RE: The humbling reality of writing multi-page articles

Subject: RE: The humbling reality of writing multi-page articles
From: "Darren Barefoot" <darren -dot- barefoot -at- capeclear -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 15:30:02 +0100


To briefly reply to my own posting, I found a couple of good discussions
of this issue (a productive Google search is http://tinyurl.com/1dk1):

http://www.valdron.com/checklist/wsd03.html
http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/pagelength.html

A couple of quotes from these pages which seem particularly useful are:

"Ask yourself when was the last time you left a site because you had to
scroll down or for that matter even conciously thought about it? Now ask
yourself when was the last time you left a site because you had to chase
the information because it was on a bunch of short pages never really
giving you all the answers?"

"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text
with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This
advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there
is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm
established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving
a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that
rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something
that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should
be."

"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual
aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page
document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for
easier reading."

Thanks. DB.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Darren Barefoot [mailto:darren -dot- barefoot -at- capeclear -dot- com]
> Sent: 10 September 2002 15:22
> To: 'TECHWR-L'
> Subject: RE: The humbling reality of writing multi-page articles
>
>
> Indeed, I'm one of those people who would prefer to scroll
> instead of click "next page". This is particularly applicable
> when I'm on a dial-up connection, in that I can start reading
> the page (or, in fact, skim much of it) before the page is
> done loading. However, in some usability book somewhere I
> read that it was good practice not to permit people to scroll
> more than a couple of "screens" past their position at the
> top of the page. I'm not sure what the logic for this was, or
> whether this has changed now that the average user is a lot
> more scroll-savvy, but that's what the decision was based on.
> I expect that part of it is avoiding the sense of information
> overload one gets as the "scroll nub" (for want of a better
> term--what is that thing called?) gets smaller and smaller.
>
> We also plan to implement ye olde "print-friendly"
> functionality, but haven't gotten around to it yet. DB.
>



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