Sully Syed

UX Movement – Why headlines attract more user attention than images

I feel obligated to repost this invaluable bit of knowledge from the excellent UX Movement website.

UX Movement – Why Headlines Attract More User Attention Than Images

When websites show content, they’ll usually use a headline and image. Headline and image quality is important in getting the user’s attention. However, the headline will always get the most attention no matter what. Here’s why.

Look at this image. How relevant is it to you? What is the context behind the image? One could make guesses all day, but the fact is that nobody knows for sure.

Now look at this headline. How relevant is it to you? What is the context behind the headline? You know what the context is immediately after reading it.

You can easily visualize the image with the headline alone. But you can’t make out the headline with the image alone. Users won’t understand the image without the headline. But users will still understand the headline without the image.

With the headline and image put together, users get the full picture. They get both the story context and the emotion.

When users see both together, they will naturally pay more attention to the headline because it has the context and details of a story that they can relate to. Users are looking for information, and a headline gives them more information than an image. However, the image can appeal to users’ emotions more. And that can reinforce the headline and give users the extra boost to click-through. Both are important, but the headline is most important.

Placement & Visual Weight

How can you apply this newfound insight to the way you design content? Since headlines attract more attention than images, you’ll want to place your headline before your image. This way users can immediately get to the headline without having to go through the image.

Putting the image first wastes an extra visual fixation that doesn’t give users any useful information.

The image is more meaningful to users after they understand the context from the headline first.

Another thing is to make sure that your image doesn’t have more visual weight than your headline. When an image is too large, users can easily get distracted. This slows them down from their task of getting information. To avoid this, balance the weight between your headlines and images, and let your headline do most of the talking.

When your image is louder than your headline, users waste their time staring at the image.

Replicated Research

If you’re still not convinced of the claim through objective reasoning, take a look at Jakob Nielson and the Poynter Institute’s research. Their studies “used different methodologies, tested different users and different sites, had different goals, and were conducted at very different stages of the growth of the Web” and they all concluded the same results. In Jakob’s own words:

When different people keep finding the same results year by year, it is time to take the findings seriously and to base Web design on the data and not on wishful thinking.

The results are in and the time to treat headlines with more respect is now. You may love looking at your image, but the user is looking at your headline.

Sully Syed

Why the Apple iPhone isn’t manufactured in the United States of America

Today the New York Times has a long article that essentially investigates why Apple and other hardware companies manufacture their wares abroad. The pat answer of “because it’s cheaper” is certainly accurate, but the piece also touches upon the reasons of a lack of worker flexibility, a lack of an appropriately skilled population, uneven support via subsidies from government, and a supply chain that just isn’t available in North America anymore.

New York Times – Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

…

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products.

But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

…

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

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Sully Syed

What if middle-class jobs disappear?

I don’t believe this piece offers us new insight on the turmoil in labour markets today, but I think it does a good job of summarizing the why’s and touching on possible outcomes. One interesting note I’ve read before and again here: Holders of undergraduate degrees had their wages fall more (by percentage) than even those with only a high school diploma. That says something about the type of job displacement occurring.

The American – What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?

…

There are two widely circulated narratives to explain what is going on. The Keynesian narrative is that there has been a major drop in aggregate demand. According to this narrative, the slump can be largely cured by using monetary and fiscal stimulus.

The main anti-Keynesian narrative is that businesses are suffering from uncertainty and over-regulation. According to this narrative, the slump can be cured by having the government commit to and follow a more hands-off approach.

I want to suggest a third interpretation. Without ruling out a role for aggregate demand or for the regulatory environment, I wish to suggest that structural change is an important factor in the current rate of high unemployment. The economy is in a state of transition, in which the middle-class jobs that emerged after World War II have begun to decline.

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Sully Syed

Leadership secrets of Kim Jong Il: The infantilization of North Korea

One of the questions I’ve seen being asked today as a result of Kim Jong Il’s death this Saturday was, “Why would you only show footage of a bunch of crying people. Sure, crying is fine, but aren’t you going to have some people talking the leaders up and saying some words of praise? How does showing endless tears make you remember your leader more?”

My answer to this is that showing footage of North Koreans in severe emotional distress is specifically done in order to reinforce the infantilization of the North Korean populace. A key tenet of the North Korean propaganda machine is to portray the now deceased Dear Leader, and the State, as the ultimate father figure. This isn’t my own analysis but the work of a number of others:

The Atlantic – Mother of All Mothers

Kim Il Sung’s title Eobeoi Suryeong means not “Fatherly Leader”—a common rendering that encourages Martin to exaggerate the influence of Confucianism on the personality cult—but “Parent Leader,” the most feminine title the regime could get away with. As the country’s visual arts make clear, Kim was more a mother to his people than a stern Confucian patriarch: he is still shown as soft-cheeked and solicitous, holding weeping adults to his expansive bosom, bending down to tie a young soldier’s bootlaces, or letting giddy children clamber over him.

