Print has an Ending
An advantage of print over web is the simple fact of an ending.
When reading a book, you feel accomplishment with each passing chapter instead of being overwhelmed by passed hours of clicks and links.
Large amounts of time online can get frustrating. When you leave, you feel there’s so much more that has yet to be discovered. Since you can’t measure the amount of progress you’ve had on a subject, you constantly feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pages.
With a book, magazine, newspaper, etc… You have an immediate beginning and end. With every page being achieved, you’re able to put the progress in perspective of finishing. Not having this same feeling online makes reading web pages very frustrating for users.
So why bring this up? I think it’s an interface problem and I’m curious in how to solve it. One idea is to tell people how many pages are on the site and how many of those they have read so far. You could go even further and tell people how many more pages there are on this particular subject and how many they have read so far.
There’s quite a few ideas and I’d almost bet money - if this got some more attention by web developers, site retention would go way up.
Bill C Says:
That’s profound. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I just finished “Why Software Sucks”. If it was an article on the web, I would have read it for about two pages. I dislike the 1-2-3-4-5-6 interfaces on a web page, but I am ok with it on a book.