BlogI recently carried out some user testing on the Channel 4 news site, looking at the site in general, but also the new blog  area – where Jon Snow (one of the lead news presenters) is blogging. We wanted to find out how people reacted to blogs and the plugins that you can get for them.Here are some of my main takeaways.

Try to avoid using Blog standard labels

The people we tested were daily web users, who were super fans of news and news sites. However, when we asked them what “Blogroll” was, they didn’t know or understand the concept. The label was too far into the real of industry jargon. I know what it means, as do all blog owners and regular blog users. However, people who only read blog posts from a link they clicked don’t understand it.

We’re now looking at ways to re-label our blogroll – “Recommended Blogs” or “Recommended Sites” are the current favourites, with “Blogs we like” still hanging on.

Comments should be in context

Many blog sites like to put the most recent comments made on their homepage. I like this idea, but our testing showed that comments out of context are more confusing than helpful. People like to see comments and discussions in context, so they know what the conversation is about.

What is a Tag Cloud?

None of the 10 participants that we tested knew about tags or what a tag cloud is. When asked what he thought Tags meant, he said:

Isn’t a tag one of those things that criminals wear around their ankles when released from jail?

We laughed, but it does show that labels that we, as internet professionals, understand clearly are unknown to the general online population. Finding a clearer label for tags is proving more difficult, answers on a postcard please! Maybe a “What’s a tag?” link is enough?

Interestingly, when we explained what tags where and how a tag cloud worked, our participants really liked the concept and said that it would be really useful.

Twitter – Ugh!

A groan is exactly what we got from one participant when she saw a twitter plugin on a page. About 40% or participants had heard of Twitter, mainly from the recent press that it’s been getting here in the UK (thanks to Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross of the BBC), but have no idea what it is.

This is a harder one. We want to make the News site as open to new technology and social tools as possible, but we don’t want to alienate or confuse our users. Keep it in or take it out? That’s a much harder question to answer. I have a Twitter plugin on blobfisk.com, but then the people reading this blog will either Tweet or be fully aware as to what Twitter is.

The orange box with RSS in it

Only 1 of our 10 participants knew what RSS is and used an RSS aggregator; a surprising number of people still wanted an email digest of some sort, and a number of people wanted nothing at all – they would come directly to the site for headlines etc.

One humorous anecdote about labelling: Jon Snow’s blog is called Snowblog. We asked participants what they thought the link on the news homepage to the Snowblog was. 70% of them thought that it was a blog about the recent cold weather and snow the UK has been having!

Sometimes you just need to use a descripting label and not try to be too quirky!