Charged with the responsibility of providing some copy concerning the potential publication style our web feature is to use, a few difficult decisions came to the fore almost immediately.
The relatively lengthy process we went through to both come up with an idea and then refine it into the project we have tentatively called ‘Internet Killed the Video Star’ left a clear and conflicting division between the publication style we would like to use and the user base we are attempting to target. As mentioned in our recent presentation, www.Screenhub.com.au embodies the intergrity of written content and continuing relevance we seek to achieve as well as succesfully appealing to the appropriate industry-centric target audience we would like to connect with. However, its design and aesthetics struggle to transcend the typically clunky and relatively stark academic style by which many of these industry magazines are bound. This brought us to the question, which put succinctly is, why has Screenhub elected to use such a style?
As in Screenhub, the crux can be found in this same disparity between the information we intended to collate versus the aesthetic we would ideally like to achieve and the fact that at surface level these intentions are seemingly at odds. As simply suggested in Lawrence's (2006) summation of universal rules of 'good' web design, "design and content should reflect the needs of the audience and purpose of the site", Screenhub needs none of the bells and whistles of other tech sites because it is foremost concerned with the quality and accessibility of the content being consumed there. In other words, it would seem that more academic or ‘harder-edged’ news being delivered would most likely miss the point if it tried to generate the graphical explosion and glossy nerd-hype that sites like Mashable and Engadget use so well.
However, we live in a world where it is well known that there exists a deficit of attention and a surplus of online conent. Readers skim discerningly through huge amounts text whilst in reality only stopping to consider the bare minimum of information they are presented with (if it is needed, on average a mere 28% of the text on each page). So how to communicate our relatively weighty subject matter whilst retaining some semblance of beauty that web surfers demand?
To answer that and our design conflict, we are going to try and improve on Screenhub's site through implenting the philosophy that sites like www.techradar.com employs so effectively. Our feature will sustain user attention through a virtually administered Ritalin....
Not quite, but as a close second, we figure the best way to improve on Screenhub's daggy approach to the web is to use a littany of multimedia which will remain transparent in putting our data first (not as a distraction) but rather allowing us to unpack relatively dense packages of information in a shorter amount of time. Videos, illustrated graphs and all the associated mediums of delivery mean that unlike Screenhub, online education will no longer be a bitter pill to swallow and that we might suppress the omnipresent urge to make that one click back to Facebook. One must look no further than the way techradar reports on a huge number of tech-centric stories but keeps its feed clean yet crisp and enviably modern to see this in its all its white-backgrounded glory. This is not only a means of communication that looks good but speaks in a language that our target audience especially can understand. Indeed, for most in the screen industry (including myself), days are spent combating the bastardly user interfaces of NLE's and perfecting our the ever-fleeting visual language - so, it is our hypothesis that creating a resource on streaming to the extend that we desire will be hugely useful if we can get rid of mountains of information and, in essence, do the readers work for them.
