8. Mixing Topics

If you publish on many different topics, you’re less likely to attract a loyal audience of high-value users. Busy people might visit a blog to read an entry about a topic that interests them. They’re unlikely to return, however, if their target topic appears only sporadically among a massive range of postings on other topics. The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).

The more focused your content, the more focused your readers. That, again, makes you more influential within your niche. Specialized sites rule the Web, so aim tightly.

If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.

Sadly, Nielsen’s right: without a focused topic area I’m not going to attract hordes of readers (and hence lots of advertising revenue). And I’m never going to have a focused topic area, simply because I’m interested in too many different things. So if no one’s going to read my blog, why bother?

Actually it’s not so bleak. For one thing, you have to be mostly crazy to blog for the money. It’s unlikely you’ll generate much traffic, but even if you do, you’ll end up using more bandwidth, so you’ll have to pay more for hosting. Then your blog might end up like the car you had in high school: existing so you can make money to pay for its existence. Instead, serious bloggers write for the love of it. It doesn’t matter whether they have huge audiences.

Also, technology comes to the rescue. I may not have a specialist blog, but blog-readers can (and do) find topics of interest by looking for keywords in blog search engines like Technorati, Yahoo, or Google. I suspect that trend–of searching for articles of interest–will continue. Already, little of my news consumption starts from one place. My custom RSS feeds look for news stories about various topics of interest to me, or I’ll glance through the list of headlines from several news sources. So I predict that soon most readers of blogs, instead of reading just a few blogs regularly, will read numerous blogs via blog aggregators. Then being a specialist won’t be so important anymore.

As the demos show, the most obvious departure from the past is that menus and toolbars are all but wiped out. The focus is now on letting users specify the results they want, rather than focusing on the primitive operations required to reach their goals.

The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target — say an org chart or an entire document — and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it’s now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.

It’s as if you could point to a marble block and say, “I want it to be the David — or maybe Venus de Milo,” as you flip through a book of famous statues. Every time you mention a design, your marble block would morph accordingly, but with your content (say, the face or the size) in place of that original element.

Obviously I haven’t yet seen the prototype Microsoft Office. But it sounds suspiciously like the Office Assistant (from previous versions–you know, the talking paper clip) writ large. The Office Assistant is always appearing to offer worthless suggestions (no–I’m not trying to write a letter–go away). In other words, it’s an extension of the thinking that says, “We’re sure you’re so stupid that we’re going to tell you what it is you’re trying to do and do it for you.”

Nielsen’s the usability guru, so I’m fairly certain he’s right: this will make Office easier for beginning users. The problem is that no one does (or should) stay at the level of a beginning user. It’s like keeping a permanent drivers’ ed teacher in the front seat. If you use word processing software regularly, you have built up the skills necessary to accomplish what you typically need to do. With this “paradigm shift,” Microsoft renders that skill set obsolete and appeals to the minority of Office users who are completely inexperienced.

Worse, by discouraging users from learning the means to reach their own goals and instead providing a set of Microsoft-imagined goals, the new Microsoft Office probably will make it more difficult to achieve one’s custom goals. Nielsen’s sculpture analogy aptly shows the weakness of this paradigm. When you want the David or the Venus de Milo, it may be faster to pick it from a catalog. But what about when you need to create your own sculpture of something no one else has imagined? The new paradigm not only has robbed you of your trusty hammer and chisel; it also won’t let you near the block of stone to use any newer equipment.

As an aside, I have my doubts that the “Venus de Milo” of document goals will really be in the gallery. Anyone who’s used Microsoft Frontpage, with its garish templates, knows that sometimes what the Microsoft engineers imagine as your goal is a far cry from what anybody (including Microsoft itself) would ever use.

It’s hard not to be somewhat sympathetic with the Office development team. After years of Office versions, it seems as though they have approached a limit of features widely used. So how can they convince someone to shell out hundreds of dollars for an upgrade of minor options? They can’t. Their remaining choice is to re-work the only area where there’s room for major changes: the user interface.

I view it as a personal failure that Flash collected the bronze medal for annoyance. It’s been three years since I launched a major effort to remedy Flash problems and published the guidelines for using Flash appropriately. When I spoke at the main Flash developer conference, almost everybody agreed that past excesses should be abandoned and that Flash’s future was in providing useful user interfaces.

Despite such good intentions, most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won’t recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.

Flash is a programming environment and should be used to offer users additional power and features that are unavailable from a static page. Flash should not be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Don’t make your pages move. It doesn’t increase users’ attention, it drives them away; most people equate animated content with useless content.

Using Flash for navigation is almost as bad. People prefer predictable navigation and static menus.

Nielsen is right that Flash can have useful applications, but as he also points out, most of the time it’s used just for the “wow” effect. And with Google’s creativity showing how far one can go with “Ajax”-based apps, the number of situations in which Flash is necessary is shrinking.

What I dislike about Flash the most and what makes it an anomaly on the Internet is that it’s a proprietary standard. You have to run software made by Macromedia in order to view Flash. Unfortunately, when Macromedia decides it doesn’t want to port Flash to a given operating system (as it has done with mine, Linux 64-bit), then users are out in the cold. The number of those users is bound to increase, as mobile phones with web access become more common. Almost no other significant web technology is proprietary. From serving web pages to browsing them, you can do it all with open-source applications. Why should Flash be the exception?

Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It’s also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, blinking graphics.

Our study refuted these stereotypes. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites. (The success rate indicates the proportion of times users were able to complete a representative and perfectly feasible task on the target site. Thus, anything less than 100 percent represents a design failure and lost business for the site.)

Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.

I’ve wondered if the growing popularity of blogs would help to counteract the declining literacy among young people:

In fact, fewer kids are reading for pleasure. According to data released last week from the National Center for Educational Statistics’s long-term trend assessment, the number of 17-year-olds who reported never or hardly ever reading for fun rose from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. At the same time, the percentage of 17-year-olds who read daily dropped from 31 to 22.

On the one hand, blogs require their readers to read and interpret information; on the other hand, they’re often undemanding both in length and content. We’ll see.