Writing the User Interface
September 22, 2009 | 9:38 pm
I have to apologize in advance. The great Jeffrey Zeldman gave a talk with this exact title at the Event Apart conference a few years ago in Boston. His talk was much more in-depth than this post will be, but it was the impetus behind this post. Since seeing that talk, I've been on the lookout for good examples of written user interface and try to incorporate it into my work as often as possible.
Today, I was flying home from a great research trip to New York and Washington, when a nice man offered his previously-read copy of the Wall Street Journal to myself and my traveling partner.
Despite being 'in business', I've never really read the WSJ. Always kind of assumed it to be dry and overly business-like. Turns out, it's more general interest than I realized. I expected it to be pretty inaccessible, when in fact it's well written and covers a broad range of interesting topics.
But the one thing that stood out to me more than anything was how they handled the interface between the lead-in for a story and the continued copy deeper in the paper. This has undoubtedly been a hotly-contested issue at many papers. "How do we get people to continue reading?" In this day and age where people are inundated with media, we want our readers to glean more than just the headlines. So, aside from a well-written and interesting story, how can we encourage users to keep going?
The Halifax Herald is pretty brash on this front. In bold letters at the end of the first passage, it simply proclaims 'Page 2'. This does nothing to make me want to move on and finish the story, even if it's a great piece.
The thing I noticed in the Wall Street Journal was this simple phrase: "Please turn to page 2". It's so much nicer. It prods you gently to make the move to the next page, and it's polite. In a world where so much media is interruptive and rude, this is pleasant, relaxed, encouraging.
I've read stories about the differences in conversion between "Read More" and "Continue Reading" and how one caused 5% more users to purchase a product than the other, but I think this goes deeper than that. It's about being polite, and human in your writing and your interface. As my mother always said, "you'll get farther with sugar than with salt". I think that's especially true with web writing. What do you think?
jump slugs
I used to lay out and edit the paper and had to cut the story for the jump.
There area a number of considerations on the look of the whole page, making sure the essential facts are included the front section and avoid making the jump cut mid-sentence or 'graph.
You assume that 75% of your readers won't jump.
The polite "please turn to" is very British and old-fashioned, but charming in a sort of retro way. But I think it's cosmetic.
I think jump slugs should be teasers on what is to come. "Continue to Page 2 for Mr. White's thoughts on the challenges of migrating content from print to web interfaces - "you'll get farther with sugar than with salt".
That at least baits the reader's curiosity and gives a reason to turn the page.
I was hoping you'd read this...
I agree that it makes sense to contextualize the 'jump slug' (great term, BTW), but I think the limitations of space make this difficult.
I do, however, think there are good ways to generically represent this and bad ways. While "Please turn to page 2" is indeed prettier than "Page 2", there's more to it than that.
It would be interesting to study what makes people continue reading and what makes them stop.
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