[Sigia-l] Company geographical location, where to display it on the screen

[Juan Ruiz]

>Think of the bottom of many pages
>as the end of an "act," if you will. That is not the time to a)
introduce
>major new characters b) take the plot in any direction not set up,
often to
>an exaggerated extent, by the act that just finished c) distract the
>"reader" from anything but What Happens Next.

Very valid points, Troy. I will use this analogy for future
conversations here in my office.

But, when would a user would like to change geographical location of the
website? Right at the beginning or at the end of the act? For placing
this simple feature, most UX designers will say: "it depends". I know it
depends on the context of the site; it would be different for an
e-commerce site, company site, news site and/or an informational.

Thanks for your thoughts

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Troy Winfrey
Sent: Thursday, 26 July 2007 9:44 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Company geographical location,where to display it on
the screen

>
> After reading the article "blasting the myth of the fold"
> http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of, the author
> mentions how some websites are putting useful features at the bottom
of
> the page, based on the research that users DO scroll down to the
bottom
> of the page when good content is available.


The article is a little fuzzy on business requirements. Obviously, if
your
page looks like a newspaper (ahem, AOL), people will read it all the way
down if they read it because that's what you do with a newspaper. People
will also scroll to "finish" a picture, of someone's bits or something
else.
Nothing new there.

The real problem is the unexamined mental model of a "web page" in a
post-literate era. Don't think of it as newspaper layout, in which what
are
essentially Platonic shapes (with icky "content" glued to them, but who
cares) are moved around a larger shape, just like the
scissors-and-pastepot
of the high school yearbook. Instead, it's more like a narrative...a
difficult thing for most current or ex-graphic designers to
conceptualize,
given the shy relationship to the written word that many of them have,
but
there are some basics we could all follow. Think of the bottom of many
pages
as the end of an "act," if you will. That is not the time to a)
introduce
major new characters b) take the plot in any direction not set up, often
to
an exaggerated extent, by the act that just finished c) distract the
"reader" from anything but What Happens Next.

The problem is not generalizations about form. The problem is that so
many designers have inadequate knowledge of the incredibly rich
conceptualizations, models, and theories of forms that the West has laid
down for the past 2500 years. In turn, this lack of understanding of
such
things as genre, modes of representation, and aesthetic theory (not how
it
looks, but how it works), leads to a great deal of wasted breath and
even
more silliness. Imagine if some "fiction guru" said that all novels had
to
be in rhyming quatrains, with a formal Prologue addressing either a Muse
or
the work's sponsor. Or, conversely, if a "poetry guru" suggested that
the
best thing to do with a short poem was to put a chapter or two of prose
in
the middle...to make it "sticky," perhaps.
------------
IA Summit 2008: "Experiencing Information" 
April 10-14, 2008, Miami, Florida

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