Slashdot Mirror
How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?
theduck writes "Ever suspected (or feared) that web users are mostly mindless sheep evaluating your website more by the eye candy than your carefully crafted content? Well, it appears you were right. A study resulting from a collaboration between Consumer Webwatch and The Stanford Pervasive technology Lab reports that even though consumers say that they look for content first when evaluating the credibility of a website, they actually focus primarily on design look and information design/structure (i.e. ease of navigation). Of course, the study's methodology might have something to do with the results..."
What good is the best content in the world if it's difficult to navigate your way through it?
In real life communication people are able to get much non-verbal information from the speaker, giving hints as to whether they are passionate about their topic of conversation, or even whether they really believe it or not.
While ultimately the content itself is paramount, having a well-designed site will show visitors that you at least care enough about it to put some effort it.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
They view the source to make sure only valid XHTML and CSS are used. Those that do get top scores :-)
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
But the main evaluation is
...and what they're looking for. Obviously a site that is impossible to navigate is't going to be very popular, but the savvy user who knows what he/she is looking for will certaintly be more focused on content than presentation.
Of course, the 'internet surfer', who is typically not looking for anything specific, is more likely to be captivated by 'shiney things'. Given the nature of the study's methods, I'm thinking that was the case.
Since there was no guarantee that the person in question had any interest whatsoever in what they were showed, how could they honestly judge the page based on *content*?
=Smidge=
If it looks good, it is good. Nothing surprising there.
Content is important, but if you make it hard to get at it'd be bad. I don't think people go to a site looking for info, say 'this is ugly' and decide to try and find a prettier site to get their info from. If you're a web designer or a graphic design guy, and your webspace looks bad, then the content would have more to do with it...it really depends on your sites focus / intended audience.
Yes, if you invite mindless sheep, it is quite likely that it is reflected in your results. In this case, it turns the whole study into a very good case of black humor :)) From here.
We began recruiting participants in May 2002 by contacting nonprofit groups, such as the Children's Brain Tumor Foundation, and offering a $5 donation for each supporter who completed the study
*** Why not read an analysis of the Slashdot Effect instead :))
and people look at the pretty colors? 85% of my online time is learning new things, researching topics, etc. I don't give a rat's ass how "pretty" the page is....Hell, I use w3m half the time (in emacs)..
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
The design/look of their consumer webwatch website is much too poor for me to ever buy their conclusion. ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Simple.
1. Does it have what I'm looking for.
2. Is it easy to get there.
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Sites that do not use Flash get my Seal of Approval.
It's a combination of the two, design + content, that makes a site sell and be credible.
A site which has no content but has a nice design is pretty worthless, and a site with a lot of content but no way of finding the information you need easily is just a way to scare off customers.
Of course a pretty webpage is no excuse for bad content. Just looks will ensure that people visit your front page and dont really come back. For the invitation you need the eye candy, for the substance you need content. so you need balance.
However some webpages are all eyecandy and everything else is a pain. A proper balance is needed. A good example of balance is this site.Then CNN is also an okay example though it gets a bit cluttered.
Sadly, most webdesigners use some invalid M$ only code in their website, and non windows ppl have a problem surfing. These guys realize that 95% of surfers wont mind the nonsense.
This is web democracy majority rules. Most sites which are coming up new are focusing all on eye candy.
You have other extremes too. Some people want to make it easy for lynx users, result, sites look good only in lynx! This is going too much over the board. IMHO a good site should have valid HTML, and simple valid javascript. Also a site map is a must. I really hate those sites with lots of clutter. Looking for info is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Perhaps if they put some good search engine on the front page. As far as that is concerned even /. is horrible. The search engine can take some serious work. Otherwise I just love it, its simple, has never crashed my browser and dosent take too much time to load.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
...and neither are you. That's why we're both reading Slashdot.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
While there are exceptions, of course, most pages with good content don't concentrate as much on stupid layout-questions (how many i-frames can I use on the square inch and should this border be one pixel to the left or to the right) but focus on making the content accessible.
Only pages with nothing worth to look at concentrate on eye-candy.
(As I said, there are exceptions this is more a general observation)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I don't have a problem with sites using flash liberally, so long as they provide a non-flash way to get to the same information on the web site. This is especially important for an index page...you ought to allow people into the site without them having to wait for your animation to download.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Here's an alternative thesis.
