Re: Atom Info Proposal

["Dave Winer" <dwiner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dare, I agree that user testing here would help answer a lot of the
questions.

Jason, thanks for the thoughtful response, no sarcasm.

I'd add that these days people have learned to read fast, to skim, which has
the upside that people can wade through spam-filled inboxes, and even make
sense out of 4000-plus listings on weblogs.com, but means that it's hard to
communicate subtle thoughts. At best you can hope that people who click on a
link will let their eyes wander around a bit before hitting the Back button.
Any concept that requires a user to actually read and comprehend the text on
the page is going to get limited adoption. I wish it were otherwise, I've
seen flamewars start based on misunderstandings stemming from this kind of
reading, but it's a fact of the Web in 2003.

There is a workable idea in here, but it involves (like many of the workable
ideas) a centralized server. I don't know anyone who everyone trusts to run
such a server, so my personal guess is that the current state of the art is
the best we can hope for. While I respect you for trying Jason, I don't
think this is going to make a difference for users or for developers. But
that's just my opinion.

Dave





----- Original Message -----
From: "Dare Obasanjo" <kpako@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Danny Ayers" <danny666@xxxxxxxxxxx>; "Dave Winer"
<dwiner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "Jason Shellen" <shellen@xxxxxxxxxx>;
<atom-syntax@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 11:28 AM
Subject: RE: Atom Info Proposal


> --- Danny Ayers <danny666@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > I would suggest in this case doing some actual
> > user testing. Put
> > > a real user
> > > in front of a few websites, some with the
> > white-on-orange buttons some
> > > without and see who gets confused, and ask them to
> > explain (the
> > > ones who got
> > > confused).
> >
> > What are you expecting the users to do/understand?
>
> Never heard of a usability study? Throw some people at
> different versions of a website that uses various
> mechanisms to show people how they can subscribe and
> see which is the most intuitive. The XML button is
> probably less so than Jason's proposal since it at
> least will point to a URL which would be a starting
> point.
>
> On the other hand, for people who were already savvy
> with syndication they'd prefer something like the
> feed:// URI than a prettified XML page.
>
>
>
> =====
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