watch your head as i heave
Reading Online News: A Comparison of Three Presentation Formats
into the ol’
annotated
bookmark bin
:
“With the ever-increasing progression towards online
newsletters as a principal source of information presentation, the
Web has offered many opportunities as well as challenges that are
unique to this environment. For instance, the traditional newspaper
presents information within the confines of evenly-spaced, gridded
columns. This has worked quite well in the past, and readers have
become very accustomed to this style of information presentation.
However, with the advent of the Web, it is now possible to place
information in multiple sources that are connected by link
titles–permitting online newsletters to initially present only a
small amount of pertinent information through the use of these
links.”“Accordingly, this study addressed the question of how information
should be presented within a news-style web page. For example,
should all the information related to a single article be presented
on one page, or should the newsletter contain a page that lists
only the link titles that relate to each specific article, and
which is presented on another page? Moreover, if the newsletter
presents initial information in the form of link titles, should
they present supplementary information that provides a general
overview of the entire article, along with the link
title?”
the results are straighforward. people prefer executive summaries. [ via
webword
]