Sunday, June 28, 2009
Effortless Headlines
Firefox has built in a feed to the BBC News for several versions, with the name Headlines in the bookmarks toolbar. I use it frequently to get a quick overview of world news. Since the bookmark is driven by RSS, the titles of the articles become the links in the toolbar. The links are short, succinct, easy to scan, and make it simple to get a quick overview of breaking news.
Writing well, doing so on a short time schedule, and with an economy of words is hard work. Distilling complex issues into scannable, readable bits takes effort. When it is done well, the effort expended behind the scenes isn’t apparent until you think about it, or until someone points it out.
Jakob Nielsen noticed, and pointed it out on Alertbox:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html
He views the craftsmanship of the BBC News headlines from the usability point of view. And reflecting on my use of them in the Firefox RSS feed, I see that usability should lead to an almost effortless use of the object. I should be so lucky to even approach that level.
