Week Two: Lupton "Text" | Robinson

Apparently, when we were in our pre-pre-teens, Xanga captivated thousands of angsty middle schoolers when it emerged on the blogging landscape. I missed this phase and only recently discovered the website as part of a project for an IST class last semester. Its base of users has matured and the site now appeals to a young adult, still-hormonal demographic.

Xanga hosts blogs, photoblogs, message boards and social networking profiles, making it a unique composite of Blogger, Myspace and Facebook. It’s an uncensored outlet for opinion, creativity and gossip. It obviously represents a website reliant on user-contributed content. Except for the excessive use of emoticons and discussion of trivial issues, it’s kind of sick. In theory.

Xanga is perhaps, the most poorly designed website I have ever had the misfortune of visiting (and I’ve seen some pretty gnarly spam in my days). I think online content should have this one design rule in common with print media, specifically newspapers: there should be some sort of focus on the page-- a headline or photograph that guides our line of vision along the page.

This is Generation X. We’re lazy. You need to literally show us where to look first.

Lupton seems to agree. She says on page 75, “In our much-fabled era of information overload, a person can still process only one message at a time. This brute fact of cognition is the secret behind magic tricks: sleights of hand occur while the attention of the audience is drawn elsewhere.”

The Xanga site is a mess of disorganized content. Ironically, there is greater than 50% white space. Still, the information presented on each page is not cohesive. Xanga’s greatest disadvantage is its (lack of) ability to entice new users. On the Home page alone, you can access Featured Weblogs, Top Blogs, Recent Blogs, Blogrings, Metros, Profiles, Themes, Extra Credit and Ideas.

What the heck do all those things mean? Half of them sound identical. It's confusing for a first time visitor.

The site needs to understand the flaw of its target generation- our underdeveloped multitasking skills and lack of attention span. Not to entirely dismiss creativity and abstract design, more than ever websites and other "mediums of media" need to maintain structure to ease the viewing experience of the user.

-Melia Robinson