Shop Talk

I am reluctant to discuss my job too much on this blog. Mostly because I don't really think that it is that interesting to most people, sometimes not even me. Though something has been bothering me for a few days and it is, in fact, related to my job:

When we deal with user experience and usability, are the user types of websites becoming so varied that it is difficult to judge how usable a site is? Often in my research, I come across this concept of the fairly savvy internet user - age demographic 18 - 35. But what does that really mean? For example, what if you are a 20 year old that spends most of their time reading blogs? Are you going to have the same expectations from a website as a 32 year old woman who primarily uses the web for shopping? Both would be considered experienced internet users but, it seems to me, that they would have very different expectations when visiting a website for the first time.

Although I have been thinking about this concept for a while, specifically since the rollergirls gained control over their site and started posting updates, it really became lodged in my head after I visited Peter Morville's (author of the Polar Bear Book) Blog - finability.org. Ironically, this man who writes about user experience and usability for a living, has a blog that it took me FOREVER to find anything on. Basically, I was looking for his archived blog postings and it took me a good 3 minutes to find them. I felt like I was a dunce but was I? I really don't think so. In a nutshell, here is the problem as I see it:

I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis, most of them, have very similar conventions when it comes to naming and navigation. Findability.org is set up like a traditional website and not a blog, ostensibly, I would assume, to make things "findable". Past posts are organized by topic and then there is one small link at the top that says "Archive". Yes, it is pretty logical and if I was on a standard website, I probably would have gotten it right away. But I wasn't on a traditional website, I was on a blog. So I here I was searching for links that look like the ones on my and so many other blogs - titles of entries and entries organized by date, and I was having no luck finding them. They didn't exist. It took me going to the Archive link and seeing the selections organized by date to understand that the links under the "topics" heading on the main page were to entries from the blog. Previously I had just assumed they were external links.

So while his categorization was set up to make things easy to use, my preconceived notions of how a blog should be got in the way. I have to assume that as time passes and we invent more types of ways to use the internet this will become more of a problem.

A similar problem is occurring on the rollergirls site. They will dump a ton of content on a page and it will scroll forever. Content that could very easily be categorized by date or type and put on separate pages. At first, I thought that the girls updating it were just idiots, but then I realized that, although they know html and how to navigate websites, their paradigm is primarily based in blog updates. In a blog, you would just dump a ton of stuff on one page, and let the blog organize it for you by post. It is an interesting dilemma and one I had never considered until recently.