User-Contributed Content - Page 32

Some new-media pundits claim that the ability to engage the audience in a discussion with the staff of a website is one of the major benefits of the online medium compared with print and broadcast. Even though user feedback is very valuable for improving the design and direction of a site, I warn against trying to start a dialogue with your users unless you can devote substantial resources todoing so.

A small site that gets a comment or two per day should easily be able to handle a small amount of correspondence with its faithful and eager users. It's quite another matter for larger sites with millions of page views per day and a potential for thousands of messages. The staffs of such large sites could do nothing but correspond with individual users if they were to answer all email.

Instead of encouraging a large amount of two-way communication between your staff and your users, it is possible to invite the users to contribute to discussion groups on the site. User- created content is often quite popular, especially if it is linked off of specific stories or segments of the site. Some sites have general discussion areas, but they tend to degenerate into confusing free-for-alls.

Moderated discussions usually work best of all, but are obviously more expensive to maintain.

Chat is almost always the worst way to add community to the Web. Even the entertaining visualization of the dialogue in ComicChat cannot disguise the vacuous nature of Internet chat. People simply don't have anything to say. And what they say isn't always appropriate for some audiences.

Applet Navigation

Whether implemented in Java or other languages, applets are ways of adding advanced functionality to a website by allowing users to interact with a real program and not simply with a bunch of text and links. Applets can be divided into two rough categories:

• Functionality Applets. These are independent mini- applications in their own right, with state transitions and multiple views (e.g., a tabbed dialog). Functionality applets often manipulate "real-world" data that exists separately from the web page, for example, allowing customers to manage their checking accounts, inventory control, and server administration.
• Content Applets. These applets are tightly integrated with the content of a web page. Examples include site navigation controls (an active sitemap or outline flippers to expand and contract a hierarchical listing), active content (a model of an engine that can be rotated, animated, and otherwise manipulated in place), and minor functions (currency converters). Typically, running a content applet has no results other than changing the appearance of the current web pages.

Content applets should be displayed in a browser together with the web page they belong to; functionality applets should display in a new, non-browser window without any web navigation controls.

If functionality applets are displayed in a browser window, then users will invariably confuse applet interactions with browser interactions. Most seriously, users will frequently click the browser's Back button when they want to undo an action in the applet or return to a prior state or view. Of course, going back in the browser takes the user to the previous web page and kills the applet.

The problem is that the hypertext navigation metaphor is too strong as long as the user is within a browser window. Users simply cannot abstract from using the browser's commands to navigate, even when they are "supposed" to navigate within the applet. The only solution is to open the applet in its own window without any browser controls. Once the applet appears in another window, users stop thinking "Web" and start interacting with the applet on its own terms.

In the long term, the solution to this problem is to eliminate browsers and move to a completely integrated navigation system that unifies navigation between system states and information objects, and maintains a single navigation interface for all user actions no matter whether they are on or off the Web. After all, users should not have to care whether they are dealing with HTML or another data type or whether they connect to the Internet, to an intranet, or to local content on their own hard disk.

Functionality applets may include hypertext links back to the Web. Typical examples include help pages and an airline reservation system that enables users to read more about different types of aircraft. Such hypertext links should take the user out of the functionality applet and back to the web browser (while the functionality applet remains visible in its separate window).

A functionality applet that spawns its own window(s) should follow traditional GUI design guidelines, whereas a content applet that stays on the page should follow web design guidelines and principles for good information design.

Supporting Old URLs - Page 31
Designing Web Usability
Slow Operations - Page 33