This question was sent in to us by Shel Holtz who discussed our Blog Usability Study in his podcast this week:

Nick, one of our listeners on the “For Immediate Release” podcast, where Neville Hobson and I reported on the study, asked the following question. If you can answer, I’d like to report on it for Monday’s show:

“My son, Nathan, noticed that the comment on page 8 of the report about the participants being visibly surprised when they found out it
was a blog did not go far by telling us what the surprise meant.
Were the participants surprised positively or negatively? This is an important part of the resuslts as it goes to preconceived ideas about blogging.”

Variations of this question have come up in other coverage /discussion of the study, so I thought I would post my response to Shel and his listeners. The implications of the answer go beyond blog design (which was the main thrust of the study), but are directly relevant to the question of the user experience of blogs and blog posts overall.

I think the main point of the observation was to highlight the fact that although “the word is out” about blogs, this does not necessarily translate to the ability to recognize what a blog is when one is encountered. An interesting side-effect of this phenomenon was that participants had a vague feeling that the journalistic integrity / credibility of a blog was different from what might be expected from, say, an article on the core BusinessWeek site. So, when they realized they were actually looking at a blog post, their feeling about what they were seeing shifted from their initial impression (when they thought they were reading BusinessWeek).

So, I suppose, from the point of view of preconceived notions, we might say that the people we tested still seemed to be struggling with the question of how they should view a blog post as opposed to an article or, presumably, a post on a message board. It’s a familiar dilemma — whether (and how much) you can trust what you are seeing (or buying) on the Internet. Many people have responded to our study by saying that it doesn’t actually matter whether people know they are on a blog or not. Strictly speaking this is true — the “name” of the thing doesn’t really matter. But if the name implies that the information presented should be evaluated in a particular way, then the name is actually essential to maintaining transparency and building trust.

The continuing engagement with the results of our study is really gratifying. Watch for a post next week that highlights some other reactions.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 11:21 am and is filed under General, Usability Testing, Diary of a Business Blog, Blog usability.