The Hidden Text

After reading Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think naturally I have a couple of thoughts.  I was especially taken by his discussions on the loss of size, place and linear time in the digital world.  I was thinking about how the loss of these dimensions affects all of us in History 697.  I am especially interested in the preliminary factors we internally consider before starting a reading assignment.  Specifically I am curious on the temporal considerations that go into this initial process.  We don’t have the same luxuries of planning out how long an online reading will take us since the flexibility of the web increases potential distracters for our initial assessment.  While many times we can guess how large a site actually is by examining the website’s topic or even the amount of content on the homepage, in the back of our minds we realize that (a) not everything relevant to the site is on the homepage and (b) we have no idea how many links are on a given page. 

Take for example our weekly reading assignments for History 697.  Professor Petrik usually provides us with readings both online and in hard copy form.  By this point in our education, we as grad students have become pretty good at surveying our assignments for a particular week and projecting how long we will need to complete each one.  This process is especially easy with printed books.  I would guess that we all know our reading speeds and thus simply calculate how long a particular book will take to read.  The online assignments aren’t as straightforward however.  At least in my case, my first step after clicking the link for a reading from the syllabus is to check how small the scroll bar becomes on the right edge of the page.  This process isn’t meant to indicate that I am enthusiastically counting down the pixels to when I will finish the assignment (in most cases), but rather a “web version” of the same surveying technique described for printed books. 

Yet this initial step frankly isn’t an accurate indicator as only a portion of the screen is visible, and I have no idea how many links to other essential articles are embedded in the text.  Even worse those links may have more links.  I’m sure we have all accidentally fallen off our original “path” while surfing the web.  But as most of us have probably known for a long time, the term path can be an absurd notion in websites.  Yes we can spend loads of time planning for every possible user tendency or performing usability tests, but as Krug notes every user is unique in their approach to a site.  So it’s important not to spend our time during the planning and development stages of our sites thinking in terms of what a user’s path may be.  Instead we should simply focus on the content, and how we want the content to relate to one another.  This was the most important point I took away from Krug’s book. 

Playing with Time

I imagine the following discussion will continue next week as we explore the impact videos games will have on our sites, yet Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think makes some important points as well as some “head-slappers” moments regarding the evolving human perspective on temporal issues.  I realized some time ago that for me personally a 25 year-old grad student, the metaphysical rules of the web simply make sense.  I have noticed that those of an even slightly older generation many times don’t possess the same comfort I have navigating around on computer programs and websites.  Why is this?  I was actually a late bloomer compared to my classmates during middle and high school.  In fact up until my junior year in High School, when a teacher asked for a paper to be typed, I assumed that she meant on a typewriter.

 

Yet once I bought my first computer my freshman year in college, I was able to explore all the features I was scared to try on publicly shared systems in high school, and found the usability was shockingly intuitive.  Does this intuitiveness derive from Bill Gates and Steve Job’s remarkably lucid user interfaces?  Possibly, but I think I have identified another source: video games.  The video game revolution was just kicking into high gear during my youth, and in fact interesting (or sad) as this may sound, I can’t remember a time previous to video games.  I should clarify that by video games I don’t mean arcade games, but rather home systems such as the Atari or Nintendo systems.  A crucial distinction I make between public and home-owned systems is the glorious (at least to me) power of the reset button. 

I remember quite vividly spending hours trying to beat “the computer” in Atari’s Football (so creative).  After years of playing the game you begin to learn the computer’s tendencies and patterns, and exploit them to your advantage.  After all the computer isn’t a thinking being (as opposed to what some might think) but instead a series of equations involving “what if” situations.  So let’s say you are in the midst of a particularly important game and you are winning quite handily.  Suddenly the computer seems to receive some unnatural breaks.  It starts out with an interception during a simple pass or a fumble during a run where you are positive no one has touched you.  Must be a weird quirk in the game, you think, someone didn’t program correctly before released from the manufacturer.  Slowly it dawns on you after your fifth fumble in as many possessions that the game is absolutely with out a doubt cheating!  How can this be?  It’s just a piece of junk with a bunch of math on it.  But nonetheless the cheating is real.  Gamers know all about what I am talking about, as we have all shared our traumatic stories, all because Football’s programmers simply wished to have a little fun in production.

Luckily as that child grows older, he or she begins to comprehend the power of the “reset” button, a line of thinking which I believe fully prepared me for the non-linear online world.  Think about it, the power to start all over again.  The power to go back.  It has actually been several years since I have spent significant time playing video games, but I can remember how liberating it was to know I could use the reset button whenever I sensed I was about to be cheated.  Let’s tie this into Krug’s book and web surfing.  As Krug noted, the “back” button accounts for 30-40% of clicks on the web.  That is a lot of restarting.  As designers and historians we must completely change our organizational outlook when creating an original piece of scholarship on the web.  Linear narratives can be incorporated in a site, but they can’t define the site.  As each user’s navigational habits appear to be unique, it would be foolish to cater to only certain types of thinking and searching.  Take a chance.  Give the user many paths to get to a link, or many options for finding information.  Luckily if she (or he) starts on a path that simply doesn’t make sense to her, rather than curse the website’s creator (programmer) she can retrace her steps to a point she is comfortable with.