The Vineyards

As webpages evolved, we learned that centralized text, blinking text, animated .gifs and image-links with borders are not the way to go. At the same time, internet advertising became a bigger business and the abundance of broadband connections allowed all sorts of new content, notably video.

Big deal. The web today wastes more of my time than the centralized blinking text did.

I sometimes visit digg.com or check Firefox’s included Headlines live-bookmark in search of something interesting to read, some news that I may mention during a meal (“I read an article” is how I begin a lot of my conversations these days).

Then comes the first annoyance. I open the titles I find interesting and check the size of the scrollbar: if it is small, I read it right away; if it is long, I save it for later or just scan the document quickly in search of the most important information in it. Sometimes the bar is small and I start reading, reach the end of the page and see a “Next”. I had my mind set to read a short text, not two short halves. Worse, I reach the end of the page and see this article is five pages long – most of the time I just quit reading. For this, some are certain to call me lazy, say I have a short attention span, etc. Nonsense, and unfair. I quit reading for two reasons: first, I was set on reading a short text, not a long one – if I knew it was long, I would have simply saved it for later and read it then; second, I know one of the reasons websites do this is to show me twice (or five times) more ads. I fully understand server and bandwidth do not pay for themselves, but fooling me into seeing possibly the same ads five times will not make me any more inclined to click them; fooling me into seeing five different ads (and probably an interstitial between some pages) will just annoy me – enough that I sometimes click the “Print version” button right away just to get everything in one page.

Even worse, some online magazines now make slideshows instead of articles – lots of pictures, each in its own page, with a small paragraph next to it – and present it as news articles. I am not here to look at pictures! I want information, not screenshots, pictures of an event, montages representing each topic being talked about – “talking about” very little, too, since the spotlight is on the image. Unless it is exceedingly necessary to present something as a slideshow, give me text, preferably all in one page.

Post continues after the jump.

Jump!

Continued from before the jump.

That is another annoyance. Newspapers and magazines used to do this, though I was never quite sure why – you reach the end of the page and instead of a conclusion there is a “Continued on page…”, often half the magazine ahead (and often in a page not numbered); you have to skip half the magazine and keep a finger marking the page you were on to come back and read the rest once you are done with that one. No idea why, as surveys show a majority of people never bother to go to the next part [citation needed]. On the web, this jump just means “There is a box-ad between this and the rest of the text”, and it will keep flashing and moving while you read the text to distract you.

Finally, there is video. Why is video used at all on news, other articles, tutorials? If I follow a link to an interesting story and instead of a text I am presented with a video box, I close the tab, simple. If I go to YouTube, CollegeHumor, 5min or Metacafe, I expect to sit here and watch videos from beginning to end; if I want to read a story, article or review or follow a tutorial, however, I prefer that it is presented as text so I may evaluate its length and scan it quickly if I want to, take a break at the end of any paragraph knowing I am not in the middle of an idea, an explanation or a joke, read slowly or fast, follow the steps calmly at any pace. On the other hand, if I am given a video, the website is telling me it will take that specific number of minutes from my time, that I would rather wear earphones if I prefer not to bother people around me, that copy-pasting from what they wrote is prohibitively complicated, that my choice of pacing or even of quick-scan is pointless because they choose how long the video will take and when they give me the important information I want. All that consuming several orders of magnitude more bandwidth than text and, if the server or my connection is in a bad mood, several times longer to load. Screw it, I will not have that.

Granted, video may add to text or even be the entirety of content, if in proper context. If an article is about an old cartoon and provides a video-box for it, that is all good; if it is to mention a TV interview or a filmed presentation, fine; if you saw something really funny on YouTube and think I may like it, great. Just do not provide all your content in a video.

Speaking of annoyances, there are blogs that update about once a month. Those are the worst.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.