Usability Report on Blogs and RSS
The Catalyst Design Group has published an interesting usability study on blogs and RSS. Not surprisingly, most people are not aware of RSS and its benefits and are confused by things like XML icons and the whole blog newspeak. The purpose of RSS is badly explained to “normal” users.
What we should ask us for Akregator: Do people grok what Akregator is good for and use it? Do they know how to add feeds conveniently and use the konq feed icon? Probably it’s far too small, unexplained and cryptic and 95% of users just ignore it.
I hope replacing the “RSS” in the konq icon and using a more verbose tooltip than “add feed to akregator” improves it at least a bit. That’s how it looks like in SVN:
Maybe we should use something even more simple like “Inform me on site updates”, whatever.