Is it possible to say that poorly designed websites reflect a certain apathy on the web designer's part? Surely (the argument goes), if designers didn't care enough about the design, they wouldn't have cared enough about the info they provide.
Now, that's a statement that wouldn't apply to me. I use Opera 6.05 to navigate, so I get more than my usual share of poor design (bad html, javascript, MS-proprietary tags etc). However, personally I don't care; my focus has always been on finding the info I want, for which I use the excellent the find-in-page and the google search buttons that Opera provides.
Bottomline: It's probably not poor navigation per se, but a bad impression on the viewer.
More than mere navel gazing.
I skip over the certificates, don't bother with the layout and could care less about flashy, erm, flash animations. No, what I look for when deciding whether a site is credible is the Big Gaping Asshole(TM) stamp of approval. So far, only one web site I've seen has earned this coveted honor, but hopefully the trend will catch on and businesses who know what their customers want will realise their site needs to earn the goatse stamp of approval.
Ever suspected (or feared) that web users are mostly mindless sheep evaluating your website more by the eye candy than your carefully crafted content?
/., it has so many cute icons...Einstein, penguin...to mention just a few...
well, that's how i evaluating
I don't believe that holds true for all users or all types of information. The more detailed the information you seek, the less concerned you are with the look of the site. Example: I've been thinking about building a guitar, and have literally spent hours reading articles at Frank Ford's site. That's one of the plainest web pages you could imagine, but the information there is pure gold.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Code that runs perfectly but is uncommented, undocumented, and mostly consists of one 3000 line file titled main.cpp with five methods == bad code
The distinction between information and data is critical. If Site A has the data I want, but Site B has it and has already intelligently decomposed it into information for me, then Site B wins. It's not even a distinction that only matters to non-power users; any thoughtful person will prefer to spend less time digesting data into information and more time applying that information in interesting ways. This is a dynamic that is seen in good coding practice, in (G)UI design, in web design, in short, in any sort of content presentation.
This is not to defend presentations that _obscure_ the information being presented, but rather to highlight the importance of _correct_ content presentation. Clarity of presentation is a creature of balance; neither too little nor too much. If Flash can make your information clearer, use it. If Flash obscures your information, ditch it.
Then, which category would slashdot fit into?
After three years of researching Web credibility, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab...
Persuasive Technology Lab sounds a bit ominous to me. I think the real agenda of this group is to come up with some sort of "persuadatron" a la Syndicate.
This "webpage design" survey was just a test run to see how many pointless sites they could "persuade" people into appreciating.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Apparently when we speak, 80% of what is heard is how we say it, and the rest is a mix of everything else, with the actual message taking a thin piece of the pie. Maybe that's a factor?
I don't know whether to prefer the content or the presentation!
(p.s. it's funny)
Fuck it
Who in their right mind would be able to read a site with that horrible tone of blue? And they aren't using PHP so we know the report is bogus, right guys?
Of course they judged the books first by their cover. We do it with books, with the people we meet, with stores at the mall and around town!
We need to do that. It helps us decide whether we want to pursure things further or move on to the next thing. Otherwise we would have to fully investigate everything.
Does it work 100%? No, but it works well enough that nobody is going to stop doing it.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
So has anyone actually read the article before posting, and, if so, what are they on?
Virtually serving coffee
Banner adverts really lower my impression of a website ... *ahem*
"No-one claimed to be from Idaho, North Dakota, or Wyoming" (p14). Well, would you?
Virtually serving coffee
michael writes:
"Ever suspected (or feared) that web users are mostly mindless sheep evaluating your website more by the eye candy than your carefully crafted content? Well, it appears you were right."
Thanks, michael.
In other news. water is still wet, the sky is still blue and yes, Barbara Streisand still sucks.
My
Limekiller
And requiring flash or cookies to be enabled doesn't help either.
Totally agree.
:P
I have reasonably popular LJ - but thought I spend the most time writing longer essays on serious topics, my traffic always spikes around silly stuff like the Photoshop matrix spoof, my whimsical story on credit-card fraud or random picture of a cute asian girl.
Content is dead. Long live design!
