Category: Psychology

Why do website publishers alienate users with so much clutter?

My friend @HarshadOak recently complained on twitter:

Think content websites need 2 look at delivering only the content that’s been explicitly requested by the user & nothing else

He was, like most of us, unhappy with all the clutter that you find on a typical website these days. There are ads, links to other posts, links to other websites, and a whole bunch of things other than the content that the user requested. The question is, if all the users hate this so much, why are the websites doing this? Don’t they know that they’re alienating their own users/fans?

The answer is simple: most of the users don’t care about this issue as much as they think they do.

I’ll explain.

I learnt this lesson the hard way in the early days of @meetumeetu‘s website wogma. Having views similar to Harshad, I kept pressing for a clean website with minimal advertising. And as meetu asked for advice from experienced folks, the advice she kept getting was that the ads needed to be more prominent. And when we (meetu and I both) pointed out that this would alienate the loyal readers, we got this surprising advice:

If putting more prominent ads really alienates readers, then, as soon as you enable these ads on the website, your traffic should see dip. So, turn on the ads, see if there is a dip, and if there is one, then you can turn off the ads.

This seemed like a reasonable, scientific mechanism of testing the issue one way or the other, and we turned on ads.

And by now, you’ll have guessed what happened. There was no difference in the traffic.

The basic truth is this:

If you have good quality content, then the readers are willing to put up with all the clutter on the website. That is the price they pay for the free content.

But, Harshad points out:

even apart from ads, there tends to be so much content that the user hasn’t requested for

That’s simply because the web publisher wants you to stay on the site for longer. Hence you’ll see links to related posts, and other more interesting sections of the website. The game is to try to increase your page views per visit, since in most cases page view are directly proportional to ad revenue.

But what about this objection:

a clean site with revenues coming from other sources like events, paid content, etc. sounds doable

Yes, and no. I’ll respond to each separately:

  • Paid Content: In some ways, this is worse than ads and other clutter. It dilutes the brand and the content, and it irritates the readers even more than clutter. Increasing the ads and clutter rarely results in irate emails from users, but often content by guest bloggers does (and I am not even talking about paid content here).
  • Events: Is possible in cases of “local” sites, but not possible where the readership is global and the per-city density of readers is not high enough.
  • Etc: In general, trying to do any of the other things will distract from the main goal of most publishers – that of creating great content. This is not a tradeoff that everybody is willing to make.

So clutter is here to stay.

Are mobile sites a solution for this? This discussion started off with this tweet by Harshad:

That people r increasingly pointing to m.__ version of articles is IMHO a vote for clean interfaces & against the current web clutter

Make no mistake – as people start using the m.xxx sites more and more, publishers will find a way put ads and clutter there to. It just hasn’t become a big problem yet.

Here is a final quote to close out this article:

If you’re consuming something, and you are not paying for it, then you are the product…

In the world of (free) websites, the advertisers are the customers, you (the readers) are the product being sold, and the actual content is the marketing.

Why teenagers rebel, act stupid, and why this is a good thing

Teenagers, as a rule, are rebellious, don’t listen to their parents, do stupid, reckless, dangerous things, and are generally a huge pain for parents to deal with. An article in the National Geographic (subscription required, unauthorized PDF here), based on recent research into brain functioning, explains why all of this happens, and more importantly, explains why this is actually good for the teenager (as long as one of the reckless things does not kill him/her).

The article (PDF) is long, and parts are rather boring, but some parts, especially on the second page, are quite insightful.

I’ll summarize with very broad, simplistic strokes:

  • Yes, teenagers do take more dangerous risks than most other age groups
  • They do understand the dangers involved (so you telling them “Don’t you know what could happen?” is not particularly useful)
  • The main difference between teenagers and others is that they value the rewards (gained from taking the risks) much more than adults
  • Teenagers take more risks in the company of their friends/peers. In other words, they value “social rewards” and “peer recognition” quite a lot – much more so than adults
  • In general, this is evolution’s way of encouraging teenagers to learn new things, explore new opportunities, to boldly go where they haven’t gone before. This prepares them for leaving their parents’ home and going out into the world on their own
  • They prefer the company of young people. Parents, teenagers don’t what you as friends, they want their friends as friends. (As explained previously, they are wired to get excited about new and unknown things, and parents are neither new, nor unknown, nor exciting.) Evolutionarily speaking, this is the teenagers investing in their future rather than their past or present
  • To help, parents should “engage and guide their teens with a light but steady hand, staying connected but allowing independence.” While the teenagers should obviously benefit from your experience (and they often do – but a little later than you would like), their primary instinct is to learn from their own mistakes. Let them.

I am not the parent of a teenager, so I have no idea what I’m talking about. But I’m good at summarizing long articles into pithy blog posts.

You should probably read the full article.

Positive psychology exercises improve students’ outlook & behavior in school

This article, reports that making school students go through positive psychology exercises helps them get a better impression of school in general, improves their behavior in classroom, and a bunch of other good stuff.

For example, one exercise in the positive psychology asked students to list 3 good things that happened to them each day for a week – then the follow-up questions asked what the event meant to them and what can increase the likelihood of this happening again (kind of connecting the dots for the students).

…

The net result: positive thinking and resiliency training improved students' school outlook and engagement, improved classroom behavior and cooperation, resulted in more self-control, and more empathy. Not bad!

That's not all – think about this:

students who believed that intelligence was a fixed entity were more likely to show no improvement in their math achievement from 7th to 8th grade, more likely to withdraw or cheat, and less likely to demonstrate mastery-reactions to setbacks. Not surprisingly, the students who believed intelligence could be 'grown' – were more likely to persevere, show resiliency behaviors to setbacks, and improve performance.

See full article.

(Via: http://twitter.com/sandygautam)

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