subject: The Well-kept Secret about Web Site Design [print this page] The Well-kept Secret about Web Site Design
The internet has changed everything about the media and content providers.
For the first time each individual can adjust to his own attention span and cater to his own interests to a degree never before possible with television, radio, or literature. Anyone interested in web site design needs to know how this can be used to their advantage, or they risk being lost in the world wide crowd.
It's often said that the technological advances of the last 50 years have progressively forced people to have shorter and shorter attention spans. People walk on the street reading news, trading text messages, browsing through music videos, etc. On a short bus trip, someone could respond to an email from work, order a book, read a news article, and watch a preview for the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But there are just as many people who don't reach that extreme, who only respond up to a certain point. For this reason, sites can't just bombard people with nonstop information regardless of what they're after. There has to either be a compromise somewhere, or the rate of new info has to be adapted to the user's actions. This is the secret no one wants you to know: you don't have to decide what your user's experience will be. You only have to be prepared when they are ready for a change of pace, so that it will be there under their mouse when that time comes.
There are any number of guides, truly more than anyone could ever use, to all of the technical aspects of web site design, but tempering this bottomless well of know-how with a little basic knowledge of human psychology will make your site stand out from the crowd in that it will not have one single target audience. If the user is free to make his experience the way he wants it, no one will be disappointed.
