Summary:
From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.

The user experience field has its own version of "Powers of Ten" (the classic 1968 documentary by Ray and Charles Eames). For us, it's not so much that things get 10 times bigger or smaller; most user interfaces are about the same physical size, as dictated by the need to work with the human body. For example, a BlackBerry keyboard is about 1/5 the size of a PC keyboard — it wouldn't work at 1/10 the size. And, except for wall-sized displays, nothing is 10 times bigger than a PC interface.

But in the "4th dimension" of time, user experience phenomena work across many powers of 10.

0.1 Second

Many of the effects of perceptual psychology take place at this time scale.

A research team lead by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard found that people can make rough decisions about a Web page's visual appeal after being exposed to it for as little as 50 ms, which is 1/20 of a second (50 ms is only half of 0.1 second, but it's close enough for the purposes of a "powers of 10" analysis.)

In Lindgaard's study, screen images were flashed at test participants for 0.05 seconds, after which they could distinguish between more and less attractive designs. It's important to realize that this is not how users actually approach Web pages during real use. For one, pages don't flash on the screen for an instant and then go away. Instead, they render over a period of a second (if we're lucky — otherwise more). Second, people spend a few seconds looking over the page before they decide what to do about it.

Still, the study does show that people can form basic visual impressions very quickly, at the limits of human perception.

0.1 second is the response time limit if you want users to feel like their actions are directly causing something to happen on the screen. For example, if you click on an expandable menu and see the expanded version in less than 0.1 seconds, then it feels as if you made the menu open up. If it takes longer than 0.1 seconds for the revised state to appear, then the response doesn't feel "instantaneous" — instead, it feels as if the computer is doing something to make the menu open.

Thus, to create the illusion of direct manipulation, a user interface must be faster than 0.1 second.

In eyetracking studies, most of the fixations we track last little more than 0.1 seconds. In fact, the first thing people notice when running their first eyetracking study is how fast the human eye moves across Web pages (or other stimuli). Users look at things very briefly, which is a big reason to emphasize clarity in content usability.

1 Second

When the computer takes more than 0.1 second but less than 1 second to respond to your input, it feels like the computer is causing the result to appear. Although users notice the short delay, they stay focused on their current train of thought during the one-second interval.

This means that during 1-second response times, users retain the feeling of being in control of the interaction even though they notice that it's a 2-way interaction (between them and the computer). By contrast, with 0.1 second response times, users simply feel like they're doing something themselves.

For Web usability, this means that new pages must display within 1 second for users to feel like they're navigating freely; any slower and they feel held back by the computer and don't click as readily.

In the Web's early days, it was impossible to achieve such download times. This is why many guidelines advised that you minimize the number of page views required: back then, going to a new page was unpleasant if it took more than a second to do so.

Today, with broadband widely available, subsecond download times are eminently possible and should definitely be the goal. The main problem now is not so much big graphics or heavy "page weight" (number of kilobytes to download). Now, slow response times are more frequently caused by excessive widgets and other dynamic elements that bloat the design and slow down the server.

(Also, it's important to remember that some people still use dial-up, especially in rural areas or developing countries. Mobile devices also have slower connections, so your website's mobile version usually needs a serious diet.)

10 Seconds

After 1 second, users get impatient and notice that they're waiting for a slow computer to respond. The longer the wait, the more this impatience grows; after about 10 seconds, the average attention span is maxed out. At that point, the user's mind starts wandering and doesn't retain enough information in short-term memory to easily resume the interaction once the computer finally loads the next screen.

More than 10 seconds, and you break the flow. Users will often leave the site rather than trying to regain the groove once they've started thinking about other things.

10 seconds is also the time users typically allocate to examining a page before deciding that it's so bad that they're going to leave.

The average page visit lasts about 30 seconds, but the more experienced the users are, the less time they allocate to each Web page. People are impatient on the Internet. Instantly gratify them, or they're out.

1 Minute

Users should be able to complete simple tasks in about 1 minute. Awkward sites that require much more than a minute for basic tasks — such as transferring money from a savings to a checking account — will be abandoned.

Likewise, most Internet videos should last no more than 1–2 minutes because people don't like passively watching something for much longer than that while they're in the active frame of mind induced by Web surfing.

Most website visits last about 2–4 minutes.

