31DBBB Day 12: Watch a First Time Reader Use your Blog
This is Day 12 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project we are doing together in an attempt to improve our blogs and help each other become better bloggers. You can read more about it and still sign-up to participate here. Please subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay updated on the project.
Today we are going to spend some time watching a first-time reader use your blog. Thank you to all of you who participated on the first two weeks of assignments, we are gone through about half of the curriculum and are getting some good discussion back and forth as I initially hoped. Let’s keep up the effort and I hope everyone is having a good time while taking steps to improve their blogging.
- Week 1: Read about the first week of 31DBBB
- Week 2: The second week of 31DBBB
- Day 11 (Monday): Solve a Problem for your Reader
- Day 12 (Tuesday): Watch a First Time Reader Use your Blog
- Day 13 (Wednesday): Creating a Sneeze Page for your Blog
- Day 14 (Thursday): Write an Opinion Post on your Blog
- Day 15 (Friday): Leave Comments on Other Blogs
Watching a first-time reader browse your blog is one of the most effective way to gather information on what you could improve on your blog. Although it would be better if you were doing it in person with a friend, or family member who is not familiar with your site, you can also team up with fellow bloggers that you are as familiar with for this assignment.
Assignment
- Get a friend or family member who isn’t familiar with your blog. If you want to do it virtually, simply team up with another blogger who may not have visited your blog in the comments.
- Allow them to browse your blog for 5 to 10 minutes
Watch carefully how they use your blog if you are physically there:
- How do they navigate?
- Where do they click?
- What do they pause to read?
- What do they skip over?
- What areas of the blog do they seem most drawn to
After the 5 to 10 minutes of browsing, ask them the following questions:
- What were their first impressions?
- What did they first think your blog was about when they arrived at it?
- Did they find it easy to read/navigate/understand?
- What did they ‘feel’ when they first arrived at your blog?
- What suggestions do they have on how you could improve your blog?
- What questions do they have having surfed your blog?
- What words would they use to describe the design?
- What are the main things that they remember about your blog 10 minutes later?
- What suggestions do they have from a user perspective?
Once you’ve done the assignment,please come back to this post and let us know what you learned. If you are doing this virtually, feel free to accomplish this assignment in the comments! I want to see some teamwork today so get it done!
Discussion
- What benefits do see in getting the perspective of a first-time visitor?
- Do you have any tips for getting feedback from a first-time visitor?
- Did you do today’s assignment? If so, what were the most significant things you learned?
![Watch: Creepy Trailer for Slasher Pic ‘Maniac’ [NSFW]](http://www.anomalousmaterial.com/movies/wp-content/themes/yamidoo_pro/scripts/timthumb.php?src=http://www.anomalousmaterial.com/movies/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/elijah-wood-maniac-tb.jpg&w=50&h=50&zc=1)
24 Comments
This is a pretty interesting idea Castor. I often use my husband as a test subject. While he’s hugely supportive of MM’s, he’s NOT a big movie guy, and he’s not a big reader, so for him, a relatively tough audience, to view the blog I really take his thoughts into consideration. If he’s interested in looking further then I feel like I’m accomplishing something. However, my brother has no internet and hasn’t seen the new template or revamping of the site and we’re seeing The Expendables together tonight. He’s huge into movies, so I’ll have him take a peek and work this assignment out.
I had my husband do this for me a couple of weeks ago, so I didn’t have some of your great questions in hand at the time. I might have to virtually rustle someone else up. The people I know in person either already know I have a blog or I don’t want them to know I have a blog! After watching my husband navigate, I did move my blog roll down. I had it high up and the first thing he did was click over to someone else’s blog! Also, I put a decent amount of video clips on my site, but he didn’t play any of them. I think most people do though(right?). He also clicked “about me” and went into my archives a bit. This showed me that your stuff needs to be in good shape at all times.
I have my dad checking my blog, but he doesn’t read english… but he says he gets it with google translate. Most my friends only visit my blog when I tell them to LOL I don’t know 99% of my visitors personally… hmmmm.
However, I have read that most people don’t really read, so you gotta avoid huge chunks of text. And they always complaint when posts are divided by pages, because they say you’re trying to get clicks… which is probably true.
oh! maybe some of you guys can visit my blog and tell me what you find interesting and what not xD
Hi Amy, I checked out your blog for the first or second time and I actually read through the main page. I think it might help for visitors to know a bit more about your focus. Your tagline is a bit generic, but your topic seems well centered on Asian related movies, actors and topics. Or movies and entertainment through an Asian perspective, maybe? It might help to know what you’re getting into when a visitor arrives at the site. I’m planning a visual revision of my site starting in September to improve the focus of my site.
Heh, I know it seems very Asian centered… today. It’s just happens to be my favorite young Japanese actress’ bday, so I decided to post all the updates I had of her today.
It’s hard to not have a generic tagline, when sometimes we talk about design [the dj multi touch interface], commercials, music in general, greta garbo, dita von teese, star wars fan meetings, music videos, photography, plus product and film reviews xD and more.
Maybe it’s entertainment from around the world from an Asian-Latin-American perspective in English.
What I really need to do is open up my new website, with a better and more clear structure. And more people with different likes… xD
I actually like that tagline better – gives a reader a place to start. I think a tagline can be about what you’re going to write about OR about who is doing the writing.
