[IxDA Discuss] Don't Be Too Innovative with Your UI...

[Peter Merholz]

This is exactly what I refer to when discussing document genres.

http://www.peterme.com/archives/000460.html

People make snap judgments about the nature of a document based on  
its appearance.

I don't want to argue against innovation, but you have to understand  
the expectations people bring to your experience.

The disconnect that Rich describes is borne of people being cued into  
thinking they were dealing with a particular document genre, and then  
the interaction not behaving appropriately.

--peter

On Apr 2, 2007, at 3:43 PM, Dan Saffer wrote:

> ...so claims Rich Skrenta, founder of Topix.
>
> "People don't lean forward and squint at web pages to figure out how
> they work anymore. They instantly recognize -- within 100
> milliseconds -- which class of site a page belong to -- search
> result, retail browse, blog, newspaper, spam site, message board,
> etc. And if they don't recognize what kind of page they're on, they
> generally give up and hit the back button.
>
> Our news pages didn't conform to any standard metaphor. Some people
> thought they were search results. But they weren't, our pure news
> search was a separate section of the site. Some people thought we
> were a newspaper, with human editors. Some visitors thought we were a
> blog. But our news items didn't behave in very bloggy ways. Most
> people just didn't know who we were or what the page was trying to  
> do."
>
> http://www.skrenta.com/2007/04/what_do_you_do_when_your_succe.html
>
>
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