Subject: Online Newspaper Design From: catchup@dial-switch.ch (Norbert Specker) Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 14:51:36 +0100

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Thank you all for your answers to my posting:

>I am looking for somebody has written about/spoken about a specific issue
>of Online Newspaper Design - the Human factor. What do I as a publisher
>have to do, to ensure a no-stress ambiance on my home-page? What engages
>people to "click", what drives them off? Backed by experiences from other
>areas or systematically collected and backed by hard facts.

Mindy McAdams proposed to put the subject on the list and certainly already
put her contribution there:
Here is the rest:

Randy Sunderland wrote:
-----------------------
Totally unscientific, but very effective -- when I set up my site for a
small weekly I recruited about 20 people willing to serve as testers. They
had a variety of browsers, with mixed levels of online experience, and we
put our site through the paces for about six weeks before going "public".
This provided valuable insight into the habits of my readers.
Unfortunately, I redesigned the site about four months after all this and
did not take the time to "test" it again.

Now I am approaching my first year on the web and have another redesign in
the works and this time will take the time with a test group again. These
folks told me what they liked, did not like, based on how they used my
site, not how the "experts" and graphic artists would like the site to look
like.

Couple other advantages -- it cost no money to put the test team together,
and this group promoted our site once it was available to the public far
better than I could have.

My answer
---------
Thank you for your prompt reply. Incidentally I was in that jury and I do
think some online publishers come empirically to the right design decisions
- if indeed they give it the attention it deserves.
What I would want to present to the publishers at my conference is a more
structured approach if you wish. Online-Design as a marketing tool, maybe?
I am still pondering. I would like to offset the "who is online" with "how
do people act online". In direct-mail there was a guy who developed years
ago an eye-tracking system. Something like that. Or Martin Radelfinger of
E&P was telling me that replacing the "click here" with a 3-D button
tripled accesses.


Steve Yelvington wrote
----------------------

Best I know of, if you can find him: David Rollert, or any of his
design-team compatriots from the Interchange Network Company. They did
extensive research in a usability lab in the process of designing
the Interchange user interface, which was designed for publishers. It's a
dead product now but there was some really brilliant thinking behind it.

                      Can anybody help with this contact?

Steve Outing
------------

If you're looking for a speaker on design issues, you might try Bill Skeet
of Knight-Ridder's New Media Lab (San Jose, California). He's their chief
designer; used to work at Roger Fidler's Information Design Lab. He's at
bill@skeet.com, tel. 408-467-1406.


Thank you and I hope the thread takes off!

(Do we Europeans have anybody thinking about those issues?)



  Norbert Specker                       INTERACTIVE PUBLISHING Europe
  Catchup! Communications AG            Conference
  Landenbergstrasse 10                  Freiestrasse 208
  CH-8037 Zuerich (Switzerland)         CH-8032 Zuerich (Switzerland)
  Phone +41 1 272 10 52                 Phone +41 1 387 70 88
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                                        http://www.mediainfo.com/IPEurope.htm
  catchup@dial-switch.ch                IAPUBLISHING@catchup.dial-switch.ch




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