How NOT to change the world

Many worthy campaigning organizations have websites that are unlikely to spark the enthusiasm of casual visitors. I’m thinking of sites which provide important information about what can be done to tackle injustices in many spheres of life. Sometimes they are too much like corporate sites, sometimes they try to emulate entertainment sites (and don’t quite pull it off), and sometimes there’s just too much reading material for most people to take in.

Down below, I’ve included a section which notes how intellectual discourse shrinks the audience. It’s usually independent activist sites which make the mistake of trying to change the world with essays on theory and philosophy.

If campaigning websites don’t mind remaining ineffectual, one thing to do is tell visitors they must download lengthy PDF documents to discover the aims and policies. Employees in large, bureaucratic organizations are in the habit of reading documents in PDF format, but research shows that most of the online public hate them. And personally, I find inadvertent PDF downloads as offensive as junk mail. Visitors should always be warned when a link leads to a PDF.

Where’s the research? The leading expert on web usability is Jakob Nielsen, and his company — the Nielsen Norman Group — has done more in-depth research than you can access from any other source. Jakob Nielsen’s site, useit.com, has more than 300 articles on every aspect of web usability. He recommends new visitors start here: Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design, and the remaining 300+ articles are here.

He says “A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read.” That’s the way I feel about it too. Nielsen puts a short summary at the top of each page so that visitors will know whether to continue reading. If I visit a page via a search engine and see so much text that the browser scrollbar starts diminishing to a speck at the top of the screen, I hit the “Back” button straight away. There are usually plenty more sites to choose from on the search results page. Only people who have a compelling reason to visit the website of a particular organization are going to put up with information overload which gets in the way of finding what they’re looking for. A press release from a leading provider of website tracking services reports that 62% of visitors to websites view just one or two pages and 75% visit no more than 3 pages.

Flash^® animations are not a good idea

Sometimes activist sites and sites of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) attempt to jazz-up the “user experience” with Flash® animations. Moving eye-candy and other gimmicks may be appropriate for entertainment websites, but they are obstructive to conveying a serious message. In any case, unless I plan to visit an entertainment website, I keep the Flash® plugin turned OFF in my web browser. I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of other people do likewise (it’s a one-click menu option in Opera) — because of Flash® banner ads that clutter commercial sites now. They take longer to download than normal images. Broadband connections aren’t available in all parts of the world.

Intellectual discourse shrinks the audience

There are some people who happily use the internet to track down an endless supply of highly intellectual reading material. Whatever conclusions they may come to about pressing social and political issues, there aren’t enough of them to change the world. Campaigners for social change should be careful to avoid catering to intellectuals alone. Articles filled with intellectual discourse could appear in a subsection of the site, but if that’s the only kind of material on offer, skeptical or undecided members of the public are unlikely to wade through it.

How can I be so sure? I found a perfect example when I did a Google search to see if anyone else had chosen the same title for a web article before posting this one. Benjamin R. Barber, author of “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole,” is the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland. I found references to a paper he contributed to a quarterly academic journal on democratic theory: Constellations. The journal is published by The New School for Social Research in New York, and the article title was “How Not to Change the World: Karl Marx’s Manifesto.”

I couldn’t find any extracts or quotes from the article online, so I visited the Constellations website. The journal’s statement of Scope & Aims says:

“Constellations fosters creative thinking in philosophy, politics, social theory, and law. The journal aims to help expand the global possibilities for radical politics and social criticism in the coming period.”

Academic articles on social theory and philosophy won’t grab the attention of the majority of citizens. To recommend reading material of this type is likely to shrink your audience considerably. Just take a look at the visitor numbers recorded by the hit counter on the journal’s home page. That’s the popularity level of an academic journal which discusses all theory, all the time.

Writing for the Web

Once again, Jakob Nielsen has some helpful advice in his summary of research into how users read on the web. Well worth reading for anyone who wants to get their ideas across to the widest possible audience. Talented advertising copywriters are paid phenomenally high salaries because their ability to make an impact in a few short words is a very precious skill. And political leaders have long known the value of a memorable soundbite.
 

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