By Laura Carsten, 17 May 2001
The Internet has emerged as an important source of news and information for the consumer over the last decade. Traditional broadcast media have been forced to find new ways to compete with the explosion of information available through the World Wide Web. For many newspapers and magazines, this has meant creating a website that complements or mirrors their print product. With the increased public interest in science and technology (Ankney et al. 2001), this has been a special challenge for publications focusing on science news.
Two popular print magazines that also offer online versions, New Scientist and Science News, are prime examples of the ways in which print science media has adapted for the web. An analysis of these sites using information from literature on hypertext theory and writing for the web suggest that this adaptation has been largely successful.
In 1993, Redish described a process she called satisficing, which refers to a mechanism readers use to cope with overwhelming amounts of information. In this situation, readers must make choices about where to focus their time and energy, often skimming or only grasping main points before moving on to the next demand. Although Reddish was referring to the work environment, this concept can be extended to free time, as well, where the non-captive reader may quickly lose interest.
Print media are well aware of this phenomenon. The traditional journalistic style calls for inverted pyramid style of reporting, based on the assumption that a reader may lose interest by the end of the piece and thus must be fed the important details first. To avoid losing readers, print media also use strategies such as engaging imagery, conflict, and human interest (Nelkin 1995), as well as using illustrations to visually break up white space. However, stories are still presented in long columns of text that may continue for pages.
On the Internet, presenting text in this fashion may lead to the quick loss of an audience (Nielsen 2000). The tendency for a non-captive reader to lose interest is intensified on the web, where competing sites are only a click away (Farkas and Farkas, 2001, Nielsen 2000). This presents special challenges for creating compelling, appealing hypertext content. Emerging research (Haas 1995, Strain and Berry 1996, Nielsen 2000, Farkas and Farkas 2001) has resulted in guidelines for converting text to hypertext, both in terms of structure and content. Should existing print media simply be thrown onto the web with no modification? The consensus is a resounding no, yet for publications such as Science News and New Scientist, as well as many others, this creates a dilemma.
On the Internet, presenting text in this fashion may lead to the quick loss of an audience (Nielsen 2000). The tendency for a non-captive reader to lose interest is intensified on the web, where competing sites are only a click away (Farkas and Farkas, 2001, Nielsen 2000). This presents special challenges for creating compelling, appealing hypertext content.
Emerging research (Haas 1995, Strain and Berry 1996, Nielsen 2000, Farkas and Farkas 2001) has resulted in guidelines for converting text to hypertext, both in terms of structure and content. Should existing print media simply be thrown onto the web with no modification? The consensus is a resounding no, yet for publications such as Science News and New Scientist, as well as many others, this creates a dilemma.
The question becomes how to preserve the style, rigor, content, and coherence of the magazine while still creating an appealing product for online consumption. In addition to this tension, designers also must choose whether or not to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet that are not possible in print, such as linking, use of audio and animated elements, and video.
Finally, there is the challenge of boundaries-with print, there is a cover and a binding, a well-defined beginning and end. With hypertext, this is not the case. This can lead to disorientation and decentralization for the reader (Keep et al. 1995).
Both New Scientist and Science News have chosen to address these challenges in similar ways. First of all, both magazines present a table of contents identical to the print version on the homepage, perhaps to preserve continuity with the print version, but they also follow each feature story headline with a short summary of the article. A reader wanting to learn more can click on the summary to be taken to the full story.
This blend of strategies allows the magazines to preserve their print style while adapting for the restlessness of the web. Presenting the contents in a traditional format has the advantage of providing readers with a familiar schema. Strain and Berry (1996) suggest that mental models and pre-existing schema provide a framework of understanding for readers. Busy readers may not take the time to understand unfamiliar systems that are not encompassed by pre-existing schema. Thus, providing this familiarity could lead to ease of navigation and increase "stickiness," or the ability to hold viewers, for a website.
The magazines also preserve the full content of their print stories on their websites, a strategy that has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, a reader who chooses to view content through the web is not faced with a tradeoff between convenience and quality. This may be a satisfying alternative for an individual that wants the full content but prefers the accessibility of the website, or for a consumer already familiar with the print product.
The two sites differ in their navigation strategies. Science News provides a navigation bar leading to the homepage, searchable archives, a help page, and a search engine at both the top and the bottom of every page. From pages featuring stories, there is a list of links on the left that provide access only to the special, online features not available in the printed version.