The tradition continues under Kim Jong Il, who has been called “more of a mother than all the mothers in the world.” His military-first policy may come with the title of general, but reports of his endless tour of army bases focus squarely on his fussy concern for the troops’ health and comfort. The international ridicule of his appearance is thus as unfair as it is tedious. Anyone who has seen a crowd of Korean mothers waiting outside an examination hall will have no difficulty recognizing Kim’s drab parka and drooping shoulders, or the long-suffering face under the pillow-swept perm: this is a mother with no time to think of herself.

When it comes to the Workers’ Party, the symbolism is even more explicit, as in this recent propaganda poem:

Ah, Korean Workers’ Party, at whose
breast only
My life begins and ends
Be I buried in the ground or strewn
to the wind
I remain your son, and again return to
your breast!
Entrusting my body to your
affectionate gaze,
Your loving outstretched hand,
I cry out forever in the voice of a child,
Mother! I can’t live without Mother!

It’s easy to imagine what Carl Jung would have made of all this, and he would have been right. Whereas Father Stalin set out to instill revolutionary consciousness into the masses (to make them grow up, in other words), North Korea’s Mother Regime appeals to the emotions of a systematically infantilized people. Although the propaganda may seem absurd at a remove, it speaks more forcefully to the psyche than anything European communism could come up with. As a result, North Korea’s political culture has weathered the economic collapse so well that even refugees remain loyal to the memory of Kim Il Sung.

…

It would appear that Kim knows just enough. The border with China remains so porous that even children often sneak back and forth, and yet no more than three or four percent of the population has chosen to flee for good. The regime obviously did the smart thing by publicly acknowledging the food shortage and then blaming it on American sanctions, instead of pretending there was no food shortage at all, as Stalin used to do.

The Dear Leader has also deftly exploited the tradition according to which Koreans care for their parents in old age: the masses are told that it is their job to feed him, not the other way around, and his famed diet of “whatever the troops are eating” is routinely invoked to shame everyone into working harder. Never has a dictator been such an object of pity to his people, or such a powerful source of guilt. In 2003 North Korean cheerleaders, living it up on a rare visit to a sports event in the South, responded to a rain-soaked picture of Kim by bursting into a hysterical lament that baffled their hosts.

…

Kim must also be aware that the infantilization of the people has come at a price. Away from Pyongyang’s carefully monitored tourist sites, North Korea is a much more raucous place than any dictator could be comfortable with. “One surprising thing,” Michael Breen writes in Kim Jong Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader (2004), “surprising because you expect robots, is … how frequently fights break out.” According to refugees, even women fight out their differences, and young female teachers are said to hit children the hardest.

This lack of restraint is a problem for many North Koreans trying to adjust to life in the South. Social workers complain that the refugees pick fights with strangers, and storm off jobs on the first day. “I’d have thought they’d be better at controlling themselves, coming from a socialist system,” is a common lament.

Sully Syed

Street style (rebel edition)

A Libyan rebel fighter smokes a cigarette next to an improvised multiple rocket launcher in the back of a pickup truck, as the rebels prepare to make an advance, in the desert on the outskirts of Ajdabiya, Libya, on Thursday, April 14, 2011. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

— In Focus – 2011: The Year in Photos, Part 1 of 3

Sully Syed

The touch-sensitive Etre FIVEPOINT Gloves

I caught a glimpse of Etre’s FIVEPOINT gloves on The GQ Eye and ended up purchasing a pair of Oxford Blue with Pearl tips in large. Delivery to Canada took ten days; the total damage was $67 CDN. A little pricy, sure, but for someone who is forever checking his phone while waiting at one frozen bus stand after another, these are invaluable.

Sully Syed

Rev. Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre

This is “Rolling Stone’s 1979 story piecing together what happened after the tragedy masterminded by Rev. Jim Jones”. It’s an amazing, disturbing read to any of us too young to have heard live coverage of the event.

Rolling Stone – In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Guyana After the Jonestown Massacre

The others were already in Guyana. Stuck in the Miami airport, through no fault of my own, I paced. I was a journalist, a ghoul, with a desire to go where no sane man would wish to go. A smiling woman with large, syrupy eyes tried to pin a candy cane on my shirt. She explained that the Hare Krishnas were feeding people all over the world, and she had this record album and a book and a magazine – “Like, it’s rully ecstatic” – and would I like to cough up a donation.

