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.
on July 27th, 2005 at 8:20 am
I think the RSS icon on web pages should change to something more user understable like “track this” or something that gives a clue about what it does.
on October 5th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
Here’s my usability issue.
I can maneuver among feeds and articles. But I can’t easily scroll the article I am currently reading.
How can I do that? The arrow down moves just one line at a time. What about one page at a time?
on February 22nd, 2006 at 3:35 am
Just found Akregator - on slackware 10.2 .. I didnt know what a blog was so rss had no chance. A persistent Unix problem only talk to geeks and experts dont get me wrong I love Slackware been playing with it since release 3.5 But programers are not the best communicators outside of writing great programs.
Need more ordinary mortals
Regards Barry
on February 22nd, 2006 at 8:16 am
I don’t get the message of your comment, do you criticize Slackware, RSS or Akregator? Or all together?
on March 30th, 2007 at 8:34 am
I think that a lot of the ignorance of RSS has to do with both user laziness and the tendency of those writing the definitions to write only for the academic crowd. I did not know about RSS a few weeks ago, but I took the trouble to do a google search and now I know a little bit about it. The information that I found, however, was not practical to the end user. It was mostly written in a format that is useful only to IT professionals. I did not understand how RSS is relevant to me until I tried akregator just to see what it will do. I found this to be a lot more useful than reading a bunch of technocratic trash. From my own practical experience with RSS, I learned a lot more about the use of RSS than from the stuff that I read. I find that it does not take much knowledge for anyone to click on an RSS icon that is on a website and cut and paste the resulting URL into their feed agregator or allowing your browser to use its built in RSS support to display another page. One thing that I don’t like is that it is not as easy to exclusively browse for RSS enabled sites as it is for regular websites, making it time consuming to find RSS feeds. I wish that someone would invent a program that would allow someone to browse for RSS feeds in the same way that you can browse for traditional Web sites. I also hope that the search engines will be updated to make it easier to search for RSS feeds.