10 Minutes

10 minutes would be a long visit to a website. In one case, for example, we followed a user researching a B2B purchase across 25 site visits. The longest site visit? 7 minutes.

1 Hour

Most usability studies last from 1 to 2 hours because it's hard to recruit users to come in for longer tests. In fact, unless we're testing kids — for whom an hour is the max — we usually limit our test sessions to 90 minutes. People tire after an hour or two.

People complete most Web tasks in less than an hour. In one study, 1/2 of e-commerce purchases occurred within 28 minutes of the user's arrival at the website. Of course, the other half were spread across longer intervals, often including multiple visits that were days apart.

1 Day

1 day is the maximum turnaround for customer service requests, although you should send transactional email and confirmation messages within 1 minute to keep users from wondering whether their action — such as a purchase or address change — has been received correctly.

The difference here is that users assume that customer service requires human intervention, so they don't think the computer is broken if they don't hear back within 1 minute. Faster service is still appreciated, of course.

Many users habitually check certain content sources on a daily basis. (A behavior called monitoring.) So, if your topic warrants, it might be smart to publish a daily e-mail newsletter. (But be warned: you're begging for unsubscribes if you have a slower-moving topic and publish too often.)

1 Week

Other habits are weekly (or monthly, or yearly — depending on seasons, holidays, or tax filings). In our studies of how people use social networking, we found that Facebook and Twitter tend to be daily habits (or more for some people), whereas MySpace and LinkedIn tend to be checked weekly.

Tasks that require extensive research or big decisions often stretch across a week or more, as users gradually progress in their thinking. So, while each individual visit to any given website might last only a few minutes, the full process takes much longer.

This means that sites must support revisitation behaviors, for example by keeping track of what users have done in previous visits.

Weekly and monthly behaviors don't lend themselves to in-lab usability testing, so we often study them through diary studies or other more field-oriented methods.

1 Month

Business processes often take even more time than individual decisions because of the need to get various people on the same page. For both B2B sites and enterprise collaboration, it's common to have a month or more pass between the initial action and the completion of that workflow.

1 Year

Once people have used a website for about a year, they graduate to being experienced users with some knowledge about how the site works. It takes a long time to build such expertise because of the superficial in-and-out way users approach websites. Each visit is short, and people don't spend much effort on explicitly seeking out new features and building their skills.

Nevertheless, people do eventually learn something about the sites they use frequently. This is why Amazon.com can get away with very complex product pages that are cluttered with more features than I recommend for most sites: many of Amazon's customers have used the site for years and thus have the background required to cope with the site's numerous features.

Organizational change usually takes years. For example, it typically takes 2-3 years for a company to progress to the next level of the 8 stages of usability maturity.

10 Years

It takes almost 10 years for users to develop deep expertise in a complex system such as Unix. The learning curve thus continues for many years past the initial uptake of simple features that we usually study. Throughout these first 10 years, people gradually explore more and more corners of the system and slowly build their skills.

Data often lives for decades — far longer than any individual user interface that people use to access the data. This means that you need migration tools to help users make sense of old data and transfer it into new systems. For example, photo sharing sites should give users tools to import old photos. Eventually, such sites will also need to cope with the exploding mass of thousands of decade-old uploads.

100 Years

If organizational change takes years, social change can take decades, getting close to the 100-year mark in some cases, which is why we're not seeing them yet for many aspects of computing. For example, it's possible that collaboration systems will depopulate cities. It's also possible that the change to shorter, more superficial information nuggets instead of immersive, linear information will undermine education as people lose the ability to learn and study harder concepts.

We don't yet have 100-year effects in user interfaces, because people haven't yet used computers for their entire lifetime. But eventually this will happen. We're already 20 years into the era where many people started using computers as little kids. And we're certainly seeing more and more uptake of Web use and other computer activities among senior citizens.

Combine these two trends, and we'll eventually have people who've used computers all of their lives — or 100 years for the more long-lived members of the species. What'll that mean? Let's discuss this in 80 years.

今天，Code Horror为我们带来了关于写作Blog的13条法则，虽然他比喻做陈词滥调，但是我个人觉得这13条法则对很多Blog还是适用的，所以列出来，分享给大家。 

I started out in early 2004 as a blog skeptic. But over the last four years, I've become a born-again believer. In that time, I've written almost a thousand blog entries, and I've read thousands upon thousands of blog entries. As a result, I've developed some rather strong opinions about what makes blogs work so well, and what makes blogs sometimes not work so well.

