Cc: Peter Wiggin ,
        Kathy Keith 
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At 6:56 PM -0600 1/7/98, Vin Crosbie wrote:

>Online is an actively used -- not passively used -- medium. A user's
>abilities to immediately access what he wants and to get immediate
>gratification are two of the most important reasons why consumers will use
>this medium rather than traditional media.

I agree somewhat with the upshot of this, but not the rationale. Online is,
in fact, a marketly SLOWER medium to traverse than is print. (Put someone
at a computer with a website already dialed up and hand someone else a
newspaper and time them in how long it takes to them to find answer
questions from the day's news.) Moreover, online is prone to greater use by
active information seekers for two main reasons: the lack of an involuntary
exposure modality (i.e., that "push" never really materialized) and the
disproportionate number of infoseekers who form the early-adopter  audience
for the Internet. Failing to provide greater lures to casual browsers (who,
by the way, are anything BUT passive; see the true definition of
"scanning") could, in fact, become the medium's undoing.

That said, I concur heartily that scrolling Java applets are of very
limited value, partly because of how people read. Eye-Trac has indicated
three general "phases" of reading. Graphical vividness is effective only
during the first phase, which occurs during the first one second or less of
exposure. Unfortunately, most online graphical devices have not had time to
download and unfurl during that time. This is a prime reason, by the way,
why many banner ads do not work that well online.

>This is a medium, a generation, an era, and a future of websurfing,
>channel surfing, and fast forwarding, where consumers no longer suffer
>easily the delays of distance or time -- even download time.

This may be the most widely held mis-reading of the decade. People really
don't have shorter attention spans these days. In fact, they tend to be
willing to put up with incredible amounts of grief and delay -- provided
there is a reward in the end. Last night, for example, I was explaining to
a much younger visitor the Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon and watched
in amazement as the next 45 minutes were spent by this student searching
dozens of website for theaters still showing the film at midnight Friday
and Saturday nights. True, it was slam-bam exposure to each site, but not
from lack of attention span but rather from lack of patience with
irrelevancies.

>I realize that Kathy's questions was about designing for non-scrolling
>users. However, what study shows that if a website doesn't display all of
>its contents in the top 640 x 480 pixels of its index page, users will
>leave? The eye can scan a scroll-down webpage for headlines far quicker
>than waiting for scrolling ticker tapes or rotating banners to rotate
>through all of those same headlines.

True, but once the top part of the page unfurls, the eye immediately begins
to narrow its field of focus as the reader shifts into the second and third
phases of reading. Choices then rather quickly become confined to reading
one of the things offered or going somewhere else. It's a more pronounced
phenomenon than the dropoff from the top half of a printed page to the
bottom (most papers are unfolded before being read), but only slightly less
pronounced than the dropoff from Page 1 to Page 2 in print.

Absent all the modality issues, there is, however, another solution:
increased relevance of the front page. Why not set a cookie that tracks
which parts of the paper the reader looks at most often and, instead of
rotating teasers at the top, adjusting them to match each user's most
likely areas of interest?  This could be carried to too much of an extreme,
but online certainly could give the sports lover a sports "skybox" while
simultaneously serving up a features "skybox" for the non-sports reader.




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Subject: Re: Screen limitations From: Eric Meyer  Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 12:10:56 -0600
How the Web Was Won
Subject: Re: Screen limitations
From: Eric Meyer 
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 12:10:56 -0600

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