A usability expert like Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini spends time thinking about making things, well, easy to use.
How many buttons do you have to push to start your microwave oven, for example?
Or how much time do keyboard shortcuts actually save? (Tognazzini’s research shows that shortcuts actually add 1-2 seconds to a task while keyboard users decide which key to press.)
At a usability conference hosted by the Nielsen Norman Group this week, I decided to ask him how he gets his news, what tools he uses as a consumer and why. Tognazzini is a principal with NN/g.
In this edited interview, here’s what he said.
Quinn: How do you get your news?
Tognazzini: I get my news via Google News. I scan Google News for the headlines, then branch to articles of interest.
Always? Do you use other sources?
Tognazzini: Oh, yeah. I look at physical newspapers, particularly when I’m traveling. We get some news on television, but primarily Google News.
What if there’s a big story? Where do you look?
Tognazzini: I go to Google News. I then tend to favor either Reuters or Associated Press, then the local paper site that’s closest to where the news is, then The New York Times and The Washington Post.
What is it about Google News that attracts you?
Tognazzini: They have a new edition every 10 minutes. The home page is not festooned with advertising that fills most newspaper home pages, making downloading ponderously slow and making it difficult to find the content.
One of the wonderful things about Google is that the publications it links to cross the entire spectrum from biased sources such as Fox News and Huffington Post to mainstream publications like The Washington Post and New York Times. This constant mixing of headlines averages out to a wonderful neutrality that can keep the citizenry from drifting away from reality.
One other thing is that Google News leads me to publications I would never have otherwise encountered. Many times I have followed a link to a local publication close to an event, then spent an hour or more reading that edition as well as many back editions, finding wonderful columnists and writers of whom I’d never heard.
Google News recreates for me the experience of the out-of-town newspaper stand I would always haunt when going to downtown San Francisco. I’d look at a bunch of papers to see what was happening around the world, then leave with a few, and those few would always be papers I would never have encountered anywhere else but there.
You’ve made a career out of looking at how inviting and usable everything is around you, from light switches and faucets to keyboards and menu bars. When you sit down to read a news site, what keeps you reading and what stops you from reading?
Tognazzini: Interstitial ads that come between you and the story.
When you go to a news site, instead of getting the story, you get this giant ad that completely fills the screen. Up at the top, there’s a tiny little “x” box. If you can find it, you can click it and close it before the 20 seconds are over.
I’m sure they get a nice little piece of change from whoever buys those ads, but what I do is just hit the back button and hit one of the other links from Google News. I stop reading those publications. It’s as simple as that.
What if one of those news organizations is your client — looking for ideas to make their content most accessible, but they say, “We have to sell these ads to survive”? What is your advice to them?
Tognazzini: My advice is to find out what’s really going on with readers’ behavior. The first step is to start logging your site in such a way that you can find out what’s going on. Look at the number of people who, when they hit that interstitial ad, bail out. Those people will never see the many other ads on your site for which you might have received money. They also are far less likely to ever come back, costing you future revenue. You may discover that something that seemed like a gold mine is really a lead weight dragging you down.
Interstitial ads are not the only problem. What is your home page experience? Does it take forever to download on anything but the kinds of connections you have in your own offices? Experiment with offloading all of the creative graphics and some of the ads to the articles and see if your overall traffic and advertising revenues go up as people abandon Google News in favor of their local paper, now accessible in 10 seconds instead of 45 seconds or more.
I would love to set my hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, as my primary news source, but it is just so incredibly slow on the connections I experience when traveling, as well as being ponderous to scan because of the elaborate graphics treatment of the home page.
How about news on handheld devices?
Tognazzini: Here’s my iPhone. I probably read more news on that than even on my computer.
Using Google?
Tognazzini: Google. Absolutely. On the iPhone, it becomes triply important, because Google comes up fast and most Web sites don’t. I do want to preview what I read, before I make the investment in time of waiting for an article to come in. Speed is very important from a usability standpoint.
Do you get RSS feeds on news topics?
Tognazzini: No.
What do you think is coming next for handheld devices with news content?
Tognazzini: When The Washington Post came to my room this morning, I just put it on the table because I realized that there probably wasn’t anything in there that I hadn’t already seen. The big thing that laptops and especially handhelds have done for news is absolute immediacy.
What about the ability to provide information to someone based on where they are at the moment? Location tracking?
Tognazzini: Well, there are a lot of services that newspapers could offer.
For example, newspapers have this archive of restaurant reviews that you can’t necessarily find. But to have tie-ins between an iPhone app that can be directed to a reader’s location, with really good, detailed reviews from the newspaper — a credible review becomes very accessible and important.
Or if a person who’s out looking for a place to live could use their handheld to access information about what has happened in a neighborhood within a period of time, it could help them decide where to live.
A different way to organize news, other than just by the day a story appeared in the newspaper, would be very useful.
Bruce Tognazzini spent 14 years at Apple Computer, where he put together the company’s Human Interface Group, a team of psychologists, writers, visual people and engineers that could explain the philosophy of the Mac and how it’s used. He later led the Starfire project at Sun, which predicted the rise of the World Wide Web and helped to establish the healthcare site WebMD. He has published two books on interaction design.
