Digital Design Blog

Smorgasfeed: Designing an RSS Inspired Future

It’s come up again, with my current client, as it has with almost every project I’ve worked on: How do you put all the important information on the homepage and have it be prominent?

This time I think we have an answer that will work for most sites, is easy to implement, and solves a lot of the problems of the past. We’re calling it the Smorgasfeed.

Business – and information – moves too fast today to be able to architect a homepage that will cover everything that needs to be covered. Customers expect to get the latest, most relevant information immediately, from inside the company, as soon as anybody on the inside knows anything. The Black Box approach – keeping mum, then putting out a formal press release – just won’t keep customers’ thirst slaked.

And businesses are becoming a lot more agile as well. Marketplaces shift, competition springs up from nowhere, technology advances exponentially. To work in the current landscape, companies require a more flexible approach to getting the message out than a modular showcase that can only highlight a few key points.

I started looking back to my old projects, and kept seeing the standard Latest News section at the bottom of the homepage. Typically, we’d put four or five headlines on the page, and have a more news link to the press section of the site. All these links had the same 11-point weight, and basically were there as a catch-all just-in-case-we-need-it box. While users would look at them, they didn’t really pop out as important.

Jump forward to now: Everybody seems to be doing nothing but scanning news links. Whether it’s their Facebook news feed (which people seem obsessed with refreshing every few minutes), a customtized RSS reader, a news aggregator like alltop, a blog (like this one), Digg, or even their credit card account detail, sites today are putting long lists of links up that are relevant and timely. And users are getting information from these link-lists in two ways: skimming them to get an overall sense of what’s going on, and then clicking in to those that seem to hold specific useful details.

So how can we take current user behaviors, client needs, and current technology, and put them together into a solution that works? Enter the Smorgasfeed. It’s a basic news feed we’re al familiar with, amped up, styled for scannability, and categorized to make it easier for companies to manage and users to read.

Here’s the recipe to make it work:

Extend the list – users want a complete picture of everything going on in your organization. So give them as much as you can. Studies have shown that users have no problems scrolling, and bandwidth is big enough that a few extra kb of ascii text isn’t going to slow down your site. So we can amp up the number of links to 25 plus. Just make sure the start of the list sits above the fold, and users will scroll down to read the rest.

Add hierarchy – People can skim if they can parse out levels of information. And companies know that some posts are more important than others. Our emails can come in with those high priority exclamation points and red flags. The style feed can do the same, with a little visualization. Quick updates can display in 10pt, while a new product release might get a 14pt bold treatment with a thumbnail image. Small icons can act as bulletpoints to both show breakes between entries and give users a clue as to what type of entry this is.

Categorize – Your core business isn’t changing every day, so there’s a number of categories that you can add right off the bat. Product companies might need categories for new products, product support and product updates; services firms might categorize by case studies and recent wins. Everybody needs a general category for news and press. Setting up categories allows users to parse information better, and to view the feed as vital info rather than as boilerplate for-press-only content.

Link smart – Not every entry needs a link, and neither does every word in the entry. A one-line entry with no links works wonderfully as a micro press-release. Other entries might point users to a few different places by linking the pressing phrases in the entry.

Think like an editor – There’s so much great information circulating around any company, and some people have lots to share with coworkers around the halls. It’s not about becoming a corporate gossip site. But think of writing for the feed the way a journalist would – find a source of information, get the facts, add an angle, get it out quickly. And publish often to keep readers coming back.

Make the admin tools simple – You don’t necessarily need a half-million-dollar CMS to publish news on a site. There’s a whole host of open-source publishing platforms (like Wordpress, on which this blog was built) that are simple to set up and adapt. And a strong developer (working with an IA) could create a custom coded feed. It ought to be as easy to push news to your site as it is to add a blog entry on myspace. If it isn’t, the marketing team is just going to be crippled by bloated technology.

Syndicate – add that RSS button for people who want to take your content with them. ‘Nuff said.

With a Smorgasfeed in place, a huge weight can be taken of the other zones of the homepage that need to do the heavy lifting of promoting your brand, setting up your core value proposition, and introducing new visitors to the full suite of your offerings. The standard homepage turf wars between lines of business can end as well; everybody can get full weight and attention within the feed. And when it’s executed right, users will be reading.