Last changed 22 Oct 1997 ............... Length about 900 words (6000 bytes).
This is a WWW document by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/webdesign/gisttalk.html. You may copy it.

GIST discussion

Who: Steve Draper & Mark Dunlop

Where/when: 1pm, Friday 31 October 1997, conference room, 17 Lilybank Gardens

Title: "Entrance lobbies for web pages"

Mark Dunlop now has a minimalist web page. (Here)
(And another minimalist-ish one is: here)
(And another one that puts simple and striking looks over ease of use: here)
This is contrast to most others', e.g. Steve's. (Here)
Is Mark right? Although objections can be raised (and will be discussed), there are quite powerful rationales for his design. This is the topic for this meeting.

Some ideas are:

The task users have to do when they arrive at a web page is to decide by recognition whether this is a page they want. To support this, knowing that often they will scan many web pages, it is best to have a very small fast loading page, that can be recognised as right or wrong very fast. And this justifies using a graphic (faster to recognise). Conversely the "real" pages could be big, text only, and bookmarked by regular users.
In IR, the short summaries to support this user task are called "surrogates" e.g. the 3 line summaries AltaVista returns from each search. So Mark has decided that he should design his own document surrogate, and not let some dumb machine do it badly. Is this a general idea a) for all web documents e.g. big papers of mine b) in IR?
Following a link on the web is fundamentally slow, in contrast to say a Mac menu command. So shouldn't web link labels be very long, unlike menu command names? So should any page that points to Mark's take a copy of his entrance page and use the whole of it as a link?
Is Mark's design too minimalist? It's OK for those who know his name or face; but what about those who know his voice (from the phone)? should there be a voice sample? something that describes his accent? A statement of all the ways people might know him e.g. BCS committee member, amateur petanque player (like me).