I'd like to share some of the latter with you today, in a piece I call Thirteen Blog Clichés.

Before I start, realize that these are my opinions. That should be a redundant statement on any blog, much less my own, but I'm putting the disclaimer out there anyway. Just because I run my blog a certain way doesn't make it the right way-- or even a very good way. These are preferences, not beliefs. Please don't be offended if your blog, or a blog you enjoy, commits one of my so-called clichés. I'm not trying to single any one person or blog out here. It's your blog, and you don't have to answer to me. I'm just some guy on the internet. Run your blog as you see fit. These are nothing more than broad observations formed over a period of four years where I've been deeply immersed in blog culture.

You may not agree that these are clichés. You might even feel very strongly that I'm wrong about all of this. That's what comments and trackbacks are for. Use them.

1. The Useless Calendar Widget

   This list isn't in any particular order, with one exception. There is nothing I dislike more than the redundant blog calendar widget. It's like a recurring canker sore we can't quite seem to rid ourselves of.

   I can't think of a single time I have ever found the blog calendar widget helpful. My computer already has a calendar function, so it's not like I need another calendar displayed in my web browser. Every post carries an obvious datestamp, so I can easily discern when it was published. But knowing whether someone posted an entry on the third tuesday of the month? Utterly useless.

   The calendar widget is the vestigial tail of blog engines, evidence of our primordial ancestors. But we've evolved; it's time to lose the tail. Surely there's something more useful we could put in that space.

2. Random Images Arbitrarily Inserted In Text

   One of the cardinal rules of web writing is to avoid large blocks of text. There are plenty of excellent web writing guides that exhort you to break up your text, using bullets, numbered lists, quotes, paragraph breaks, images-- anything, anything to avoid creating an intimidating wall of dense, impenetrable text.

   And they're right. That's what you should do. I do it all the time. I'm doing it right now.

   But like all good advice, it can be taken too far. For example, when you find yourself inserting random pictures into your writing for the sole purpose of breaking up the text.

   In the above snippet, what does that image have to do with the text? As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing at all. I see this on a disturbing number of blogs and feeds that I regularly read. It's probably due to the influence of Philip Greenspun and his seminal book, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, where the text is juxtaposed with random photographs that Philip has taken. It's one of the earliest and best references on web development, and the fact that it's still relevant today despite its age speaks volumes about the quality of Mr. Greenspun's writing. But it's the writing that makes the book a classic, not the amateur photography sprinkled throughout its pages.

   As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But you should no more insert a random image into your writing than you would insert a thousand random words into your writing. I don't care how beautiful your photographs are, it's a terrible, irresponsible practice that distracts and harms readability.

   And those of you sitting there smugly, with your stock photo library and your peripherally, tangentially, almost-but-not-quite related images that you use to break up your text, don't think I'm not talking about you, either. Because I am. Think about that the next time you read an article about a "web 2.0 bubble" accompanied by-- you guessed it-- a stock photo of a child blowing a bubble.

   Images are not glorified paragraph breaks. Images should contribute to the content and meaning of the article in a substantive way. And if they don't, they should be cut. Mercilessly.

    

3. No Information on the Author

   When I find well-written articles on blogs that I want to cite, I take great pains to get the author's name right in my citation. If you've written something worth reading on the internet, you've joined a rare club indeed, and you deserve proper attribution. It's the least I can do.

   That's assuming I can find your name.

   To be fair, this doesn't happen often. But it shouldn't ever happen. The lack of an "About Me" page-- or a simple name to attach to the author's writing -- is unforgivable. But it's still a problem today. Every time a reader encounters a blog with no name in the byline, no background on the author, and no simple way to click through to find out anything about the author, it strains credulity to the breaking point. It devalues not only the author's writing, but the credibility of blogging in general.

   Maintaining a blog of any kind takes quite a bit of effort. It's irrational to expend that kind of effort without putting your name on it so you can benefit from it. And so we can too. It's a win-win scenario for you, Mr. Anonymous.

    

4. Excess Flair

   I'd like to talk to you about your flair.

   Blogs work because they're simple. When we clutter up our blogs with a zillion widgets, features, and add-ons, we're destroying an essential part of what makes blogs worthwhile.

   I've lost track of all the times I've clicked on an image in a blog and been hijacked by some crazy JavaScript image loading technique, when a simple link to the image would have sufficed-- and probably would have been faster and more convenient. Or when I've moused over an unassuming hyperlink and had an annoying, superfluous image preview of the link pop up when I didn't want it to. And do your readers really want to see pictures of the last 10 visitors to your blog?

   Before you add a new "feature" to your blog, consider whether this feature will be useful enough to your readers to overcome the additional complexity it adds to the page. Hint: almost none of them are.

    

5. The Giant Blogroll

   I'm all for linking generously to outside content. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, after all. Although if you look down in today's world, you might find that you're standing on lots and lots of midgets. Large or small, we owe them a debt of gratitude.

   Citing your references and influences is a great and necessary thing, but obsessively listing every single blog you read-- the so-called "blogroll"--  is just noise.

   If you're really reading this many blogs, you should be linking to them organically in your blog posts, in a sort of natural quid pro quo. Wearing a giant blogroll on your sleeve is an empty gesture. I'm reminded of the distasteful way that blogs in giant ad networks (such as Weblogs, Inc) spam every page with a huge list of internal links to their other blogs. It feels artificial and insincere.

   Publish your OPML if you think organic links in your writing aren't telling the whole story, but avoid cluttering up your page with a huge, spammy blogroll.

6. The Nebulous Tag Cloud

   I'm a big fan of tagging. It's far superior to the old method of placing everything in hierarchical folders. Tag categories on blogs are moderately useful, particularly for bloggers who tend to bounce around among many different topics. What I've never found useful, however, is the stereotypical tag cloud visualization, where the size of the tag word varies with its frequency. 

   The perception is that tag cloud visualizations are cool, like badges of honor for the tagging club. The reality is that tag cloud visualizations are chaotic, noisy, and unusable. Keep the tagging, lose the cloud. A simple sorted list of tags, along with the number of posts associated with each tag, is much more effective.

7. Excessive Advertisements

   Advertising is a fact of life. People need to feed their starving children. I get it. I've even reluctantly entered the field myself. But is it really necessary to make your blog look like Times Square? Does every square inch of whitespace have to be filled with paid links, Google AdSense, and ad banners?

   In the process of researching this article, I found a related article on blog usability that's a perfect-- even ironic-- example of how you can hurt your usability with excessive, obnoxious advertising. It's everywhere.

   It is almost never in the reader's interest to see advertisements, so my advice is to tread very lightly, and be respectful of your audience. Bad advertising is so prevalent that if you take the time to advertise responsibly, you may find that readers appreciate you for it.

   Well, probably not, but it can't hurt to try.

    

8. This Ain't Your Diary

   I don't begrudge anyone their right to post whatever it is they think they need to post on their blog. But let's be perfectly clear: your readers aren't coming to your blog to read about you. They're coming to your blog to find out what it can do for them. If you find your blog turning into a diary of your daily activities, you'll have a very limited audience unless you happen to be a real world celebrity. Even my wife isn't particularly interested in the minutiae of what I do every day. Why would I expect my readers to be?

   That said, blogs are a place for writers to find an interested audience, and a place for readers to find a helpful peer and a unique voice. It's OK to be yourself; at some level, it is a cult of personality: people are reading not only because your content is useful to them, but because they like you. It's normal to inject a regular dose of yourself into the conversation.

   But like Tabasco sauce and other powerful seasonings, a little YOU goes a long way. A really long way. Write accordingly.

9. Sorry I Haven't Written in a While

   If you haven't posted anything new to your blog in a while, don't waste our time with apologies. Just write! The best apology is new and improved content. Maybe with a wee bit more consistency this time, though.

   The most important piece of advice I give anyone who asks me about blogging is this: pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. That doesn't mean you should post substandard crap, of course, but I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm. And the best way to demonstrate your enthusiasm-- and to improve-- is to get out there and write. Regularly.

   And if you can't muster the enthusiasm for writing regularly, move on. But don't stop creating.

10. Blogging About Blogging

    I find meta-blogging -- blogging about blogging -- incredibly boring. I said as much in a recent interview on a site that's all about blogging (hence the title, Daily Blog Tips). I wasn't trying to offend or shock; I was just being honest. Sites that contain nothing but tips on how to blog more effectively bore me to tears.

    If you accept the premise that most of your readers are not bloggers, then it's highly likely they won't be amused, entertained, or informed by a continual stream of blog entries on the art of blogging. Even if they're filled with extra bloggy goodness.

    Meta-blogging is like masturbating. Everyone does it, and there's nothing wrong with it. But writers who regularly get out a little to explore other topics will be healthier, happier, and ultimately more interesting to be around-- regardless of audience.

11. Mindless Link Propagation

    One of the most pernicious problems in blogging is the echo chamber effect. Most blog entries merely regurgitate what other people have said or add vapid commentary on top of news articles and press releases. Only the tiniest fraction of blog entries are original content, and only a tiny fraction of that fraction is worth your time. One of my very favorite articles is Chris Pirillo's piece on 10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber. Chris has been blogging for a very, very long time and he has the battle scars to prove it. This call to action should be required reading for every blogger. With pop quizzes.

    It's always been deeply disappointing to me that we have the whole of human history to talk about, and most people can't get past what happened today. If I wanted news, I'd visit one of the hundreds of news sites that do nothing but news every day. Putting yourself in the news business is a thankless, unending grind. Don't do it.

    If everyone knows about it, what value does that information have? Three years from now, will anyone care that Apple released a new iPod on that particular day? My advice here is almost contrarian: if everyone else is talking about it, that means you should avoid talking about it. Switch things up. Seek out uncommon sites with unique information. Dig down to original sources and read the material everyone is commenting (comments on top of comments on top of comments) endlessly on.

    If all you can find to talk about is what's already popular, you're not trying hard enough. Form your own opinion. Do your own research. Go out of your way to blaze a new trail and create something we haven't already seen hundreds of times before.

12. Top (n) Lists

    Yes, exactly like this one.

    The problem with Top (n) Lists is that they become a substitute for critical thinking, the classic, laziest possible use of Cliff's Notes that every college professor and high school teacher fears. You're supposed to read the book, then read the Cliff's Notes as a companion to the book-- not use the Cliff's notes as a substitute for reading the book. 

    Lists are a great convention. They make sense, people understand them, and they're a logical way to structure your writing. But don't let lists become a crutch. I'm always taken aback when I see the "most popular" posts on a blog dominated by Top (n) Lists. Shortcuts are only meaningful if you know what it is, exactly, you're cutting. If all you read is whatever Top (n) Lists have managed to float to the top of today's Reddit or Digg homepage, then you've cheated yourself out of the deeper experience of reading a complete book.

    If you find that the Top (n) List convention is a go-to tool in your writing toolkit, consider rebalancing your writing portfolio with longer, more in-depth pieces as well. Not everything should be a sprint; throw a few small marathons in there somewhere to complement your short distance skills.

13. No Comments Allowed

    A blog without comments is not a blog. Yes, there are exceptions for massively popular blogs where comments clearly don't scale. But until that applies, the value of the two-way conversation far outweighs any minor inconvenience on your part. Writing is inconvenient. Get used to it, and get over yourself. The sum total of community contributions is far more useful than any one thing you'll ever write.

    Besides, It's an open secret in the blogging community that the comments are often better than the original blog entry itself. Would you browse Amazon without the user reviews? No? Then why would you willingly choose to run your blog that way?

    Don't be afraid of comments. Embrace them. Moderate them. The community will respect you for it, and your blog will be better for it as well.

This piece ended up being much longer than I originally intended. But I've had a lot of this stuff on my chest for years, and I wanted to do it justice. I also needed to explain myself in a constructive way so I don't end up offending too many people.

I've already broken at least two of my own rules with this very post. How cliché.

Discuss.

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings

Summary:
To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

I recently served as a "consultant's consultant," advising a world leader in his field on what to do about his website. In particular, this expert asked me whether he should start a weblog. I said no.

You probably already know my own Internet strategy, so it might not surprise you that I recommended that he should instead invest his time in writing thorough articles that he published on a regular schedule. Given limited time, this means not spending the effort to post numerous short comments on ongoing blogosphere discussions.

Weblogs have their role in business, particularly as project blogs, as exemplified on several award-winning intranets. Blogs are also fine for websites that sell cheap products. On these sites, visitors can often be easily converted and the main challenge is to raise awareness. For example, a site that sells pistachio nuts should post as much content about pistachios as possible in the hope of attracting quick hits by people searching for that information. Some percentage of these visitors will buy the nuts while visiting the site.

