RE: The humbling reality of writing multi-page articles

["Darren Barefoot" <darren -dot- barefoot -at- capeclear -dot- com>]

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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