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  1. 1
    Karl Craig-West

    I’m interested in knowing where the study concluding that serif fonts are easier to read than sans serif fonts comes from.
    If anyone could give me some pointers I’d be grateful.
    Thanks,
    karl

  2. 2
    James Windrow

    Everything and the kitchen sink.

    That is the philosophy that has carried the creation of the Canyon Ranch site since 1997. Unfortunately, that has fueled a site that resembles a multi-color lego city. In some cases I think the average person would have to possess ESP to figure out the location of information that is buried so deep and so inconsistent its not unheard of for people to think they have seen Elvis during the search.

    One of the basic fundamentals related to service marketing is that information is critical. Services (surgery, massage, consulting, etc), unlike physical products (car, house, computer, etc), usually can not be held, touched or evaluated through sight. When a doctor recommends surgery how do you evaluate ahead of time the quality of workmanship you can expect? Clearly you cant hold the completed surgery in your hands and make your determination then. No. Your only option is to gather information that will help you to make an educated assumption as to the level of service you will recieve. In this particular case that would be medical references from educational institutions, from past patients, other doctors, etc.

    All future expectations are built upon past successes.

    So in an industry where information is so critical for helping people evaluate the end product how do you balance information overload with site useability?

    Presenting information in a simple, logical and intuitative manner has been my guiding light for the past 4 years. But now Im facing a paradox. Many times I have told my design and development team to make most information on the site (80+ %) accessible within two clicks of the home page. Unfortunately, in this case that would lead to webpages of epic length, which can be self defeating and confusing.

    Does anyone know of recent studies or reports on this topic? Has any reseach been conducted to suggest what the optimal depth for a reasonably complex site should be? Is 5 clicks to buried to find information? How about 10 clicks? Perhaps preconcieved notions of site complexity are ambigious and in reality the answer is related to how organized the layout is so that depth of site is irrelevant if your information organization and architecture are intuitive?

    So I guess all this rambling boils down to the need for some research to support or discredit my beliefs. If you know of any and can point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it.

    Thanks in advance.

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