Communicating Target Knowledge about Web Feeds

One of the major themes of our research here at UIE is a user’s level of knowledge: their current knowledge of the world and the target knowledge necessary to use a design. As Jared explains so well in What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?, a major goal of design is to align current and target knowledge. It is no accident that this is our most-read article.

When we put together Brain Sparks, we needed to know what the current knowledge was regarding blogs and feeds. Were people familiar with blogs? Did they know what feeds are? Did they recognize that they could automatically get updates of the site whenever we publish something new? In short, how many people already possessed the target knowledge, and how many people were still new to this whole phenomenon?

Of course, someone having the knowledge that they can use feeds to keep track of blogs doesn’t mean that they’re going to choose to do so. Their personal choice is what we’re after, to communicate the topic well enough so they can make the decision of whether or not it is right for them.

In our initial research, which involved talking to people and doing a sort of literature review about how other sites were handling the situation, we realized that there was little consensus about how to handle the notion of feeds. Some people had no idea what they were. Some had heard of them, but didn’t know how they might help. Others were comfortable with them, but called them something else. After reading a lot of different viewpoints, our conceptions of feeds changed, too. We realized that there was barely even a language for talking about them, let alone a standardized way of doing things.

We hope the results of our efforts, the Subscribe page, is hard to miss. On the right hand side of this blog you’ll notice a link to it enclosed in a box titled “Subscribe to Brain Sparks”. This box contains some text that we wrote to satisfy varying levels of knowledge about feeds. If you don’t know what a feed is, you can find out by clicking “What is this?”. If you already know what a feed is, you can simply grab the feed from the link.

Judging from the uptake of our feed so far, we’re happy with how this is working. However, there are still things we can tweak. What happens if someone who doesn’t know about feeds clicks on the feed link and views the raw XML content there? What if someone associates the word “subscribe” with something they have to pay for? What if someone is determined to subscribe to our Atom feed instead of our RSS feed because they like that format better? What if someone reads the subscribe page and it just doesn’t help them?

We’ll be dealing with these questions over time, as we learn more about the current levels of blogging and feed knowledge of the growing Brain Sparks community. If you’ve seen something that works, we would love to hear about it.