New Scientist, on the other hand, provides a navigation bar only at the top of each page, leading to home, a job search function for scientists, subscription information, and a site search engine. Links to all feature stories of the week are available from every page. The structure of New Scientist is more web-like, with freedom to navigate between pages readily available from every story, while Science News relies on a more traditional hierarchical structure, where access to many features is only available from the homepage, although this is mitigated somewhat by the presence of the search engine function.
In addition to these differences, New Scientist has chosen to use a closed site, with links only connecting to other areas of the site, while Science News provides access to outside links. New Scientist's strategy may be more effective in holding an audience to their site, but Science News's strategy provides users with a way to easily access additional information on topics, which may appeal to many users.
However, if the magazines' goals include increasing readership through the website, preserving full content may pose a problem. According to Nielsen (2000), many readers prefer reading print to reading from a computer screen. Thus, he has advocated cutting converted text by an astounding 50 percent. Failure to cut text at all forces the reader to either scroll down the page or to click on buttons taking them to a new page where the story continues.
Both magazines have chosen the scrolling approach. Both Farkas and Farkas (2001) and Nielsen (2000) recommend that web designers avoid long scrolling pages. Nielsen found that users often scan content and will rarely scroll down to get the complete story, although this study was carried out in the mid 1990's, and users tolerance for scrolling may have increased since then.
However, even though users must scroll to read the full page, both websites chunk information into small, bite sized paragraphs, and fill only about two-thirds of the page with text, two strategies that make the text more scannable and palatable (Farkas and Farkas 2001, Nielsen 2000). The strategy of filling only two-thirds of the page with primary text leaves ample room for navigation elements, which go a long way to defining the boundaries of the online magazine and preventing the disorientation that users may experience in a poorly designed site (Farkas and Farkas 2001).
Although both magazines have done an admirable job of adapting their print product for the web in some ways, they have not fully developed their sites to reflect the capabilities of the web. Science News offers a link for subscribers wishing to receive the magazine in an audio format, yet the website does not utilize any audio elements. Neither site provides interactive illustrations or diagrams, streaming video, or flash.
Because many of these elements require longer downloading time than straight text, this may have been a conscious decision to simplify the site. Yet the explanation of complex scientific concepts could certainly benefit from some of these technologies in some instances.
Both sites have gone beyond traditional print offerings in some ways, though. Science News provides special, extended treatment of topics with links to past stories that would not be feasible to include in the print version. It also offers a list of references and sources about the story topics that limited print space would make impossible to include.
New Scientist provides professional support for scientists in the forms of a job search feature. Instead of leafing through the many pages of job advertisements offered in the print version, an individual can search by keyword, area of science, type of job (e.g. academia vs. industry), or location of job. These features may encourage some to visit these sites even if they are not print subscribers, thus increasing the readership of the magazines.
New technologies and styles of presenting information will surely continue to arise as time goes on, presenting information designers with new choices and tradeoffs. New navigation schemas may emerge, replacing traditional modes and forcing websites to adapt.
In the present, however, both New Scientist and Science News have made effective choices for adapting their print counterparts for the web. The similarities and differences in their choices illustrate the diverse ways that information designers can successfully approach their task. As bandwidth and connection speeds continue to increase, perhaps designers of science news sites will make choices that more fully utilize the capabilities of the web.
Ankney, Raymond, Richard Moore, & Patricia Heilman, 2001. Newspaper coverage of medicine: a survey of editors and cardiac surgeons. AMWA Journal 16(1):23-32.
Farkas, David, & Jean Farkas, 2001. Website design: theories and principles. Unpublished manuscript. 262 pp.
Haas, Stephanie, 1995. Quotations in scholarly text: converting existing documents to hypertext. Computers and the Humanities 28:165-175.
Keep, Christopher, Tim McLaughlin, & Robin Parmar, 1995. The Electronic Labyrinth. www.eserver.org/elab.
Nelkin, D., 1995. Selling Science. W.H. Freeman & Co., New York. 217 pp.
Nielsen, Jakob, 2000. Designing Web Usability. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis. 419 pp.
Redish, Janice, 1993. Understanding readers. Pp.15-41 in: Techniques for Technical Communication, eds. Carol Barnum and Saul Carliner, Macmillian, NewYork.
Strain, Helen, & Pauline Berry, 1996. Better page design for the World Wide Web. Online & CDRom Review 20(5):227-238.