{"id":184,"date":"2014-05-23T23:52:36","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T23:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/?p=184"},"modified":"2015-02-24T13:24:57","modified_gmt":"2015-02-24T20:24:57","slug":"how-clean-design-enhances-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/how-clean-design-enhances-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"How Clean Design Enhances Attention"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve agonized over building my own websites, only to come up with horrible<\/a> designs. When it came to picking a WordPress theme for this blog, I understood something I didn\u2019t quite get as an inexperienced designer: the more shit you cram onto a page, the more distracted your readers will be. I didn\u2019t fully appreciate this until I bought a tablet, because the tablet provides a better environment for immersive reading than a PC ever has. For this reason, I chose a responsive design that has one column, focused on content, when reading from a mobile device. It\u2019s a completely different reading experience compared to a desktop. Today I\u2019m going to focus on how cleanly designed mobile apps have rescued deep reading.<\/p>\n

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I found this grumpy-codger thinkpiece<\/a> about how the Internet is destroying our attention. Keep in mind it was written in 2008, when the desktop was still king. However, it does have a point: the typical web browsing experience is attention draining. Most sites crowd their pages with flashing ads and links upon links upon links directing you to other content. Then the iPad was launched, and a million tablets and e-readers followed\u2014to rescue the novel, the \u201clongread\u201d article, and our sanity. I have read more novels in e-reader apps in the past two years than I\u2019d read at all in the past decade. In fact, I probably wouldn\u2019t have tackled all 1500+ pages of The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em> during a week-long vacation if I\u2019d had to lug around such a thick and heavy tome. Project Gutenberg has made it easy to catch up on the classics with the push of a button. I\u2019ve also filled my Kindle app with tons of contemporary fiction. I am never without something to read (so long as I charge my tablet every day).<\/p>\n

The simplicity of some tablet reader apps has also made reading articles easier than it\u2019s ever been, even compared to a physical magazine. There\u2019s elegance in the friction tablets impose when it comes to multitasking, and users are skeptical about potential split-screen functionality<\/a> being added in the near future. It\u2019s why I\u2019ve come to hate more than one column in tablet page design. It\u2019s difficult to read the content when it\u2019s reduced to half the screen: the text is smaller, there\u2019s less of it, and there\u2019s more distracting bullshit around the edges. This is why I hate those magazine-like responsive designs where you get a teeny-tiny column of content, and the other half of the page is dedicated to ads, specifically designed to make you accidentally touch them because they\u2019re always on the right side where you need to stick your thumb to flip to the next page to continue reading as the content is lightly drizzled like chocolate syrup over a big shit sundae.<\/p>\n

Tablet reading had a rocky start, as all new technology does, because too many people didn\u2019t have a clue what to do with it<\/a>. The first sin in formatting digital content is to have the same inflexibility as print. I remember downloading an epub version of the Neil Gaiman\/Dave McKean comic Signal to Noise<\/em> (from the first Humble Bundle), and the text couldn’t be resized so you could actually read it. Ironic, given the title. When I tried out the National Geographic app, it annoyed me right off the bat with not being able to flip it to portrait-mode. That is pure-strain bullshit, and anyone making a mobile app needs to have flexible design, dummy<\/em>\u00a0hammered into their brains until the message smashes through their thick skulls.<\/p>\n

The second sin is cramming in stupid shiny features no one really asked for. Dear Nat Geo, I don\u2019t want to be greeted by a lame animation of how you put the cover photo together when I open your digital magazine, which plays every time you tap the image, and distracts a first-time user from figuring out that you need to flip your finger sideways to reach the table of contents. In fact, I don\u2019t want to see your cover at all. Just start me off with the table of contents and I\u2019ll decide what\u2019s worthy of my time. Also, formatting your digital magazine so you have to scroll up-and-down and side-to-side at the random whim of the designer is idiotic horseshit. Pick one and stick to it. Better yet, let the user pick flipping or scrolling in your app and make sure your design gets the hell out of the way of their choices.<\/p>\n

The third sin is finding new, intrusive ways to wedge in ads.<\/p>\n

My sanity has been saved by clean reader apps that display garbage-free content, on a solid white background with simple in-line images and video integration. More often than not, I find myself saving articles to Pocket<\/a> (formerly Read It Later) so I can read them free of ads and other distracting bullshit. Reader apps are a handy way to isolate content from the ads. The built-in reader in iOS Safari will do in a pinch, but my reading experience has been far better on blog aggregator apps like Zite, which grab daily content from the web based on chosen topics and present them in a clean layout.\u00a0It\u2019s just you and the text. If the viewer can\u2019t sink into your content like a good book, their attention will wander. The onus is on the designer to focus on content, not the shit that makes viewers click away.<\/p>\n

P. S. To the assholes who devised code to force app store pop-ups for your shitty free game, please die in a fire. Nothing can make me refuse to visit your website faster thank kicking me out of my current app, which I was using to read your content<\/strong>, for someone else\u2019s<\/em> ads. If the banner ad company you use pulls that shit, threaten to pull their ads from your site. Do not let those jackasses kill your readership.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve agonized over building my own websites, only to come up with horrible designs. When it came to picking a WordPress theme for this blog, I understood something I didn\u2019t quite get as an inexperienced designer: the more shit you cram onto a page, the more distracted your readers will be. I didn\u2019t fully appreciate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[24,12],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","tag-rants","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":392,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}