*Shrugs*
The Pjammer Chronicles --
I have always expected and known this to be the case. It's the same with operating systems. Kde and Windows XP have a professional, clean, consistent look. Even if they both crashed frequently (not saying they do or not), users would still likely favor the one that looks newer, cleaner and more professional.
:)
When viewing a website that has been carefully constructed to look nice, then you feel like the person has put in a lot of effort. You *think* this means that it has been worked on longer, and more people have had time to view the content, and more thought has been put into it.
When you see a website with a black background, yellow text, and out of place images, you feel like the person has not put much effort in, and therefore the credibility of the website is suspect.
Sometimes this may be true, sometimes not, but I'm certain that this should have been obvious without a survey.
This is why some password thieves spent a lot of time on a fraudulent e-mail that they sent out to many ICQ users, myself included. It looked just like an official ICQ e-mail, every single link and image was loaded directly from the icq.com domain. The only exception was one link - the submit form. So while 99% of users would look at it, click a few links and see it goes to the icq.com website, and see the professional layout - a few would notice it was suspect purely because it was asking for our password because of some security problem.
We've come to associate professional design with companies, and to us that means quality. Brand name merchandise, clean stores, open spaces, etc. When a website is unclean, it feels like it has been done by a small business, someone without the greater know-how. Problem is, the open-source movement has very few good artists compared to programmers
Is it just me or does everyone interpret sites with tiny font sizes as credible? (The article in point, too.)
Perhaps it's just a pet peeve, but I would much rather have a sizable (not hard-coded) font size rather than a miniscule one where I can't resize it. To me, usability reflects a level of expertise and understandingand is more likely to garner my optimistic impressions ("credibility") of the site's owner.
My $0.02.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
What's this talk about credibility??? /. is credible. No?
I go for Sites that have quality!
www.bbspot.com, for example, looks like crap, but the humors great. If I want satire, I go there.
www.deviantart.com has near to zilch user communication exept from "Hey, great picture!" but the Art just plain rulez. If I want Art, I go there.
www.xfree.org looks like someone got paid to make an extra crappy website. But if I want to know more about xfree I'll have to take it.
www.nosepilot.com has exactly zero user interaction but is the ultimate flash-vector-animation joyride. I look at that movie twice a year. It has credibility for being one of the references in flash.
slashdot.org and journalisim are wide and far between, but they tend to talk about the stuff I'm interessted in - as far as 'picking interesting stuff' goes, I guess
Quit generalizing.
But yet again, expierience tells me that good looking sites tend to be good.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If a Site offers what I want I'll use it. If not As far as I know everybody else does the same.
And to all the freaks here jumping to conclusions about good-looking sites == no quality: You don't know squat what you're talking about.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We all know that "you never get a second chance to make a first impression," and that applies to websites also.
The content is not as important as the "believability" of that content. The credibility of that content is based upon the appearance of the site presenting it. If the site is not presenting itself in a professional manner, then a second rate website will be considered to have second rate content.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
Lemme put it this way the only things I trust less then the web are newspapers, politicians, and lawyers.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
There's nothing worse than going to a potentially interesting site and finding that I can't get anywhere because of all the links are of the form "javascript(open_page(lame.htm))". OK, there are a lot of things that are worse than that (murder, John Ashcroft, etc) but I like to overstate things.
Haven't you guys ever heard of "a href"? It's a perfectly good mechanism for linking, and every browser that supports even the smallest subset of HTML should support it.
I don't see the point of crippling your interface for the sake of having a fucking picture of a badger flying across the screen every time you follow a link.
-- $SIGNATURE
Sorry, pad're but every human response worth mentioning is hard-wired. And 'cept for a few dweebs and feebs all those hardwires are the SAME! SOOOOOOOOOOOO --- what you THINK about a website makes no difference at all to your response.
While this study produced some food for thought, I will ingest it with a liberal amount of salt. Whenever you ask people about their comments on a site they just visited, you will invariably get a fair amount of what they think you want to hear. This is why focus groups are suspect; it's an interesting truism that people are bloody poor at articulating what they really want.
Even with 10 sites per category in several categories to choose from, it's doubtful that any of those sites have content people really want at the given moment. Without providing content that will satisfy a perceived need, of course people are going to respond more positively to the shiny, candy-like buttons...
