Experiencing Information

Just got tipped off to Press Display, a news aggregation service from NewspaperDirect. Seems the biggest difference this site offers over competitors is the information experience. They have something called the Press Reader, which displays articles in the context of their original printed formats. You can see the headlines, images, colors, and layout of the original source, among other things. Their tag line: “Redefining the Reading Experience™“. In other words, the information experience is a USP for Press Display.

Here’s how they describe their “Smart Navigation”:

“SmartNavigation in PressDisplay.com provides advanced digital features such as interactive tables of content, full graphics and text views, foreign language translation capabilities, cross-title searching, sharing of articles through email or blog postings, bookmarks, advanced search and monitoring, article and page printing, clickable URL’s, emails and phone numbers and text–to–voice conversion.”

One thing I particularly like is that Press Display allows you to get a good overview of a source, offering a table of contents for entire an newspaper, for instance. You can also browse through all images in a newspaper or through all of the advertisements. (I don’t know of any retrieval system that even makes advertisements available.)

And of course, there are display controls for zooming or showing text in multiple columns and so forth. It’s quite well done. Have a look for yourself–it’s worth it.

(click to enlarge)

What’s more, there are lots of ways to capture the information you find, so it’s not just about an online experience. Download, print, and email options are available. There are also features like RSS and mobile versions of texts.

This all begs the question, Why go to great lengths to retain the look and feel of original publications? Isn’t text just text? Does it matter how the information is presented?

Well, according to people like Andrew Dillon and Misha Vaughan the answer is, Yes–it matters a lot. (See: “It’s the Journey and the Destination“). They’ve investigated what they call information shape, which they describe like this:

“Shape is a property of information that is conveyed both by physical form and information content. Separating these elements completely is perhaps impossible but one can talk of the distinction between the layout and sequencing of information as viewed by the consumer (user or reader) and the cognitive representation of meaning that employs (at least in theoretical terms) knowledge structures such as schemata, mental models and scripts. The representation of meaning is crucial to any analysis of hypermedia design and use as it gives the task real human value, yet it is precisely this component that is frequently by-passed in evaluations rooted directly in physical navigation terms.”

Almost sounds like the folks at Press Display used this notion as a mantra for their design of the interface.

In the age of RSS and atomizing data on the web to point that everything is mash-up-able with everything else, it’s almost ironic that Press Display has emerged at this time. For instance, my view of the blogs I monitor via my RSS reader is extremely homogeneous: everything looks the same. So should we care more about document genre when designing for information experiences?

On one hand, I feel that all too often we strip out all of the qualities of information that native formats offer. These are qualities that give it shape and meaning to us: color, size, position, images, etc. This stuff makes a difference in comprehension.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that I’d use Press Display or find it terribly helpful. Even though they’ve done a pretty good job with the display and interaction, I’m not convinced this service is any better or worse because of the information experience. It’s different, for sure. But the relative advantage in the long term isn’t clear to me, unfortunately. (Of course, I’m not an information professional and my daily work doesn’t center around finding, using, and managing information.)

Maybe there’s a happy medium between text-based information retrieval systems and something like Press Display?

Google launched an image view of Google News about a month ago. It’s an interesting alternative to text headlines of news stories. I quite like it. I also found myself gravitating towards different stories on the image view than on the normal Google News page, even though some of the images are the same.

The shape of information on the image view is different than on the standard view or text view. It breaks the offline newspaper genre more than online news in general. For one, the notion of priority is different. There is no real headline story, and it’s easier and quicker to dive into all of the articles.

That would make a good study: what is the perceived difference in daily events based on the different formats? I suspect with a typical news layout, the larger headlines in more prominent positions will correlate to people’s perception of what’s going on at that moment. On the image view, there may be other cues, and the top left photo may not have influence just because of its position.

