User registration – not the way?

Posted on May 27, 2004 by Chris Heisel

I had a chance to talk with [my friend Adrian](http://www.holovaty.com) the other day while he was in Atlanta on a layover from a [Poynter](http://www.poynter.org) conference.

We got to talking about something we mutually detest… user registration.

User registration, I think, is merely a bad implementation of a real business (and editorial) concern — that is, **getting to know your audience.**

We **should** want to know more about our audience — it allows us to provide better content and advertising.

Had our print brethern tried to gather more information about their audience, earlier in the game, then circulation (and maybe the entire concept of a newspaper) wouldn’t be in the bad shape it is today.

Let’s recap:
* Getting to know your audience — **good**
* User registration (in its current form) — **bad**

Over the next few entries, I’d like to tackle imagining an alternative to UR. To start, I’m going to list the information/goals that UR tries to serve, and we’ll tackle them individually.

I’d like this to be a community process, so feel free to add your ideas, suggestions, criticisms, via comments or trackbacks.

The central idea behind this system is that *people are bad at providing data*.
It’s 3:04 p.m., do you know how truthful your UR data is?

I should clarify, people are notoriously bad at giving you data, *for the sake of giving you data*. And they’re really bad at giving you *truthful* data when what they get in return *isn’t tied to the data they’re asked to provide*.

If I offer you a muffin for your zipcode, why should you give me, a total stranger, your real zip code.

Now, what if I’m offering you a list of great bakeries with spectacular muffins that are all near your house. In return, give me your zip code… get the idea?

####Drumroll….

Here’s the list of problems our “new UR” should try to solve:

* What content does the user like to read?
* What advertising or advertisers would the reader be interested in?
* What kind of a reader are you (demo/psychographics).
* Where does the user live?
* Does the reader subscribe to the paper?

While I go and try to find the answers to some of these questions, and maybe a muffin, feel free to write in with other things that we need to know about our users in order to be able to better serve them — then we’ll take stab at trying to find ways to gather them.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment

Citizen journalism: who’s problem?

Posted on April 20, 2004 by Chris Heisel

Over at Small Initiative, Jay’s got a fun little series on The problem with citizen journalism.

Essentially, if you let folks rate/rank stories, sometimes some real stinkers float to the top.

That begs the question, is the problem with the citizens, or the journalism?

<!– This is the real world, (not that one), so no answer is simple, but here’s a stab: –>

* What are are we doing covering these stories anyway? — I mean sure, they may be cute, or fun, and as folks today would say, “they sell newspapers” or “they drive clicks.”

But, can some newsroom manager seriously justify the portion of the salaries of the reporter, editor, copy editor, designer, and Web producer that were needed to write about the four-eared cat.

I’m not suggesting that your average newspaper and TV newcast should be a boatload of dull, dreary stories — I mean, who can get excited about page after page of deaths in Iraq, joblessness, corporations embezzling, etc. But is anyone going to really argue that TV news, and more and more newspapers, *aren’t* slowly descending into infotainment.

At the same time, media companies are businesses, and for all the high-minded ideals we journalists espouse, we like our paychecks, and companies have to make money to survive in our capitalist society. So if this shitty content is what sells, who are we to argue with Adam Smith?

* What is the public doing reading these stories? — Sure, they’re fun and cute, but aren’t there are other important issues, that impact a reader’s life (like the aforementioned war, terror, economy, and cash-n-carry ™ government) enough to be read/ranked into the top spots?

What does this say about our audience… Why are they reading this drivel?

<!–
My best guess is that the media-consuming audience, as a whole, as gotten larger over time. But that as the audience got larger, the education of it has stayed the same, or at least not progressed as rapidly as the audience size as grown.

So we're left with a mass audience that cares more about J. Lo’s Mom than it does the affairs of its own government.
–>

Posted in Journalism | 3 Comments

I’ve got my eye on this

Posted on March 26, 2004 by Chris Heisel

There are some early, and interesting results from Poynter’s latest eyetracking study. (Hat tip to Jay).

Here’s a quick rundown:

* Users really like text — photos, multimedia elements and the like got lower viewing than text and text-links

* Users paid little attention to the blurbs beneath headline links and paid more attention to the headline-link itself. The author says this could mean headlines are even more important than we thought… they’re the primary way to convey information to readers.

* Users will scroll below the “fold” — as the long as the design doesn’t explicity cut the page in half… he said that when pages had rules or other items to distinguish “above the fold” from “below the fold” users tended to think the page ended and didn’t scroll. If the layout indicated more content, then they’d scroll.

* Ads on shorter, less packed home pages tended to receive more viewership than on more content-packed home pages

I wonder if this isn’t just because the user is left looking for information that isn’t on your page, so they turn to the ads as a last resort.

* Multimedia elements didn’t get more hits than text… words reign supreme.

These are all very interesting results, but its also stuff that folks in the know have been saying and reading for a while.

I’m interested in seeing the full results, which will be posted starting April 5 *I don’t know where I pulled that date out from… the site says starting in May*.

We certainly can’t draw any hard and fast conclustions yet, but I imagine these early results indicate trends, and I hope the news industry — which used eyetracking in the ’70s to usher in better design — will take the report to heart and start improving their sites.

I, for one, will try and do my part.

Posted in Web design | Comments Off on I’ve got my eye on this

Like the nipple ring

Posted on March 23, 2004 by Chris Heisel

The firestorm brewing over TypeKey is raging to new heights.

There was something about the whole bru-ha-ha (aside: who remembers Wolf3D) that reminded me of an event being blown out of proportion.

BurningBird brings up the point that has been nagging me, why do we need registration at all?

I doubt that everyone really needs a SSO for all the blogs they comment on. Maybe we should all have the “remember me” boxes turned on in our various software (aside: I’ll turn it on later today and/or tommorow).

Registration may keep out spammers, but:

1. Spammers will find ways around, under, over, and through comment registration.

2. MT ships, out of the box, with a feature that turns all links in a comment into redirects, thus negating the Google advantage.

So this is, at best, a temporary setback to spammers.

No, the ultimate reason, and desire, by folks for a comment registration system — whether its centralized, decentralized, left-of-centralized, or whatnot — is that folks want a way to kick commenters off their site.

Whatever their reasons, some of which may be valid, some bloggers want to restrict commenting access, and that’s not right in my book.

So why the mammary reference in the title? The technology behind TypeKey is just like the nipple ring — its the high profile, oft-discussed topic that is getting all the attention while bigger issues remain.

If we want to register to voice our feedback, have our views filtered, or censored, then why have blogs at all… the traditional media and their Web sites have been/are doing this.

One of the things that sets blogs apart from the regular media is that there are two seperate spaces on each page.

1. The article space — This belongs to the blogger(s), it’s their place to parade their thoughts, opinions, links, etc. I can write whatever I want in the “article space” and there’s nothing you can do about it, or is there?

2. The comment space — This belongs to the audience, and there shouldn’t be anything that the author can do about it. It’s the audience’s free-for-one, free-for-all spot to cogitate, comment and contradict.

Posted in Technology, Web design | Comments Off on Like the nipple ring

If you can’t fail gracefully…

Posted on March 22, 2004 by Chris Heisel

Don’t blame the user, this message brought to you by Jeremy Zawodny.

If you can’t, just can’t, provide a limited or reduced-functionality version of your site/software/widget/widget-as-a-rental-service etc. then don’t blame the user.

Afterall it’s not that their browsers don’t support your site, it’s that you chose not to support their browser.

Posted in Web design | Comments Off on If you can’t fail gracefully…