Why Good Content Must Suck

This would have been an interesting two hours…

Why Good Content Must Suck:
Designing for the Scent of Information

Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering

If you have thousands of pages of really cool stuff on your site, how do users find what they are looking for? Turns out that the content itself has to pull the user to it. The stronger the pull, the more likely the user will find it. In this presentation, Jared discusses how to organize your site to pull users to the right place. He talks about User Interface Engineering’s recent research on how people find information on large websites. Jared shows you plenty of examples of sites that work well and those that don’t. Jared also discusses how the quality of links affects whether users click on them, how longer pages actually help users get where they are going faster, the three types of graphics–navigation, content, and decorative–and the importance of each, how users follow a scent, and four ways your design could be blocking their smell.

Thursday, Jan., 16, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., 66 West 12th Street, room 404, The New School.