Net Rage: A Study of Blogs and Usability
Catalyst’s proprietary test of the usability of blogs, conducted in late June and early July of 2005, can be downloaded immediately here. Our analysis sheds light on a variety of heretofore neglected, user-experience related design challenges associated with blogs’ potential to become a mainstream medium for Internet users.
Update:
So intrigued were we by the results of this study that we issued a press release about it… The release is posted on the Catalyst mother site and provides a good summary of the test results. Here’s a snippet:
In order to test the direction that blogs are heading – rather than where they have been historically – Catalyst probed usage and navigation of one of BusinessWeek’s five new blogs, “Well Spent�? (http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/wellspent/). Catalyst judged this to be an example of a newer, “mainstream�? type of media blog which keeps all the core functionality associated with the medium, but folds it into a larger, well-known and branded website. Highlights of the study include:
* No participant understood the mechanisms associated with RSS/subscribing to a blog – not even the minority familiar with the term “RSS.”
* Few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog – and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented.
* A minority of participants understood how to navigate within the blog itself – with most being confused by areas for recent posts, categories, trackbacks and even the comments and archives functions.
We hope you will check out the study and let us know what you think.
July 13th, 2005 at 5:08 am
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July 13th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
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July 14th, 2005 at 2:12 am
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July 14th, 2005 at 2:34 am
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July 15th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Thank you very much for the interesting study.
Great Inspiration!
July 19th, 2005 at 9:36 am
I read the study. I think the observations are pretty good. Especially on RSS.
But its conclusions are more about how a “blog” integrates with an existing business magazine site. The BusinessWeek blogs are business blog in the sense they are about business, but they are not blogs written by businesses for their customers. Thus, they are not business blogs as I understand them.
This seems to be an important thing–the study seems to more rightly point the well discussed problems journalism has with integrating blogs with its normal “edited” content. This is why your users where confused about what a blog is, because they were reading a magazine.
So, the study has limited application in my view on how blogs are perceived by users.
July 19th, 2005 at 3:43 pm
Tim – these are excellent points. However, we felt that the integration problems faced by the BusinessWeek blog were analagous to what would be faced by any company trying to integrate a blog into their overall site design. We had many discussions about how we should integrate CoFactors into our site — and ours is quite small! The reason we chose Well Spent was precisely because of this integration challenge — and also because we felt that media / journalism blogs are likely to be the first ones that many people who are new to blogs will encounter — via search.
July 23rd, 2005 at 7:33 pm
[...] Report on Blogs and RSS The Catalyst Design Group has published an interesting usability study on blogs and RSS. Not surprisingly, most people are not aware of RSS and its [...]
July 24th, 2005 at 10:26 am
[...] es related to blogs have already been identified by the Catalyst Design Group in a recent survey. Would you really want to make m [...]
July 27th, 2005 at 5:19 am
[...] d under: Usability — nortypig @ 9:24 pm Net Rage: A Study of Blogs and Usability [...]
July 27th, 2005 at 9:49 pm
[...] dea what RSS feeds are. (Even less than podcasting!?) Considering those statistics, this Weblog usability study comes as no surprise. Most participants (typical internet users) had n [...]
July 29th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
You tested with 9 particpants… hardly conclusive
consider opening up your test to include a volume of particpants, then see what your data tells you.
August 3rd, 2005 at 12:45 am
Interesting but not that surprising really – the blog world is pretty confusing to begin with. In regards to RSS, maybe more people should follow what the BBC are doing?
August 5th, 2005 at 1:31 am
Fascinating and timely study; blogging is often overrun with out-of-touch concepts and obtuse implementation.
Consider, for example, the frequency of unintelligible trackback comments on this page.
August 5th, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Chris, I agree about the unintelligible trackbacks — especially the ones not in English! It would be interesting if blogging software allowed bloggers to specify an excerpt for trackbakcs rather than simply snipping out the few words surrounding a link. This might be something we can control in WordPress.
September 16th, 2005 at 4:16 am
Great substance.
December 6th, 2005 at 2:27 am
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February 21st, 2009 at 6:34 pm
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