Interwebs: Page Loads As Opportunities
I had a mini-eureka moment today. I went to Google.com , something I almost never do, and noticed something simple and amazing. As the Google start page loaded I noticed that the screen was completely bare save for the Google logo, the search bar and the search and feel lucky buttons. Simple and elegant. A second or two later the rest of the page showed up: advanced search, footers, my Google tabs and account info on the top. In those page loading seconds I thought “Wow, this is really what this page is all about: search. Everything else is secondary to that.” Too obvious, right? Of course Google is about search. But the experience got me thinking about how publishers can use the rate of page load to their advantage, say as another means of highlighting what is most important on page. What if you could purposefully stagger the loading of different sections of content on a site in a meaningful manner. For example publishers might highlight the text of an article and a single ad unit by structuring a page so they load 10 seconds before all the other secondary noise on the page. That way the user gets the content they want immediately and the publisher and advertiser get more ‘intimate’ time with the user.There are some other web services that use the technique of loading up part of the page faster so that users don’t have to wait for the entire page to load up albeit for different purposes. The top part of Facebook’s live streams show up first on a page, older content loads as the user scrolls down; Daylife’s SmartGalleries load the first image and ‘frame for the photo gallery’ before the entire javascript gallery loads up (check it out here).
Still both of those examples are ways of coping with a slower page load. The eureka moment for me (that Michael Surtees of Design Notes fame helped tease out) was that the loading of a page can be used as a way of communicating something of value to the user, not just ‘avoiding pain’. Thinking of the page load as a friend instead of an annoyance and foe is powerful, especially as the speed of the web becomes more important.
Very interesting idea.
Simon, the author of this post and corresponding tumblog, is an old friend of mine from my jewish summer camp days. We’re both doing “business development” at NY start-ups. We hadn’t really hung out in a decade, but it turns out we’ve been on parallel paths all along. Give him a follow, you wont be disappointed.
