What your Readers Really Read and How to Avoid Issues.

Posted by Jesse Poe on December 14 at 12:01 PM My 7th grade World History teacher used to give us tests every Friday. As he passed out the test, he would boom out the same mantra every week. No talking, no notes, no going to the bathroom, no looking at your neighbors test, read the whole test before you begin and then begin.

I never read the whole test first, I am sure 90% of our class didn't either, because on the year end final there was only two people who didn't have to take the final. The year end final was passed out with the same mantra as always but this time the last question on the test said, "if you have followed the directions and read the whole test before beginning, then do not answer any of these questions. Simply sit there until 10 mins before the class is finished. Bring your clean untouched test to my desk for a 100%.

Of course 40 mins into the test you started to hear groans as kids read the last question, and we all learned our lessons, or did we?

Friday, I posted about my unfortunate experience with GOOD.is, who until recently has been one of my favorite websites.

I was very unhappy with them, but now I am pleased to announce that GOOD is no longer Bad in my book but back to good.

In the process there is something to be learned about users experience on websites, something I should have learned in the 7th grade, but didn't.

What do your users actually read?

I think that we'd all like to think that every blog post, every tweet, every profile update is read, that links are clicked and that jokes are laughed at. However, people come to your site for a specific reason typically, that reason is different form site to site. If you run a tech site like Engadget  your visitors are coming there for a different reason than if you run a site for esoteric science-fiction, fantasy, horror, fringe culture, and hobby gaming like Atomic Overmind Press. Even if there might be a tremendous amount of overlap in who is coming to these two sites, they are still coming for different reasons with different expectations.

One of those expectations, you can be sure, is not to read about the things going on on your site, a refresh, a problem, etc. It might be important to you, but not to your public, you can imagine that IF they read it, they are going to read it with their Micromachine's voice.

Other than my bank, my 401k, my email, and maybe my Facebook/twitter, I am not going to read about what you might be doing on your site, and you can imagine this to be true across the board. Unfortunately this was the case with GOOD.is.

In a Herculean effort of  outreach,  Andrew Price, Senior Web Editor of GOOD.is contacted me through Twitter and then personally by email after my post on Friday, explaining the situation at GOOD.is.  Aparently, there isn't a word limit, but for a while characters like dashes and ampersands would just cut off everything that followed them. They are trying to fix it and he directed me to the post:

http://www.good.is/post/We-Made-Some-Changes-to-the-Site

As much as I am a fan, I didn't read this post. Why? Because we go to sites to get what we want, not to find out something on a site that may not effect us (even though it did in this case) and that might very well be addressed by the time I finish reading it.

So how can we get this info to our audience in a way that is effective, how can we communicate with them?

Go to them, tell them the information that they need where it will be effectual.

Had that info been placed above the comment box: Hey we are having issues with our comment box, it's eating ampersands! I would have not only understood, but probably like them even more for the humanity of it.

GOOD.is did nothing wrong in posting a page explaining this, but it is a chance for us all to understand better the way that we move on the internet and how we interact. They did the right thing in addressing the issue and they went above and beyond reaching out to me and Andrew Price was extremely genteel and kind, but it is an excellent example of how we are still always striving to find a better more effective way to keep this every growing machine (the internet) well oiled.




Jesse Poe Topics: Internet, strategy        SHARE: