May 22, 2000 New Thinking:
The bread and butter Internet
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May 22, 2000
The bread and butter Internet
By Gerry McGovern
People who are on bread and water don’t require fancy tableware.
In our visual-saturated world, the Internet can initially feel like a prison diet for our hungry senses. Some years ago, I remember showing the Internet to a friend of mine involved in design. He was so unimpressed. He was expecting an evolution; something that moved on from where MTV left off.
Again and again and again, people have made a fundamental mistake about the Internet. Living in a world full of dazzling color and constant speed they have come to expect every new development to be a continuation of speed and color.
But in this great trend of the rise of the visual, the Internet is a great aberration, a great big return to a black and white past where it was text for breakfast, text for dinner and text for supper.
Those who haven’t got used to that simple but fundamental law of the Internet are either out of business, spending their way out of business, or have some really special niche where their customers have high bandwidth connections or are prepared to wait.
If there’s one thing most of us hate doing it’s waiting. Time is an intense and scarce resource. Most of us much prefer a bread and butter web page that downloads quickly than a nice juicy graphic one that takes ages.
But so many people still don’t get it; still refuse to accept what is before their eyes. ‘Experts’ still talk about the Internet in a way that runs totally contrary to what it is. Every time I hear someone go on about the visual and the multimedia and the experience, I ask them to think about how they actually use the Internet. Slowly, painfully, they come to admit that they are like the rest of us – they want to get the information they want quickly.
Recently, the preliminary results of the Stanford-Poynter Eyetrack Study were released. This study measured, over a four year period, what people look at on the Web. A primary finding was that many web users hardly even look at graphics; that they go straight for the text when they arrive at a web page. This is a very different result from the print Eyetrack study that Poynter had previously conducted, which found that newspaper readers generally get drawn first to photos on a page, before looking at text.
Studies in 1994 and 1997 by Jakob Nielsen supported the Poynter research, finding that on the Web, consumers want it simple, fast and informative. AOL, Ebay and Yahoo, built much of their success on simplicity and delivering unadorned information to the consumer. (Over 90 percent of what’s on the Yahoo website is textual.)
So, when developing for the Web, remember a few fundamentals:
- The Web is a textual medium
- Writing for the Web is different from writing for other media
- Good writing will always be rewarded by the reader
- The online reader likes simplicity and clarity
- People scan web pages a lot, so headings and highlighted text are important
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Web users hardly even look at graphics; they go straight for the text when they arrive at a web page.
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