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.