The only way to really understand what makes people's web site experiences a satisfying one is to observe people as they surf, and watch their results. Good web design is more like gardening than anything else: plant the site, watch traffic grow, remove some weeds, water with fresh content, fertilize with fresh design. A good strategy is to post alternate designs often, and then watch your traffic logs to see if clickthroughs increase. Amazon, whatever your criticism of them, is great at this... their site changes features and layouts just about weekly. Not enough to make people lost, but menus move, contract, expand; buttons move from GIF to HTML and back; layouts widen and narrow. Then the proof is in the traffic, and the visitor never gets a chance to tell you what they think you want to hear.
I'm glad to hear the conclusion that good design has value (I'm primarily a designer), but I think this survey is an oversimplification of reality which leads to an oversimplified conclusion.
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
Thats like saying women focus on personality and intelligence first, but we all know that is not true. Looks come first!!
[alk]
The modern literature association has some very good text on evaluating a web sites credibility. I expect that most college students had to do with MLA by now. Never the less, they do have good documentation. I suggest getting the book "The everyday Writer"
I agree that any site that requires Flash or cookies gets a big thumbs down. I don't think it's the credibility that's harmed, though. It's the usability (principally because of the download times for us modem users in the Flash case).
If the same site let me see a simple front page with the same content but no Flash animation, so I can download it and use it some time today, then maybe I'd rate it very highly if it still gave me the information I wanted easily.
If a site provides reasonable defaults without cookies, which it should be able to do if it just uses them to store my preferences as they were intended, then again, WTP? If I want to store the preferences, I'll enable cookies for the site. If not, I won't.
Even ads don't damage a site's credibility in my eyes, if they're done responsibly. I don't mind a banner ad or two that support a page. I find pop-up ads irritating, but these mostly seem to be put there by web hosting companies rather than the actual authors of a page I'm reading, so I tend to discount them as well. The only ads thing that really hurts a page in my eyes is being nasty about it. If I visit a travel agent's site, and when I've finished I close the window to find seventeen different ad windows for holidays I haven't even asked about, I'm never going back.
I guess you could argue that even this last case is really usability, but there comes a point where a site is sufficiently hard to use, or disregards the feelings of its visitors to such an extent, that it becomes a credibility problem as well.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
We all know that the average human is one step above a herd animal, that bells and whistles sell much better than reliablity and dependability. The computer monitor is too closely linked with the TV screeen and people have a blind spot ( induced or programmed) with normal truth/veracity verification of things presented via TV. Thanks network advertisers and broadcasters for years of social conditioning, and our government for failing to look out for consumers rights while ensuring profit models for large business's.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Um... Who was that?
I've seen lots of people indicate that they prefer content to style. (The /. population might well not be representative of the overall population in this respect, of course.) I don't think I've seen anyone suggest that a quality site can't be good looking as well, though.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
seeing as money is the root[1] of all evil, the owners must have no revenue from the site. therefore they must be living in their parents attic with ripped and stained jeans and cheap haircuts...
:)
oh wait, that includes the rumor mill geek sites too
[1] no pun intended
http://validator.w3.org/
Go there now... Make your site compliant... Resistance is futile... (Slashdot doesn't pass)
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
"How Do People Evaluate the Credibility of Web Sites? We've written a report on our most recent study that examined how people evaluated the credbility of live Web sites. This study included over 2600 participants and 100 Web sites in 10 categories (finance, health, etc.). We conducted this research in partnership with Consumer Webwatch, a part of Consumers Union (the nonprofit folks who publish Consumer Reports)."
Direct from credibility.stanford.edu: When your "credbility" is at stake there's no time for a spell check!
Most (it could said all) of the people in my high school (students and teachers alike) judge the web site based on the eye candy. On one occasion, a teacher told us to look for truths about Canola oil. Well, most students found some pretty interesting reads that they though to be pretty true, on websites like urbanlegends.com and truthorfiction.com. I was all over that computer lab trying to convince the teacher that the articles were just opinionated, but to no avail!
I even lost a girlfriend because of this. She was a major animal rights activist and had found a website that showed a few pictures and a few "facts" about animal abuse. The page was done completely in flash so it looked nice, even if it was basically someone's homepage. Well, you might be able to imagine I was against her saying this was real and this is what really happens... It didn't end well.
It should be required in grade-school to teach kids about the difference of creditable sites and personal opinions!