“Doesn’t this Jonestown stuff make you wonder about yourself?” I asked.

“What?” She looked up at me in shock.

“Selfless commitment,” I began.

“It’s the oldest… ”

“They killed the babies first,” I said.

“… religion in the world. We have… ”

“Potassium cyanide.”

“… members in all… ”

“Dead,” I said. “Men, women, children, old, young, black, white… ”

Her eyes glazed over and she turned from me, walking rapidly in the general direction of the United Airlines ticketing desk. I followed along after her, the way so many of them had hounded my steps over the years in airports all over America.

“They were people who couldn’t look into themselves,” I insisted. “Good people. People who fed the hungry. Who helped others. And now they’re lying out there in that goddamn jungle… ”

She stepped up her pace.

“… swollen. Grotesque. Nothing more than thirty or forty tons of rotting meat.”

She ran from me, her bag full of magazines and albums thumping against her hip. I felt both ashamed and full of fierce, brutal joy. There were a dozen of them at least, between concourse A and concourse H, and I got every one. All you had to do was “Jonestown” them and they fled like rats.

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Sully Syed

Outputting MySQL results to a CSV file without OUTFILE access

The MySQL client’s -e (or –execute=) flag allows you to specify a query to be run at the command line, which can then be output back to a local file:

$ mysql -h server.com -u username -p -D database -e "SELECT user_id FROM users ORDER BY user_id" > output.tsv

Note that by default this will output a tab-separated value file (TSV), not a comma-separated value (CSV) file.

Sully Syed

The Jane Jacobs theory of “import replacement”

In previous days I’ve argued that having a strong industrial/manufacturing base isn’t as important to a nation as it once was. But lately I’ve wondered if a loss of that base has greater implications than we think. I’m not a Jacobs devotee like many urban-minded Torontonians are, but I did think that this summation of her theory of “import replacement” is a very good explanation for why we may want manufacturing to stick around.

The Millions – Fifty Years On: Jane Jacobs and the Rebirth of New York

Why did a city like New York recover when a city like Detroit, which had a more durable industrial base, fell into blight and decay? The answer, Jacobs argues in The Economy of Cities, turns on the ability of a city’s inhabitants to innovate. Cities grow, she says, through a process she calls “import replacement.” This occurs when local tradesmen produce for themselves the goods and services they had previously been importing and then use the skills learned from this local production to create new products, which they can then export in great bulk.

Detroit, she notes, began as a port for shipping flour across the Great Lakes. Soon, local manufacturers were building their own steamships to make the lake crossings and got so good at it they began making ocean-going ships for use in other cities. This not only put money into local coffers, but supported the dozens of local engine-parts makers Henry Ford drew upon when he founded the Ford Motor Company.

But here’s the rub: the auto industry was so successful that once Ford arrived at his greatest innovation, the assembly line, the industry so dominated Detroit’s economy that there was no local market for further innovation, and, as Jacobs points out, it was only a matter of time before another city – in this case, cities in Japan – improved upon Ford’s ideas and made better, cheaper cars.

The Economy of Cities came out four years before the gas crisis that set Detroit’s long tailspin in motion, but it eerily predicts the dilemma the city faces today, in which a moribund auto industry, out-innovated by foreign competitors, had to be bailed out by the U.S. taxpayer to avoid collapse.

Like Detroit, New York began as a port city, but in New York’s case a principal byproduct of its shipping trade was a robust banking industry, which survived the city’s manufacturing collapse. Even as New York was begging for a bailout from the federal government in the mid-1970s, young hotshots like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, many of them children and grandchildren of immigrants who had filled the ghettos earlier in the century, were inventing new ways to own and finance large companies. Think of all the financial innovations of the last thirty years: junk bonds, hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, asset-backed securities, credit derivatives, subprime mortgage markets, and on and on.

Yes, bankers are evil, and, yes, the banking industry required a federal bailout even larger than that of the auto industry’s, but like it or not, New York is the safest large city in America, with a vital private sector and a buoyant real estate market, largely because the living, breathing organism we call Wall Street has spent the last thirty years innovating its way out of obsolescence.

Sully Syed

Street style (August 1944)

In France, an American officer and a French Resistance fighter are seen engaged in a street battle with German occupation forces during the days of liberation, August 1944, in an unknown city. (AP Photo)

— In Focus – World War II: The Allied Invasion of Europe