There’s a interesting study in the February issue of JASIST about which elements are most important for determining credibility of news stories on automated news aggregator pages, like Google News. [1] Though the findings might be obvious (there’s nothing wrong with stating the obvious), the researchers point to three elements that are most important on such automatically created pages:

• The name of primary source from which the headline and lead were borrowed
• The time elapsed since the story broke
• The number of related articles written on the topic of the story

The researchers write: “…The findings from this study demonstrate that information scent is not simply restricted to the actual text of the news lead or headline in a news aggregating service. Automatically generated cues revealing the pedigree of the hyperlinked information carry their own information scent. Furthermore, these cues appear to be psychologically significant and therefore worthy of design attention. Systems that emphasize such cues in their interfaces are likely to aid information foraging, especially under situations where the user is unlikely to be highly task-motivated and therefore prone toward heuristically based judgments of information relevance. Navigational tools that highlight these cues are likely to be more effective in directing user traffic, as evidenced by early research on newspaper design (which highlighted the attention-getting potential of placement, layout, and color) and screen design (focusing primarily on typography and color…Finally, visualization efforts should focus on attracting user attention towards-and making explicit the value of-proximal cues instead of simply concentrating on visualizing the underlying information.”

This means to me that–even though the pages are automatically generated–there is still information architecture and information design that is critical to understanding and experience the information. Maybe machines won’t replace designers and there is a place for professions like IA in the future after all. Hmm…

[1] Sundar, S. Shyam, Silvia Knoblock-Westerwick, Matthias R. Hastall. News Cues: Information Scent and Cognitive Heuristics. JASIST 58(3): 366-378, 2007.

Scientists at the Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have an interesting new technique for improving online reading and comprehension. Basically, the human brain doesn’t deal with block text well. Instead, our eyes view text as if they’re peering through a straw. We only focus on a small area at once, the lines above and below can cause noise and distraction while reading.

Here’s the detailed study of the technique:
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/r_walker/

Of course, we’re so used to reading block text, this might seem counter-intuitive. How could thousands of years of writing and printing be wrong? Well, physiologically block text is not the most conducive for humans to read.

Here’s an article about it with an example of the technique:
Live Ink offers better way to read text online
(Mark Coker, VentureBeat, May 10, 2007)

Be sure to check out the image of before and after formatting.

But do we really want all of our online texts looking like a haiku? For one, this would make pages many times longer. And printing would take reams of paper. So, solving one problem may cause others.

The interesting over-arching lesson from this, however, is that HOW text is presented affects how we read, understand, and interact with information. Information design is crucial to the user experience on many levels.

Maybe there’ll be a FireFox plugin to switch this kind of formatting on and off from your browser?

After 9 months of writing and 3 months of production, Designing Web Navigation–my first book–is at the printer. There were a few very rough spots with the production, but I think we have most of the kinks worked out.

You can already pre-order it on Amazon.

About The Book:
Since web navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development in some way, the book necessarily paints a broad picture touching on many areas, including things like user research and visual design. But as much as possible the focus throughout remains clearly on creating an effective navigation system. I always try to bring it back home to web navigation whenever the conversation touches other areas.

Thank You:
It’s quite amazing to me how many people contributed to the completion of this book. Here’s a shout out to you all:
- -The primary technical reviewers: Dr. Mark Edwards and Aaron Gustafson.
- -Contributors of the sidebars: Ariane Kempken, my first real mentor in user-centered design, Misha Vaughan, Eric Reiss, Donna Maurer, Victor Lombardi, Andrea Resmini, Emanuele Quintarelli, Luca Rosati, and Mark Edwards.
- -Others who read chapters for me in advance and helped out in other ways: Peter Boersma, Liz Danzico, Jochen Fassbender, Margaret Hanley, Michael Hatscher, Andrea Hill, Theba Islam, Jeff Lash, Victor Lombardi, Ariane Kempken, Michael Kopcsak, Eric Mahleb, Kathryn McDonnell, Donna Maurer, Wolf Nöding Andrew Otwell, Tanya Raybourn, Eric Reiss, Andrea Resmini, Steffen Schilb, Gene Smith, and Joseph Veehoff.