Avoid Commodity Status

For many B2B sites with long sales cycles, quick hits to commodity-level content are insufficient. Instead, these sites need to build up long-term customer relationships based on respect.

Take my own business, for example. When I talk with people at my usability conferences, they often say that they've wanted to attend for ages, and only recently secured their boss's approval to come. To address this issue, we added a "convince your boss" section to our conference sites, explaining the benefits of spending money on usability training. Still, realistically, I expect to wait 3-5 years before meeting new readers of my site in person.

Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.

Demonstrate Leadership

For the sake of argument, let's say that you're the world leader in your field. We'll quantify that as being the #1 expert among the 1,000 people with websites in your field. In other words, you are in the 99.9th percentile.

(Although you might think you have many more than 1,000 competitors, the Web thrives on specialized content, so it's better to conceptualize yourself as leading a smaller subdiscipline, unless you're so good that you're #1 out of millions of people.)

We can measure expertise as some combination of intelligence, education, experience, correct methodology, professionalism (say, avoiding profanities and politics), and willingness to be frank. The exact metric doesn't matter here; let's just assume there's a way to quantify how good people are within their field. The metric probably follows a normal distribution, meaning that the 1,000 people have the following levels of expertise:

Histogram of expertise scores for 1,000 authors. Each dot is one person.
Stupid people are on the left; clever ones are on the right.

Assuming that you're this good, you have to show it to gain customers. And blogs aren't the way, as we'll see once we plot the distribution of postings as opposed to writers.

Variability of Blog Posting Quality

Assume that the 1,000 people each write 10 blog postings. The resulting 10,000 postings will follow a much broader distribution, because the quality of postings is extremely variable.

Let's assume that a given writer's posting quality is normally distributed, with a mean representing that person's level of expertise and a standard deviation 3 times as large as the SD for expertise among people. I don't know what the actual number is, so this is just a rough estimate. But it's reasonable to assume that posting quality is more variable than expertise for several reasons:

• Sometimes people toss off a posting in a minute. Other times they spend hours.
• Sometimes a writer happens to know a lot about the topic at hand, possibly because they've just spent several months working on that exact problem. Other times people know nothing--which doesn't keep them from voicing their opinions :-)
• Sometimes people are lucky and get a blinding insight. Other times they post more out of duty than anything else.

The following chart shows the distribution of the quality of 10,000 postings in one Monte Carlo simulation I ran:

Histogram of 10,000 blog postings' quality.
Each dot is one posting; the highest-ranked expert's postings are shown in red.
Bozo ramblings are on the left; insightful stuff is on the right.

Of course, if I'd run many more simulations, the histogram would be smooth, but the overall shape would be the same.

In the above histogram, each of the tiny dots represents a blog posting. The larger red dots indicate the ten postings by our leading expert (who was ranked #1 out of the 1,000 bloggers we're considering). Although our expert tends to write good postings, a few of the many lower-ranked people will sometimes write even better postings.

Even if you're the world's top expert, your worst posting will be below average, which will negatively impact on your brand equity. If you do start a blog despite my advice, at least screen your postings: wait an hour or two, then reread your comments and avoid uploading any that are average or poor. (Even average content undermines your brand. Don't contribute to information pollution by posting material that isn't above the average of other people's writings.)

In my simulation, our expert's best posting happens to be #25 from the top. The expert's second-best posting was ranked #300 from the top. It might seem fine to be the author of postings #9,700 and #9,975 out of a group of 10,000 blog postings. But in fact, it's nowhere near good enough.

The beauty of the blogosphere is that it's a self-organizing system. Whenever something good appears, other blogs link to it and it gets promoted in the system and gains higher visibility. Thus, the 24 postings that are better than our expert's very best attempt will gain higher prominence, even though they're written by people with lower overall expertise.

Prospective new customers don't even have time to read 24 postings, so they'll never make it down the list of rank-ordered blog postings to reach our expert's best.

Beating the Internet

It's almost impossible to fight the Internet: you're up against millions of people who are willing to work for free. But you have to do so, because if you work within the prevailing Web paradigm you're letting the search engines take 98% of your content's value. That's okay if you're not in the content business. Our pistachio site doesn't mind that it's not making money off its recipe for delicious pistachio ice cream. Just as long as it sells nuts.

