “average users” was valuable information, regardless of the context or purpose.

5. Tim Bednar on July 19, 2005

   Okay, okay. I found more stuff useful. Please see my thoughts here…

   http://www.turtleinteractive.com/designblogdetail.asp?BlogID=10

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