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
i actually consider design to be a semi-valid way to evaluate a company when viewing their website
why?
if they don't care enough to try and make themselves look good, who's to say they're going to give half a crap about me?
It is the perSUasive not "pervasive" computing lab.
l
Persuasive tech is about "psychosocially active" computing (and other) technologies, ie. that affect motivation, persuasion etc. The paradigmatic example is "Baby think it over", the doll given to teens to make them think twice about getting pregnant. (There's even a special "crack baby" model I think.)
But in the last couple of years BJ Fogg (the guy behind persuasive tech) has completely focused on web trust, which is a lot less interesting than the original program IMHO.
Pervasive computing, in contrast, is another term (originally IBM:s I think) for Ubiquitous Computing. Something quite different in fact.
www.research.ibm.com/thinkresearch/pervasive.shtm
www.computer.org/pervasive/
A study resulting from a collaboration between Consumer Webwatch and The Stanford Pervasive technology Lab reports that even though consumers say that they look for content first when evaluating the credibility of a website, they actually focus primarily on design look and information design/structure (i.e. ease of navigation).
Well, duh!
This is how any recognition process works.
A better question would be "what is it that turns users off of a sight when they've been there for a while?"
As for me, once I see the first spelling error, the site credibility takes a nose dive.
What, are you guys stupid? How is this surprising?
:) ).
.nobody.
For all your smarts, folks, you're overlooking the most obvious reason for this: first impressions are important, which means looks.
It's been going on in print media for CENTURIES.
Hell, it's been human nature longer than that. Anybody who's been on a date knows about first impressions (then again this is slashdot, so i might not get everybody with that one
Why do you think anyone trying to convey authority dresses the part, salesmen try to look nice, companies have dress codes?
It's so obvious, this study was almost a waste of time. And the major embarrassment is that you guys are all so deluded that the Internet is such a major paradigm shift that you couldn't figure this out in the first place.
--my criteria preferences are content and useability. Obviously I want the content I am seeking, but I dislike sites that use active scripting for links. C'mon, is this really necessary? Sucks. I cruise with javascript and images (most of the time) off for instance, I detest having to go turn it on and reload the page just to go to the next link, or freeking image buttons with no alt text so you can't see what they are supposed to link to. That's just freaking lazy on the webperson's fault. Pure lazy.
Besides that I don't mind ads at all, sometimes there's something I want to look at in an ad, I'll go there. I have animations set to run once, so that fixes that. If flash won't let me proceed, too bad, I trash the site, their loss. Rest of the time if it's something I'm not interested in I ignore it, same as television, it's never bothered me. Frankly, I appreciate the advertisers helping to pay for content. that's how it works, well, until the ISP's stop ridiculous restrictions on private hosting, and until it's as easy as installing one program to bypass using an isp at all and just lease the wire for joe user. It sure would be bogus to have to actively pay for every web page and log in with another cookie and etc, there's enough of that already. The only other thing that is mildly annoying are websites that assume everyone makes 100 grand a year and lives in some urban nirvanaland and is on a broadband connection with a multi gighz processor machine and some near-wallsized monitor, now THAT is annoying on an older slower computer. I know that a several year old computer is considered ancient now, but uhh, why is that again? what for? A website that's bloat-coded for just new and fast is the same as telling me I can't use the road unless I own a brand new ferrari, that elitist crap can go blow too. Screw that site. And the browser/os specific pages, puhleeze, go away, just say no to internet monopolies.
I guess that'senough of a rant, what I LIKE is decent modest sized pages, not too many graphics per page, no automagical plugins, I want to CHOOSE via clicking if I want some doo dad to run, and I want "truth in linkvertising", I want a link to take me to what is really claimed to be there,no more and no less, not a tease, popup, pop under, or other nonsense of that type. In other words, don't choose for me, let ME choose please.
Um, on what basis do you say that? Doesn't that contradict the study? Maybe you're able to tune out all the visual stuff, but sounds like most people form an opinion about credibility way before they get to the content.
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
Contrary to popular /. belief, good design does matter, and here's why: If you were a website owner and planning on generating traffic and gaining a good reputation, you would make sure you have two things - good content, and good design. When users go to sites by big companies they know will be around for a long time like IBM, Dell, Yahoo, etc., and see an attractive and professional layout, they begin to associate that with trust. No-one believes that these companies are being anything but completely honest on their websites. Compare that with teds-sweet-deals.com with crappy layout and an ugly page. It looks like a fly-by-night operation and it certainly doesn't look like Dell.com, so who are you going to trust?