If you're an expert who wants to live from adding to the world's knowledge, you must go beyond the mainstream Web model of single page visits driven by search traffic. It's easy enough to build a website that freeloaders will use, but that shouldn't be your approach. You must change the game and create content that's so valuable that business users are willing to pay for it.

You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can't easily create in their spare time.

Both of these needs are met when you produce in-depth content.

In-Depth Content Is Value-Add Content

It might take you only an hour to write a blog posting on some current controversy, but a thousand other people can do that as well (in fact, they'll sometimes do it better, as shown above). And customers don't want to pay for such a tiny increment of knowledge. Sure, sometimes a single paragraph holds the idea that can increase a site's conversion rate so much that a reader should have paid a million dollars to read it. But they don't know that in advance, so they won't pay.

In contrast, in-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn't add up to Shakespeare. They'll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren't integrated and that don't give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic -- even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.

Thorough content's added value can rise above the threshold where customers become willing to be separated from their money. This is the true measure of a sustainable business.

You have to identify opportunities with a non-linear utility function: where paying customers assign more than 10 times higher value to something that costs 10 times as much to produce. The old open-source manifesto "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" holds much truth: when you're the duke, you can't trade in coffee beans, because the bazaar dealers will always undercut your price. You should build a cathedral, because a thousand tents can't compete with the Notre Dame.

The following chart shows another example from my own company: trends for key statistics across three editions of our report on e-mail newsletter usability:

Statistics through three editions of the e-mail newsletter usability report.
All numbers are indexed to make the first edition the baseline with index 100.

As the chart shows, the fatter the report became, the more it has sold. Of course, page count (the blue line) is only a rough indication of the amount of insight, which is what customers are really paying for. The new edition has a large number of eyetracking heatmaps, showing how users read various newsletters, and these many illustrations eat up pages ferociously. Still, there's no doubt that each report edition contains significantly more information than previous editions.

The report's price has increased less than its page count: as we keep doing this research, we become more efficient. You could argue that customers are getting more for their money, and that's why they're buying more. But this argument works only if customers in fact assign extra value to more comprehensive reports. So either way, I conclude that in-depth content sells.

Why are paying customers (the people who matter) attracted by detailed information? Because systematic and comprehensive coverage is more actionable. It also protects them against the risk of losses caused when something important is overlooked.

In my report example, consider an Internet marketing manager who's in charge of the company's email newsletter. The report's price is trivial compared to millions of dollars many companies would gain from increased subscription rates, increased open rates, increased clickthrough rates, and enhanced customer loyalty from content that's both better appreciated and read more often. To improve these key performance metrics for her newsletter, the manager could spend a week surfing the Web and reading a thousand short pieces about newsletter design. The result? A scattered set of imprecise advice that neglects many important issues. Instead, that manager could spend a day gaining much deeper insights from reading a single, well-structured report with all-inclusive coverage of the topic. Saving 4 days is worth a lot in business, which is another reason to target business customers with value-added information.

In-depth content provides more value in less time than numerous superficial postings. That's why business customers have empirically been willing to pay, and that's why you should emphasize fewer, better pieces as your content strategy.

Expertise vs. Content Usability

This has been a very long article, stuffed with charts and statistical concepts -- like standard deviations and utility functions -- that I know most readers find difficult. Recommending in-depth content flies in the face of all guidelines for Web writing, which call for fewer words and scannable information.

The content usability guidelines are correct: they are indeed the way to make a site easier for most people. Thus, you should follow the guidelines -- rather than emulate this article -- for normal business websites and intranets. (When I say "business sites," I include government sites and non-profits. as well as e-commerce and corporate marketing sites.)

For most sites, the content is not the point. Instead, you want to answer customers' questions as rapidly as possible so that they'll advance in the sales cycle and start buying (or donate, or sign up for your newsletter, or whatever else you want them to do).

Elite, expertise-driven sites are the exception to the rule. For these sites, you don't care about 90% of users, because they want a lower level of quality than you provide and they'll never pay for your services. People looking for the quick hit and free advice are not your customers. Let them eat cake; let them read Wikipedia.

Still, even if you run an expertise-driven site, you should follow the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks. The small percentage of users who are qualified prospects still read in an F-pattern, so a headline's first words are more important than its last words, just as they are for normal sites.

The Why of the New UI (Part 1)

This is the first in a series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 2007.

