Is RSS Pretty?
March 29th, 2004“Now if you look at my RSS feed, it looks pretty.”
“Gina Venolia recently did some research on blog usage patterns, and found that many blog consumers never successfully make the transition to using an aggregator. One common thread in our internal discussions is that the orange XML icon is kind of geeky, and even if we get people to click on it, they often have no clue what all of that code is for. Julien Couvreur pointed out that there is no need for the RSS feed XML to look so unfriendly, and he’s been using an XSLT stylesheet to render nicely in the web browser.”
I’m on the fence with agreeing with Joshua here. Seeing the pure XML of content after clicking on the orange button scares some users. True. That’s why I always advocate for having an explanation next to the orange xml button saying something like “What’s this?” or “Learn more about RSS” with a link to a simple tutorial. Any good explanation will do. Also, I think Yahoo is also on the right track with their “add to My Yahoo” buttons.
I don’t think we need to change what users see when they click on the orange button. I just think we need to educate more on how to use it.