For Better Blog Design; Understand and Analyze Eyetracking Trends

Designing a blog is different than designing a home page for a website. A blog’s main content is transient; appearing on the home page one day and not the next. Various design tactics have been tried, including displaying static front pages that look and act more like standard websites and home pages. To know what will work for your enterprise or design, a little analysis in advance of wireframing is a best practice.

As far back as the late 1800s, reading was observed as a series of short stops, not a smooth sweeping motion as was assumed. Emile Javal, a French ophthalmologist, uncovered the fact that our experience of seriality as we read was, in fact, made up of saccades which are quick, parallel movements of the eyes as they scan in a succession of fixations and discontinuous individual movements. Later, in the 50s, a Russian psychologist named Yarbus showed that there was a definite correlation between the time the eyes are still during this scanning and the subject’s interest in the task. He also showed, maybe more importantly, that the task itself influences the saccades and fixations.

It would seem then that balancing visitor interest and site layout, while understanding the tasks required of the visitor is the key to successful corporate blogs. One of the ways interactive designers can try to visualize this balancing act is eyetracking. Much has been written about it over the last 10 years by authors like Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool. For designers, it offers the chance to see through their users’ eyes and watch them behave. Of course, nothing can be precisely determined with tests like eyetracking because each visitor has different knowledge gaps and levels of tech-savviness, but inferences can be made and statistical models can be created.

The most recent report from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox shows different corporate blog designs offering different layouts, different content strategies, and different business goals, all resulting in different eyetracking patterns. In the Blog Front Pages article, Neilsen lays out the parameters for success based preferred topics, tone of voice, scannability and layout, charts vs. tables, and how readers interpret links, as well as the use of summaries or full articles. From the scanning tests done, Nielsen’s group makes these general recommendations:

1. Encourage selective reading by using summaries, especially when the blog touches on many topical areas.
2. Blending longer articles with shorter posts keeps the visitor focused on your message, but allows them to move on to other things naturally.
3. Use site analytics to determine what visitors are doing and where their interests lie – formulate your design and content structure accordingly.
4. Blogs with regular returning visitors or subscribers should feature longer articles because their visitors are returning for the next installment.
5. Making the most recent articles and posts available in a nearby widget or call-out gives the returning user what they need to find what they missed.
6. Let your visitors engage with lots of varied content styles and types – be bold enough to redesign when the analytics suggest it.

As you can see some of these same ideas can be extended to the design of home pages, product pages, landing pages and microsites. If you have other styles of corporate blog designs, have other suggestions for designing practice, or have other eyetracking links to share, please send me an email and/or a comment. For more about designing blogs click the link or use the tag widget.

Content Strategy Is A Cross-Discipline Practice

As a term, content strategy is a relatively new one to the production of interactive experiences; in particular, website redesigns and new-builds. Too often in the past, the process of creating a content strategy has been to draw a roadmap for content development. As a result of strong editorial practice or from well-meaning search engine optimization practices, many websites have lots of content, but little of it is effective for the visitor nor well-managed structurally. The phrase, “content is king” has echoed through the years, but this has produced content on the web more notable for it’s quantity than it’s quality or experience.

Content strategy, as it is beginning to be known, is a cross-discipline practice that seeks to strike a balance between user experience and SEO, persona development and site architecture, meta-data and editorial calendars, keyword research and traffic analysis. The concepts and protocols are being defined by key practitioners like Kristina Halvorson and Erin Scime and are expanding the definition of content strategy at a key moment when the web is also diversifying both in terms of platforms and applications, and in terms of standardization and conventions.

In her insightful essay on content strategy for A List Apart in December of 2009, Erin Scime lays out the conceptual overview of the content strategist as a digital curator. For me the term “digital curator” is a bit too academic. While it is true that curators, “use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message,” there seems to be room in the new definition to include the role of the environmental designer and the exhibition designer as well. It is not just the contextual thread that runs through the exhibit that interests the visitor in a website, but the ebb and flow of the content, the container of the exhibit itself, and the development of visual cohesion.

Still, Scime lays out a number of elegant, competent arguments for this expanded definition of the content strategist starting with defining and assessing the current content and needs of a project, and ending with editorial strategies and the establishment of organizational guidelines and protocols. As she says, “…content strategy engagement is site-level and long-term…” and she is right. Content strategists need to work with stakeholders and marketing people to understand the trajectory of the project and its place within the larger brand and message. They need to work directly with SEO and SEM departments or vendors to uncover searchable terms and incorporate them into every aspect of the website’s development and digital marketing. Likewise, content strategy will directly effect UX and IxD and the kinds of visual structures and cues they will create for the visitor. And now, content strategists must also navigate social media and be responsive to both external audience and internal needs.

The new content strategist is involved in every conversation surrounding an interactive project; if not in the actual development and production of the interactive experience, then certainly in the mapping of the content and the structuring of it within the larger framework. Content is not just king, but it is the map and the territory.