Any discussion about the graphical user interface of computers today has to start all the way back at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s. An amazing and ultimately historic collection of brainpower came together to work on the Alto and later Star systems. A remarkable collection of technologies and concepts that are now commonplace were first incubated at PARC: WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), the use of the mouse, the desktop metaphor (including folders and icons), overlapping windows, Ethernet, laser printing, and a number of the controls that now encompass the modern user interface: menus, scroll bars, edit controls, check boxes. This picture gives you some idea of what the Star interface looked like. (Some idiosyncrasies of the Star, such as the fact that you had to click on inactive windows in order to cause them to paint, are largely forgotten today.)

(Click to enlarge)

The Star was not a commercial success, and today many technology historians point out that Xerox did not do very much to protect the intellectual property they created. As a result, most people today think of Xerox as just a copier company despite the essential role PARC played in incubating the modern user interface.

Many of the influential contributors to the ideas behind the Star found their way to other companies, notably Microsoft and Apple. Apple was first to borrow and expand upon the ideas of the Star, first in the failed high-end Lisa system and then later in the Macintosh. Lisa standardized a number of designs that are still used in many modern user interfaces: the top-level menu bar, the concept of checking selected menu items and graying out those that are disabled. (The changes weren't all good--some PARC ideas abandoned by Apple, such as proportional scroll bars, didn't make their way back into the mainstream until Windows 95.) If you're interested in a more detailed history with screenshots, Jeremy Reimer has an interesting site.

The Macintosh went on to to inherit much from the Star and Lisa and, of course, the Mac brand name carries on today. Microsoft worked with early Apple prototypes to develop Word 1.0, which shipped in 1984 with the original Mac. Multiplan and Chart were also under development for the 512K Mac, and they eventually shipped together in 1985 as Microsoft Excel 1.0: the first blockbuster retail program available for the Macintosh (and the stated reason many people purchased early Macs.) Here you can see pictures of early Microsoft productivity apps in Apple advertising from 1984

Thus, the roots of the early Microsoft Office programs were rooted in the Mac and of course, the user interface reflected that. As the Mac's first and biggest provider of software (a title Microsoft still holds today), some of the UI decisions made in the original Macintosh were influenced by the needs of Microsoft's development teams. While the extent to which it is admitted this happened varies widely depending on the personal account, it is safe to say that the programs were developed with an intimate understanding of the system and vice versa. Certainly, the basic outline of Office's graphical user interface (especially the use of a top-level menu bar) has its roots in that first Macintosh version.

Next time, we visit "Ye Olde Museum of Office Past" and look at Word for Windows through the ages.

NewWebPick集结中国、法国、意大利、德国、英国、日本、巴西、波兰、美国、新西兰各国当红商业设计师和团队，起草编写了“设计师十之诫”，希望对准备从事或正在从事设计行业的朋友们有所帮助，对“设计师”这个职业有更深层次的认知。


第一条：
不可抄袭他人之创意，不论有何前提；
Not to copy other's creative work, under no circumstances;

第二条：
不可过分依赖电脑技术，切记，你是一名设计师，不是一名电脑修图员；
Not to rely completely on computer technology, it is a tool only and cannot
substitute your creativity. Remember, you are a designer, not a computer
graphic editor;

第三条：
不可一直追随流行设计风格，现在流行的，必是马上过时的；
Be a creator and not a fashion-follower because a trendy style today would
become an out-dated one tomorrow;

第四条：
各用10%的精力涉足十门设计学科，不如用100%的精力涉足于一门学科；
Trying ten design fields simultaneously but badly is worst than concentrating on one
field and master it;

第五条：
不可将自己都认为有问题的作品向公众发表；
Be professional and not to release any art works that you don't like;

第六条：
不可因低价商业项目，而放低对作品的要求；
Not to lower the quality in view of low business value of an art work;

第七条：
不可凭主观意识评价他人作品；不可人云亦云；
Not to criticize other's artwork merely on the ground of one's preferences
nor just replicate comment from someone;

第八条：
不可闭门造车；了解一些历史、哲学和人文，将对你的作品大有好处；
Not to create artwork without any ground. Great works usually come from
the understanding of the culture, history and philosophy;

第九条：
不论身份高低，须保持歉虚的态度；
Keep yourself modest to people, no matter you are just a novice or a master;

第十条：
永远坚信：设计可以拯救你的国家，可以改变世界。
Always believe that design can save your country and change the world.



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