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February 13, 2005
The Future Of Publishing
(Interview with Jakob Nielsen) I think the Internet as a whole will be a communications revolution on the scale of Gutenberg, but we are nowhere close to having that impact yet. Web sites as currently construed are a pale shadow of the types of interactive communication that will permeate the world in thirty years. Before we get too disappointed, we should remember that Gutenberg himself wasn't that hot either: just printing a few expensive Bibles didn't change the world. It took some time from the invention of the technology until it was widely used and had a revolutionary impact. For example, we had to get writers to invent such concepts as the novel and the newspaper.
What is your biggest pet peeve about Web publishing?
That people still write for print instead for online. It is now six years since I documented how people read on the Web and the basic writing guidelines for Web content (http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/), but most sites still don't follow these guidelines. This despite the finding that measured usability usually doubles when writing for online instead of print. So even if you write less text, people will usually remember twice as much after visiting your site.
Simply repurposing big PDF documents is the worst example of using print content for online. Often these reports are very well designed for print and it would be fine to use the network to distribute the files for printing, but many sites use PDF files as online content and encourage users to browse them, even though this makes for a horrible user experience. We recently completed two very different research projects, and PDF files caused some of the worst problems in both cases: We tested a range of internal company intranets (http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/guidelines/) and employees had big difficulties finding HR information when it was only available in PDF format. We also tested the investor relations areas of Web sites(http://www.nngroup.com/reports/ir/) and investors had just as big problems finding financial information in annual reports that had been repurposed as PDF.
It really irks me that big companies that spend a fortune on their annual reports can't spend a few extra dollars on making a version that is easy to read for investors who want to research a company on its Web site.
Posted by Don at February 13, 2005 10:05 AM
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