useit.com Papers and Essays Internet World 2008

Internet World 2008: Two Talks I Might Present in Ten Years

At the Internet World '98 conference in Chicago, Jim Sterne presented a session on the long-term future of the Internet. Jim had the brilliant idea to situate his talk as a session guide for the Internet World 2008 conference: this is what the various speakers will present, and these are the reasons one or the other talk might be important for your company. To get descriptions of sessions that might be presented in 2008, Jim contacted some of the speakers at the 1998 conference. Here is my contribution:

In deciding what I might be talking about at Internet World 2008, my first problem was to predict what I might be working on in ten years. I couldn't really decide, so I wrote up two different seminar summaries. The first assumes a traditional corporate perspective whereas the second comes from a virtual team. I tend to believe more in the second model as a successful way to work in the network economy, but who knows where I will actually be in ten years. The one thing I am fairly sure of is that the speakers at Internet World 2008 are probably going to work in very different organizations than today's companies.

Online-Writing Boot Camp: Bringing the Last Print Writers into the Interactive Age

When ICC bought up the last moribund U.S. newspapers in January 2008, our first action was obviously to close down their printing plants. Our second action was to put the writers and editors through hypertext boot camp and drill them in our non-linear online writing style. We successfully converted almost all of these hard-core linearity holdouts into creators of the kind of reader-centric interactive content that is ICC's hallmark. This seminar covers our training methods and indoctrination tactics and will be of immediate value to any other company that needs to convert large numbers of old-media staff now that paper publishing is rapidly dying.

Navigation and Usability Issues in Interactive Hypermedia Services

Now that the long-promised broadband connectivity has finally arrived, high-definition video and multimedia are becoming integrated parts of most websites. These media types introduce new usability problems and design issues. Web users are as impatient and goal-driven as ever, so we have found that the traditional guidelines for online writing transfer to online video: concise and scannable design wins over long linear videos. Soundbytes come natural for a skilled television designer, but scannability is more difficult to achieve in video than in print: we need to go beyond the old tricks with highlighted keywords and bulleted lists. Navigation has also proven difficult in highly interlinked spaces of short videoclips and other multimedia objects. Seeing users struggle with links that come and go and move around as the video progresses reminds me of the problems users had with clickable imagemaps in 1994. This seminar will present some guidelines for multimedia-driven Internet design based on our usability studies so far; unfortunately much additional work is needed before hypermedia services reach the ease of use and navigation we have come to expect since text-and-image-based Web design was standardized in 2003.