The brief presentation from Xinlin Zhao on overall webpage length was really interesting.She talked about how Sina.com,the largest web news portal,intentionally creates a huge page length of 5 screens(1024*768) to attract Chinese web surfers,which is much longer than Yahoo China's and the Google China's extremely simple interface.
Do surfers like complexity in China?Not really.But the large amount of content visually presented on Sina website does help trigger interests and keep people stay longer.
On the other hand,Google stands for another optimal mode of news reading-efficient searching, if the user knows what he wants.
So what if a "Sina Toolbar" for the browser?it would make perfect sense for me if I can have such a toolbar that helps me easily switch between the 2 optimal news reading modes.
I am sceptical about the claim that large amounts of information on the same page helps trigger interest - that's not what we are finding out in our own research. Sina is making a lot of assumptions without any qualitative data directly from users.
Dense pages might make people stay longer because it's simply longer to find what they are looking for.
Sina might have the largest number of users simply because of the content - not how it's organized. It is possible that a less cluttered and distracting layout may increase user satisfaction. But it's not like people had choice. If they want to exclusive content that is on Sina, they have to fight the interface.
Posted by: Chinese User Researcher | April 23, 2006 at 11:18 PM
"Sina might have the largest number of users simply because of the content - not how it's organized",I like the argument.I'm not sure if Sina is making assumptions here though.
Posted by: Wei | April 26, 2006 at 01:23 AM