[Sigia-l] Next article in Opinion (10 of 14)

[Manu Sharma]

e:
> The spread and persistence of the meme suggests something is working for 
> them.

I would not jump to that conclusion. Design patterns such as these spread 
for a number of reasons. It's primarily because a prominent site, a leader 
in its field, introduces it and it becomes a 'best practice' overnight. 
Others find the novel approach interesting and since it's on a highly 
successful site, they have no hesitation implementing it as it is on their 
own site without paying any attention to the context in or its usefulness.

Amazon's bottom of the page links are an example of such a pattern. It was 
originally an efficient use of space that was usually wasted by most sites. 
Users payed attention to those lnks and it worked for Amazon initially. But 
as similar bottom of the page links appeared on a million other sites in an 
year, it soon became another space (after the banner at top and the 
navigation bar at left containing gazillion links) that was ignored by 
users. Amazon eventually dropped the links.

Whether it actually works or not usually has little to do with the speard of 
these memes.

> Do you use them?

I've noticed such links recently appearing on a few news sites as well but 
since most of the browsing we do is goal directed (rather than lazy 
browsing) I consider them pointless. When I'm reading a news report I'm 
interested in that particular topic. While reading a story about a plane 
crash, for example, I have no interest in the next story in the 'world 
section'.

This would only be useful to those who visit a particular news site everyday 
and browse it as we browse the newspaper in the morning (moving from one 
page/section to another and generally scanning through each story). But even 
in that case, no one really has time to click a link and wait through a page 
refresh to see if it's relevant. Such users (who I suspect make up a small 
minority) would prefer a link to the section/category homepage than a link 
to a random story, so they can choose to read about a story that's relevant 
to them.

That said, the "next page" link at the bottom of a blog's main page is 
something I wish every blog had. Particularly useful when a blog you're 
visiting for the first time has only a few posts on the main page or one 
that updates quite frequently such as Engadget and Gizmodo, both of which 
use this type of link. It's a pain to have to go to the archives to read 
recent posts not on the main page.

Another interesting approach for blogs is to include links to a bunch of 
recent posts at the bottom of the main page. Johnathan Boutelle who recently 
adopted it on his blog calls it "Mullet" style blog layout:

http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2005/08/mulletstyle_blo.html

Manu.