Some thoughts on a disconnect in e2's use
The Database and the current scene. How they fit together, how they fail to fit together, and how to make them fit together better.
Sometimes, well, you find yourself teaching granny to suck eggs... You know she can do it, but unless you actually tell her in writing then it's not out there in The Commons. Thus I'm coming out with another one of my tracts about the underlying way this site works, and most of you will all know this already. For those web designers amongst you in particular - sorry. The topic for today? The difference in perceptions of e2 for regular users and Guest User.
E2 has a unique structure, at the core of the site is this gradually accumulating database of writeups, these writeups pull in the google-hits which in turn pulls in Guest User. Like any website the aim should be to maximise the number of hits who become repeat readers, and then convert these repeat readers into logged in users. The gold is in elegantly converting these users into contributors. There's going to be some-sort of percentage drop off; let's call it 100%-10%-1%-0.1% for convenience, but thats a wild assumption and likely wrong.
At the moment e2contact dedicates a huge (and productive) amount of work converting the 1% to the 0.1%. These are the baby-noders people tend to get worried about, and a lot of e2's angst comes from the feeling that we are somehow being unfriendly towards them. In broader terms tho, we must try to make sure that the 1% are the sort of users who can bloom on this website. And since this is the last step in a selection process we've already winnowed down our users substantially, we have already biased our group.
Turning Google hits into repeat readers is bound to be a bigger issue, because it's selecting those who make it past the later hurdles. Here I finally start getting to the point: I think the site as seen by a new user is very different to that seen by a regular, and not in a good way. Coming here from Google you find a writeup, you follow any prominent links, then you follow the softlinks... It's likely that the next thing you do is to type random words into the search bar. All of this means that E2 to outsiders is primarily the database. Here the big names from the past are very prominent, with people like Pseudo_Intellectual carrying a weight of 1535 writeups heavy on stylised writing and clever in-jokes (sorry P_I, somehow you've become the type example for an early e2 pirate noder). Only after a little playing around do you even discover the front page, and you never encounter the catbox until you create an account. This is at odds to regular users, my e2 experience is dominated by New Writeups, Cream of the Cool, Cool User Picks and The Catbox. This is an enormous disconnect in perceptions: the average writeup age is somewhere around 2001-2004, so if Guest User falls in love with the content of the database then it's likely that the current - arguably more conservative - website may be a bit of a disappointment.
What is needed is more context on each writeup, so the different eras of e2's site history are more obvious. The fact that the database is indexed by title really doesn't help, and when united with shared nodes of different aged writeups, the time independant nature of softlinks, Guest User is being led on a wild goosechase... The obvious context is all database-based. And this problem can only get worse as the site ages - integrate your writeups may be becoming a problem.
My suggestion (and there are bound to be others equally as good) is to increase the focus on the author, putting each writeup in the context of their body of work. That way we can hook Guest User in to our best writers and immediately they are using this place more like we regulars do - TheDeadGuy once referred to e2 as a radio station for your favourite writers, tune in to their latest installment.
How do we make the author a more prominent entity? First, let's look at the current situation. To get to other writeups by an author from one node it takes a click on the author button (taking you to their homepage), followed by a click on the User Search page, then finally opening up a new tab for each separate writeup - horrible, horrible, horrible. I, personally, have never managed to work through one writer's collected works this way, and it's not for want of trying. The need for tabs in particular is incredibly clunky. On top of this, the user search is by default sorted by date, with the most recent writeups the most prominent. The most highly regarded ones aren't obvious to Guest User.
There are numerous relatively easy ways to make this better: I've suggested that we put forwards and backwards arrows on each writeup so that Guest User can page their way through your collected works. Alternatively we could put a "would you like to read more" next to the name in the header, linking directly to the User Search page (I think homepages are an acquired taste). Another thought would be to put the name of the author on Cool User Picks (node title is a really poor way to navigate). Ideally, the User Search could really do with a bit of a facelift; making it more of an advert and less of a cataloguing tool. An ambitious solution would be to show the first paragraph of a user's writeups as a thumbnail. This could use something similar to the Cream Of The Cool code. Any of you reading can probably think of other ways to do this, but anything that leads Guest User more to the author and less to an amorphous aging database is likely to increase our stickiness.
The ideal has to be internet flypaper, that catches every Google hit and then lets the best users rise to the top of the site. I realise all of this requires edev to invest their time in coding, so I only suggest this now when edev has the biggest head of steam we've ever seen. At present I hear a lot about how to make e2 more friendly, but this social backbiting about the 1%-0.1% seems, frankly, rather irrelevant when there is obvious low-hanging fruit at the 100%-10% conversion. If we want e2 to grow, we have to pull in Guest User and keep them entertained.
At the time of writing e2 has today had 593,005 hits... Mostly wasted.