That being said, I think users know the difference between an e-commerce site and a personal non-profit site, and there's lots more leeway in the latter case, which can actually backfire for companies that like to astroturf. An example of this is websites for Amanda Latona (a wannabe pop diva being groomed by the major labels for commercial success). A lot of the "fan" websites seem a little too slick to be real.
"It's Dot Com!"
ah, but that is just the thing....
all the 'visiual stuf' should be clearly pointing too the content and clearly indicating what type of content.
And even if text is considerd 'less visual' by most people (you know what I mean) it's still dramaticly powerfull and should be used with care, just like images.
It's important as a web-dev too realise that because some devs still have the notion of "text is small so lot's of that, images big so little to none of that" which is completely against all web-design rules.
This is not as bad as "I got broadband, so I put lot's of pics on!!11" which some silly people are thinking, even when designing public info sites!
The thing is too look clean and purposefull, just check google.com for an example.
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Read the artical again. It says that the majority of people say they judge a site by it's contents, but in reality they're judging it by it's look and AI etc. That different to what you seem to be arguing against.
Does this mean that NASA has decided that they don't need a Moon Hoax Book because they can just redesign their web site with more eye-candy?
- Who wrote the information?
- Would the author benefit in some way from misinforming me? (If I'm looking up the molecular weight of iron, I probably don't need to worry about intentional misinformation.)
- Does the author use objective language where I think he should use subjective language?
- When the author talks about things I already know about, is he correct and does he seem to be unbiased?
- If it's a news article, do I trust the editors of the newspaper and am I aware of any bias that the newspaper has?
- Is the information reasonable?
When I am considering purchasing from a site, I'm reluctant rely solely on its content and looks, because both can be stolen from other web sites. Instead, I do one or more of the following:The shareholder is always right.
Lada(that russian car you see in bond movies)
The Lada models I know were licensed by the Soviets from Italian Fiat. Then they maybe added those wipes for the lights.
Niva (4x4) and Zil (limousines) were original Soviet designs, I think.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Hope that this is of some interest. --chris
It's just as easy to question the validity of the survey/experiment, as it is to take it seriously. Obviously, design is critical - it sets the stage for the content - you wouldnt want to watch Macbeth with players in Disney costumes (unless youre a real freakoid). So, a good design will lead a user into the content without them needing to think about it much.
/. target audience would cringe at many sites a normal parametric user would love design-wise.
However, every website has a different intended audience, with varying degrees of internet savvy. If the site meets the needs of its audience, regardless of what some ordinary dweeb who was paid $5 for an opinion thinks. Not really an accurate assessment of web usability when using such generalised audiences. I'm sure a
There seem to be inumerable factors when considering a site's usefulness, but as one poster has said, if it performs its function well, thats that. But it's just plain obvious and dumb) to plop a few drones in front of a few sites and ask them whether "design" wins over "content", of course what they see will reflect their immediate opinion.
Doesn't matter to most of us, but it's extremely frustrating to someone who's visually impaired and uses a screen reader such as JAWS when too much of the text is displayed as an image without a meaningful ALT caption. The more gimmicks that get used lately such as Flash and Java, the less useful the web becomes to someone who's blind. Granted it's nice when the banner ads are a lot easier to ignore, but a popup throws off the screen readers quickly, and ALT-TABbing your way back to what you were trying to read is a major bitch when you get caught in a "mousetrap" and the ads start flying around. It's very easy to code a site to be handicap accessible without making it any less meaningful to the majority, but almost no one thinks about it. This is almost as annoying to me as seeing new buildings that could have easily been made wheelchair accessible, but no one cared enough to do so. The Internet has no Americans with Disabilities Act, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make a website accessible than it is to put ramps and elevators in.
I've seen lots of people indicate that they prefer content to style.
Your doing the usual mistake here and overlooking a simple fact:
They way content is delivered (aka "Style") is a subtancial part of the content itself.
If I write an Essay and print it out in the Font "Impact" you'll know what I mean.
