Comments on: IA for beginners: long pages work.

By: Kathleen

Kathleen — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:57:43 +0000

I’ve been told over and over that long pages don’t work. Notoriously recalcitrant, I persist in publishing them, often arcane, technical or dense material.

20-25% of my 5,000+ daily visitors spend an hour or more on site. The average visit is over 6 minutes.
’nuff said.

By: Adam Nemeth

Adam Nemeth — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:50:07 +0000

Well, it depends. As for data, yes. But reading a long _story_ 20 pages long just makes the reader tired. Web is a fast medium. No matter how long your page is, they’ll spend as much time as they think it’s worth for your content. Not a second more.

So, long pages probably work, but concise composition is still unevitable and necessary for good web experience.

By: Matt K

Matt K — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:06:33 +0000

We’re talking about articles and other information content, right? The work done to date on this topic indicates that the answer very much depends. If your visitors are looking to do some reading and have found their way to some good content then the answer is probably yes - the long page works, but only if it’s well written and clearly structured.

Good navigation, visual structure, and content make or break it. I’ve been involved in user research where the participant says “I don’t like scrolling” but what they really mean is that they don’t like struggling because the information sucks and the page is impossible to scan.

If we’re talking about something like a home page the same principles apply, but you better believe the stuff on the top is going to get clicked through first - especially when the navigation is poor and nothing stands out. They’ll click the stuff on the top first and if you’re lucky they’ll come back.

There are lots of good articles on this topic - read more than one and form your own ideas - then watch someone try to use your app/product.
Some additional reading:
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/12/26/408/http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/41/paging.htm http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article4104.asp

By: Julien Couvreur

Julien Couvreur — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:22:26 +0000

I also disapprove of articles that are broken over multiple pages for no good reason.
The good news is that can be fixed: you can write Greasemonkey scripts for the sites that you care about, which loads the next pages, extracts the body and injects it into the first page.
I’ve done that for a couple of sites (IGN, ArsTechnica, ACMQueue) and more are available on http://userscripts.org.

By: maetl

maetl — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:29:15 +0000

It also works better with keyboard scrolling - pgdn or apple+arrow keys jumps directly to the foot of a longer page without needing to scroll, which is much more effective than clicking and loading. Enabling such long pages was the whole purpose of the #fragment identifier in URLs, so this stuff goes right back to the original design of the web.

By: Victor Lombardi

Victor Lombardi — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:58:51 +0000

Amen, brother. Until navigation is faster than visually scanning, putting everything in front of the eyes is better.