May 26, 2005

RSS subscription usability

Veen brings up a good point about the usabil­ity of sub­scrib­ing to RSS feeds.

With the roll­out of feeds on our paid sports site, and as we’re begin­ning to roll out feeds on AJC.com, it’s a ques­tion I’ve tried to tackle.

We did the XSL thing on ajc­sport­sPlus, but I have my wor­ries about it.

I can easily see my mother book­mark­ing that page to read head­lines, rather than get­ting all the ben­e­fits of an aggre­ga­tor. Yes, despite the fact that our trans­formed page says not to book­mark it and it does point you to our help page, I still think folks might skip past that as their eyes go into “find the con­tent I want” mode.

Though it may be jar­ring, dis­play­ing the raw XML might prompt users to hit the back button and click on the “What’s this?” link we pro­vide next to all our feeds.

That solu­tion, though, feels like you’re pur­pose­fully let­ting a child touch a hot kettle just so they’ll learn their lesson.

There are two out­comes: the child might learn to use a pot holder when reach­ing for some­thing hot and the user might click the help link or they might never touch the stove/feeds again.

Maybe instead of a sheet show­ing the con­tent and instruc­tions, the XSL should render a splashy page that would give instruc­tions for get­ting and sub­scrib­ing to aggre­ga­tors (with screen­shots or a screen­cast). It could tout the ben­e­fits of RSS — “It’s like Tivo for news” or some such.

Filed under: Journalism, Technology, Web design

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Comments

Randy Charles Morin – May 27, 2005 #

Agreed, the XSLT doesn’t really help drive subscriptions.

I cre­ated the fol­low­ing two that do a much better job.

http://​www.​kbcafe.​com/​r​s​s​/​r​s​s​2​s​m​t​p​.aspx http://​www.​kbcafe.​com/​r​s​s​/​c​h​i​c​k​l​e​t​.aspx