The, in this case visual, quality and appearance of Data and Information are essential to wether Information can be transported or not.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Ironically enough, you make my point for me. If you don't like an essay that's printed in Impact, you can change the style to print it in a more readable font without affecting the actual content at all. The presentation is improved, without changing any of the information contained within that presentation.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm a medical writer so I can comment on the medical content of the sites in the Consumer Webwatch reports. I don't think they're good enough.
(Since I write for the web, I found the programmer comments very useful. OK, I'll change that code in my site RSN).
I agree completely that (my) content doesn't matter if you can't find it, and without good graphic design, backed up by good programming (thanks guys), you can't find anything on those web sites (which have thousands of pages). Everything you want to know about medicine is on the Internet many times over, but the problem is (1) finding it (2) in a form that you can understand and (3)evaluating its accuracy and validity.
Here's a good example: I went to a doctor for a checkup, and he didn't perform a digital rectal examination, although he did give me a guiac test. A DRE is a way of screening for prostate cancer and rectal cancer, and the American Cancer Society among other well-known organizations recommends it for everyone above 50, like me. A guiac test samples the stool for blood, which is often a symptom of colon cancer. Various organizations also recommend sigmoidoscopy (a fiber optic scope that goes through the rectum and up the colon about a foot) and colonoscopy (which goes up the colon even farther) as screening for colon cancer. My medical textbooks were either out of date or ambiguous on these issues.
So, here's my question for the medical web sites:
Should my doctor have performed a DRE on a 50-year-old man in a routine physical?
My first stop was the web site rated No. 1 by the experts National Institutes of Health. Once I got there, I realized that I had to refine the question. What I really wanted to know is,
would a DRE have lowered my chances of dying of cancer?
As it turned out, there are scientific studies with control groups that found that there was no good evidence that patients who had screening DRE, sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy lived longer than patients who did not. However, patients screened with guiac tests did live longer (endpoint of death, they call it). I found this on the professional side of the site, not the consumer side, couched in technical language. Not easily accessible or understandable -- for something that your life depends on.
So when I read the Consumer WebWatch report, I decided to see how the expert's No. 2, MayoClinic.com handled it. To my surprise and dismay, the Mayo Clinic web site, in its extensive discussion of screening for colon cancer, did not make the point that only guiac testing had been shown to save lives. There is criticism in the medical literature that doctors don't provide enough hard information to their patients to enable patients to make an intelligent decision. I think the fact that the life-saving ability of 3 of those 4 screening tests is not supported by evidence-based medicine is an important fact for patients that the Mayo clinic should have provided for patients who are trying to decide whether to take an uncomfortable and (for the scopes) expensive test with a risk of perforating the bowel.
Evidence-based medicine, BTW, is a term of the art, and a good Google search. It means practicing medicine on the basis of scientific evidence, when it exists (the catch: you wind up saying, "science doesn't know" too much of the time).
EBM started when 2 doctors in Canada were having trouble keeping up with all their reading, and said, "Hey, let's just read the stuff that's supported by scientific evidence." That cut down the pile significantly.
A good explanation is on the Bandolier web site, from Oxford, UK. This will reduce medicine to the rationality that engineers and other geeks are used to thinking in.
What is series:
Evidence-based Medicine
Bandolier
Forms of evidence
Evidence is presented in many forms, and it is
important to understand the basis on which it
is stated. The value of evidence can be ranked
according to the following classification in
descending order of credibility:
I. Strong evidence from at least one
systematic review of multiple well-designed
randomised controlled trials.
II. Strong evidence from at least one properly
designed randomised controlled trial of
appropriate size.
III. Evidence from well-designed trials such as
non-randomised trials, cohort studies, time
series or matched case-controlled studies.
IV. Evidence from well-designed
non-experimental studies from more than
one centre or research group.
V. Opinions of respected authorities, based on
clinical evidence, descriptive studies or
reports of expert committees.
BTW, when people ask me where to find medical information on the Internet, I recommend peer-reviewed sources, starting with the Merck Manual Home Edition , then British Medical Journal, then Medicalstudent.com.
But you can't do it on the Internet alone without professional guidance -- medical librarians explained to me how to search the medical literature. And very often what you want to know is only available on paper.
I went into this in more detail when I taught a class in medical journalism. I interviewed a medical librarian and posted her explanation in an article on my web site. That's why brick libraries are so valuable -- they don't just have paper, they have librarians.