Design Does Matter
After the How to Build your Brand with Blogs at SXSW, I continued my nonscientific, informal poll of who actually uses RSS and the results are always the same. When I ask friends, colleagues, and conference attendees, “do you actually read RSS feeds?” the response is something like, “sure, I have an RSS reader, subscribe to a ton of feeds, but I never read them, because I’m busy.” If your job is to ride around on a Segway, read RSS feeds feeds all day and post on them, that’s one thing, but most of use have other work to do. Recent surveys find that I’m not alone in that opinion.
Nice. But not the same.
For consuming news, a page like Google news is more effective than RSS because there are pretty pictures to look at and those pictures are associated with a headline. I’m sure the RSS pundits will argue that I don’t get it and Scoble is reading like 2 million feeds a day now, but I ask where’s your stats? Sure, you can note how more people subscribe to RSS, but how many people are reading it? Not many.
The Does Design Matter? panel at SXSW apparently further convinced Scoble that he’s the prototypical RSS user. He’s not. He’s the exception to RSS users that are overwhelmed by all the feeds. What’s good for Scoble and his SmartPhone, isn’t necessarily good for everyone else.
As Zeldman wrote, “Reading Plastic Bag in a news reader is like getting the text of your favorite magazine in email. Nice. But not the same.”
For the love of pugs
Robert posted, “I’ve been telling audiences that those of you still using Web browsers are wasting your time.” To the contrary, RSS can be an enormous waste of time. I’d asked last year, what productivity gains with RSS? I’ve found two so far: NOAA’s weather feeds and Netflix. Those feeds work because they offer a specific feed on one topic. That’s helpful because I benefit from at-a-glance weather info or my Netflix queue. 12-a-day-shotgun posting from blogs like Wonkette and Gizmodo are absolutely not easier to read or use in a reader.
Furthermore, if no one visits your site, they can’t comment, buy from you, click your ads, discover your shared love of pugs, or all those other wonderful things we do on the web now.
Point Counterpoint
I’ll discuss blog design in depth at Web Design World next week. We’ll also discuss it more at the next BBS 05. Robert and I should probably have a point counterpoint debate on the topic. The debate started at SXSW, when I asked him who designed his blog.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Sorry Byron, too much to comment to post it here.
http://www.marketingstudies.net/blogs/rss/archive/000289.html
No problem at all. That’s good, let’s get this debate going. Reading your post now.
I read your article via RSS. N pretty pictures required
I believe that the design and workings of RSS readers etc. are poor, especially for those new to RSS. Hence I have put my own web-based reader together. It may be of interest…
http://www.feedtagger.com/
Regards,
Chris
Alex,
I use RSS readers as well. My point is does your spouse, family and friends do so as well — really? The problem is absolutely with the readers because most of them use the email application metaphor. We need smart readers, like an iTunes for RSS. NewsFire is getting close, but then the information overload occurs, where I’ve got feeds expiring daily and polling once and it’s still too much. As I said in the post, everyone I ask has the same problem. Thanks for the RSS, wish I could use it.
Chris,
Checked your feed reader, nice. The layout is broken in Safari, but I like the minimalist approach.
Is this why on the BBS site there are no little orange buttons I could find but you have a subscribe function at the top of the right sidebar? Are we about to see a trend away from the almost ubiquitous newsfeed buttons?
I would certainly hope so! If there is a trend away from the orange buttons, let us be one of the first sites to join it.
I’ve found that using a newsreader makes it easy and enjoyable to quickly browse and sift through a wide variety of information, deciding which to read.
For many feeds, I get a decent representation of the page layout in NetNewsWire’s preview pane, complete with pretty pictures. For others, the excerpted text is enough to decide whether it’s worthwhile opening the page in a browser window. If I don’t have time to read an article immediately, I flag it and come back later.
Making content available through RSS is relatively painless and broadens your reach. In this case, I linked through to this page from an article on Des Walsh’s RSS feed.
Ken,
My argument is that there’s no experience in RSS, besides reading text on the screen and against the RSS pundits, that argue design doesn’t matter. They’re wrong. It does. To stay current for posting on this site, I pour over RSS and find it absolutely overwhelming. My issues isn’t with RSS itself, but with the readers and the ridiculous assertion that we can all just read RSS now and the world’s a better place, that RSS is better than browsing.
I don’t want to be misunderstood here, I evanglize RSS as much as the next web guy, publish and use it myself, but sorry, we’re not all going to be reading RSS on our SmartPhones instead of visting someone’s site.
Hi Byron,
I don’t disagree with you on the fact that design matters - it’s been my living for over 15 years now, so I sure hope it matters.
The RSS experience right now may be low-fi, but it’s early yet.
The loss of control when moving from print design to html was a shock at first, but we’ve come to accept and embrace it with design standards that allow for flexibility on the part of the user. Let’s see what effect RSS has on future design principles. And you’re right — it’s not likely that we’re going to use one instead of the other, but one will almost definitely affect the other.
Zeldman’s words are very smart, to my opinion. The RSS technologies are not mature enough to be widely used. There will always be a demand for style and distinctiveness.
Mary,
Agreed. I think the main difference is a personality blogger v. a business that wants visitors to experience their site, brand, and products. Not going to happen with RSS and I don’t think the pundits think of it that way. True, I never need to see Scoble’s site, but I want to see how Mint works and RSS isn’t going to show me that.
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