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Re: [RC] Spiffy new look to the website! OR Broad & Shallow vs. Narrow & Deep - Linda Mirams

On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:06:51 -0800, Karen Sullivan wrote
Just some thoughts....
...
2. The new set up of the classifieds will certainly curtail my daily
perusing.....I guess being in the dark ages with plain old dial up. it's
painfully slow to view ads. Before, I could just scroll down and speed-read
and scan ads...reading all the ads probably in less than a few 
minutes...and could get all the pertinent information in an instant.

With the new format...given the titles are whatever; you can't tell 
if a a horse is old, young, how tall, etc. All that shows up on the
main menu is price and location...



What Karen is describing is an old, well-known principal in user interface
design:

 When you have alot of information to present, which is better:  an interface
   that is "broad and shallow" or one that is "narrow and deep?"

The answer is unequivocally:  Broad and Shallow!!!

While humans have a natural tendancy to want to classify and structure
information into a hierarchy, doing so *when you don't have to* essentially
accomplishes one thing and one thing only:  it hides information; burying
it where it may never be seen.

Always show as much of the hierarchy of information as you can at any one
time.  Broad has to be *very* broad before it begins to, in itself,
encumber the user's assimilation of the message.  A whole day of
Ridecamp posts approaches this limit ;-)

Another way of looking at it is:  the classifieds used to all be printed on
one big sheet of paper.  Now they are printed on tiny post-its that you
have to view one at a time through a keyhole, with a huge "mouse manipulation"
overhead between each tiny snapshot.

Or, put another way, all of the increase in bandwith one might get
with a DSL or broadband connection has been obliterated by narrowing
the portal through which one may view the information to 300 baud.

Or, put yet another way:  Beware of Second System Syndrome!

For a much longer and better discussion of these issues, see Edward Tufte's
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" (or of *any* kind of
information for that matter!)

Linda
(Who does this stuff for a living...)







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