Posting has been slow the last few days as we finished up our Blog Usability study and then dealt with the aftermath. Quite frankly, we’re thrilled with the level of interest the report has generated. We particularly liked Bloglines’ Cathy Thompson commenting on the Blogspotting pickup:

While sobering for those of us trying to court mainstream users, I had to laugh at the reactions of people in mid-realization they were looking at a blog. Sounded like comments from someone who had stepped in something icky.

For the most part, people seem to agree that blog design conventions will need to be reconsidered and recalibrated for a less sophisticated (and larger) audience. We think the time is right for this reconsideration.

Many of the usability problems we observed during our study seem obvious and easy to to fix. But this is really typical of usability testing. It is so often the case that, when our clients see their customers (or potential customers) struggling to complete a task during a test, they shake their heads in disbelief that they hadn’t anticipated the problem. Much of what is revealed in tests like this is “hidden in plain sight.” Easy to notice once you witness someone else’s difficulty. We always warn clients who are new to usability testing that they should not expect to be surprised by the results — that much of what they will learn may seem intuitive and self-evident. But it requires a usability test to shed light on these problems in the first place, and to understand how to fix them.

In our opinion (and this appears to be validated by the study and the public reaction to the results), this is a crucial moment for the design of blogs. The very notion of an RSS feed — how one consumes it, navigates it, and understands its value in comparison with the variety of content experiences currently available online — is pretty much opaque to the general public. Insert the feed into a broader interface (like the BusinessWeek site), and it becomes even more difficult to sort out. This needs to change. The value of the technology — the why of it — needs to be more evident to a broader base of users or RSS will go the way of Push Technology, Usenet, and other potentially powerful, but fundamentally inaccessible, technologies.

Watch this space for more. We just need to catch our breath. And thanks to all who noticed our report and weighed in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 5:21 pm and is filed under General, Usability, Usability Testing, Diary of a Business Blog, Blog usability.