By the way, visited your blog too. ^^
This might be a Blogger issue, but since the layout is really narrow, the content stretches all the way down for too much scrolling. A possible solution is to reduce the number of posts on your template, or create post breaks for those “continue reading” messages.
Because the layout is narrow, when you use a wide image, like the one in Hurt Locker, just place it centered instead of the right or left, otherwise you’re left with a little chunk of text on the side, which makes for difficult reading.
Your header is about 640px wide, meaning your layout is setup for monitors that were 640px x 480px… which i don’t know anyone using. I think it would be very safe to say that most users have screens with a resolution of 1024×768… so you can make your site wider by 200 or 300 pixels.
Sorry for the tech stuff. xD Hope it helps though.
Amy, Thanks! In my previous redesign there were issues with the width (yes a Blogger issue) so I narrowed it down a bit. I’ll keep that in mind for the next redesign in September. Thanks for the specific photo advice too.
Your blog template was nice. But searching for content is somehow difficult to browse. Because once I entered into your blog, I just browse each links. But still I need some more user friendly from your blog. Cheers
what were you trying to find?
The google search should be able to help, but I have noticed that sometimes I even can’t find my own content through there.
A while ago, I did a ‘guide’ page to list important stuff, but lately I haven’t find it that useful. I should modify it somehow… but how to choose what to add? I know that I should probably add the posts about Chick Flicks, Fansubs vs. Subtitles, Dubbed Films, etc.
Do you think that would help?
Yep. they somehow helped your blog readers to easily go thru with ur blog. Also, add widgets for Recent posts, recent comments and some other related widgets. So that readers will make them so comfort to look inside your blog content…
Would you guys take a look around my site too. I would love to hear some opinions from men.
I am in the process of changing my header to include the new tagline from Day 1. “Redefining The Chick Flick.”
Hi, Clarabela
I think your site seems a bit wonky on the CSS on Chrome with Win XP, as well as Firefox. You can test it out on Browser Shots.
Hi amy can you look out my blog and tell about your suggestions to update my blog.. What’s best and which one need to change, everything from your side help me to update my blog. cheers…
Well, MoviesCrunch is pretty clean. It’s got actually 2 posts, so it doesn’t stretch out the scrolling much.
Your Top10 is a little bit crowded though. With the image and the trailer. Considering you don’t have much text, you should probably just use the image or the trailer… and if you’re doing both, Maybe not use it aligned to the right or left?
If there were more text, you could align it to the right or left, and there will be enough text to fill the space before the trailer… which should be centered – if you are aligning elements not to the left, then you shouldn’t keep your YouTube embeds to the left either. It seems weird that the trailer is aligned left, and your image to the right, at the moment.
Also, move your poll above the recent posts?
thats a great idea, actually. if only us bloggers had friends we could get someone to do it…
When I started my blog, I had my brother do this exercise. I also have friends who I ask to periodically look at it and provide feedback that they may have.
When I first started my blog I had a co-worker (developer) take a look at it for design, etc. She provided excellent constructive feedback. Over the past few years I have made an effort to incorporate some of her recommendations. It may be to my benefit to have her look at it again since I have migrated to self-hosting.
This sounds interesting. For me, my friends are my first audience to give feedback about my blog. After I update a new post, I ping them to check it out. Most of the friends tell me their suggestions to me. I hope it might useful for me to develop my blog. Can any of you visit my blog, and tell me your suggestions about my blog. I think today I yet to know more about our blogging friends. What about you Castor
Me? Muahahah I’m the Morpheus of movie blogging. I don’t need any feedback!
Hahaha..Anyway you deserve it of what you said. Castor
This is gonna be a tricky one… my list of people who haven’t been to my blog through some guilt trip I’ve launched is pretty slim. Gonna see if my brother in law can offer a hand.
This is a great assignment. Unfortunately due to heavy rewriting and structural changes I’ll pass on it right now nut its great that these posts are here to be revisited later on. This is such a great task!
Okay, tried this out with a friend of my wife’s. Here’s how it went down.
When she first arrived at my blog, I noticed the top banner wasn’t displaying properly. Conclusion? Need to do more thorough testing of how it comes up in other browsers.
The first thing she clicked on was a link to our trailers page, which is located in a completely different part of the site, without an easy way back. Conclusion? Transplant our trailers page into the blog itself. Not sure how that’ll work, but we’ll see.
The next thing she clicked on was the Popular Posts banner, which was a good thing. Although the popular posts aren’t necessarily the newest posts. Conclusion? I’ll get to that.
The next thing she checked out were the top 5/8/10 lists. Conclusion? The lists are exactly as discussed early on in this workshop: an easy to digest post with a diverse amount of information. I’ll be keeping that up going forward.
As she navigated through our podcast posts, I noticed that it wasn’t clear for her how she was supposed to listen in. Conclusion? I need to make the media player widget more obvious and easy to use somehow.
Finally, after debriefing about how things went down, she explained to me that she wanted an easy way to glean the latest information posted on the blog. Conclusion? Need to create a static page, and I’ll be getting on that soon.
This was a great exercise, a real eye opener. Was really cool to watch someone navigate through the site without guidance and learn that I might have been trying to corral people when I should have been facilitating their own journey through the blog.
I wish I’d asked more questions about her experience, but I still think we both (or me anyway) got a lot out of this.
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