In my redesign post I mentioned this 'zooming content' idea I've adopted. I don't think the concept is new but I've not seen anyone write about it so I'm jumping in... Each page is based on what I'm calling a 'zooming' layout. By that I mean that the information view and relevance on the page zooms out as the page goes down. This is influenced by three things:
- Derek Powazek's Embrace your bottom! article.
- Peter Morville's Ambient Findability.
- The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes.
The Eytracker III study from a couple of years ago found that people aren't afraid to scroll below the fold but that their scanning became more rapid. To cater to this behaviour I have limited the amount of information in the lower sections of the page. The page content becomes more and more brief and scannable as the page goes on. Take the weblog index for example: it starts with a complete entry, then moves to summaries of 5 recent entries, along with access to the archives, and finally to external links.
Every page follows this pattern. The top of the page deals with specifics and details while the bottom of the page presents an overview, encouraging scanning and, hopefully, giving people what they want, when they want it.
Why have I done this instead of going for the more conventional two column blog layout? Conventions are our friends, after all...
In Ambient Findability Peter Morville calls web pages 'discreet findable objects' that can be accessed out of context via search engines... Basically, there's a very good chance that people are coming to a content page from Google having performed a search on a specific keyword phrase. The standard two column layout presents these nice new visitors with a lot of information they've not asked for and are probably not interested in. I wanted to let people get what they came for before bombarding them with choices, in line with Derek's suggestions.
Content is king and will govern both incoming links and page weighting by the engines. If someone gets to one of my pages it will probably be thanks to the content so I've made sure I give that up front. The article, blog entry or portfolio item is there in full at the top of the page with nothing else in the way. The main navigation gives a broad overview of the site and the metadata to the right suggests the presence of more local and related posts but I've tried very hard to keep noise to a minimum. I'm hoping that I've left enough wayfinding and orientation hints at the top of the page to let the user reach a decision about the context of the site and content before continuing down the page.
After the full entry I zoom out one level.
On the index pages this steps out to an overview of the most recent posts, kept short and scannable; On the content pages this is lists of two different types of entry: the most recent ones, which I'd obviously like to promote to new visitors, and related (and hopefully relevent) posts, which are an attempt to push old content. (This second group is found by passing the article title into my site's search and listing the top results.) Derek Powazek advocates using the bottom of the page to give readers somewhere to go but I had one more question I thought people might ask: Why should I believe the post I've just read? By providing a list of links to other things I've written I am trying to establish credability with my readers as well as cross-sell content. That's also what the slightly anomolous 'about me' snippet is trying to suggest - that I do have some idea what I'm talking about.
The final portion of the pages is for less relevant or less valuable information - external links, comments, that sort of thing.
I don't think this is a radical idea - far from it - newspapers have been doing this sort of thing for ever, but I am very surprised that it's not been applied to more websites. When I sat down to think about what information I should be presenting to my users at any one time this zooming idea just seemed to make sense. My biggest concern with the approach is the way it dresses up normal in-site navigation to look like more content. When I first sent the new design round to people I was expecting lots of complaints about access to the archives. So far no one has said anything about that...
To sum up: people tend to scan the page below the fold so the further down they go how about offering them more scannable content? Zoom detail to overview.
