Finding Information: Factors that improve online experiences August 11, 2008

On Idea.org, there is a recently published study focusing on factors that can improve online experiences. The authors (Sathish Menon and Michael Douma) tried to find out what kind of factors readers look for in blogposts and articles.

Some key findings:

• Easy access to complete information is key to visitor enjoyment.
• Good visual design and up-to-date information are critical.
• Visitors want information fast. Web site visitors are looking for simple, accurate, fast, and easy to navigate web sites – preferably with links to information they seek.
• Visitors want a broad range of topics. Relative to designers and organizations, visitors more strongly believe that a broad range of topics is important.
• Visitors still need handholding.
• Visitors point to the lack of breadth and depth of site content as causing an “Information Gap.” Although over 90% of visitors say that they are able to find the information they are looking for, over 50% report that there is a gap between what they are looking for and what typical web sites provide, and 60% think that a personal guide would help them navigate web sites.

So if you are a medical blogger,

• write short posts
• use microblogging services (Twitter or Friendfeed)
• cover interesting topics and help your readers in several ways:

• let them see full articles in your RSS feed (do not force them to go to your site by providing only titles in the feed)
• create collections for them about the most important posts you have ever had
• highlight short sentences that can summerize the content of an article