RSS usability sucks
At the Blog Business Summit yesterday we discovered just how bad RSS usability sucks. Molly Holzschalg was on stage with me and visited a blog and was trying to find its RSS feed. She couldn’t find it. Why? Cause there’s no consistency in this industry on how to subscribe.
Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe” or “feed” or “web feed.”
Even others, like many Blogger sites, don’t have any icon or word with a link at all. For those you’ve gotta know to simply add “atom.xml” onto the end of the URL. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.
And then there’s sites like Dare Obasanjo’s. He’s a geek. Works at MSN. But look at the right side of his blog. He has four DIFFERENT icons for RSS. One for Yahoo. One for MSN. One for Bloglines. One for Newsgator.
Oh, I bet Jakob Nielsen is screaming right about now.
Whenever I hit problems like this I ask myself “what would Jeffrey Zeldman do?” Or WWJZD for short. :-)
Why Jeffrey? He’s still leading the Web design movement forward and is my favorite writer and speaker on the topic.
I find his minimalistic answer unsatisfying. He puts a text link in very small type at the bottom of his page.
My advice? Stick with the orange XML icon. Why? It sticks out. If the page Molly was trying to deal with yesterday had one of those she would have found it instantly. The BBC’s answer is actually pretty good too. They went with an Orange RSS button and next to it have a link to “What is RSS.”
In fact, I think that’s really the best answer: “just do what the BBC does.”
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October 30th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
Scoble, Zeldman has a text link in his sidebar. The text link at the bottom of the page is for validating his RSS, CSS, etc. When one clicks on “RSS Feeds” Zeldman gives a short page explaining what it is and how to use it.
October 30th, 2005 at 9:21 pm
Apple’s Safari automatically detects if there is RSS links on your page and posts an RSS icon in the url bar.
Doesn’t this seem like the logical place for RSS annoucement?!?! Even with a friendly orange icon on the webpage, you still have to search for it.
Plus, the web browser is already decoding every line of html, etc. So, why not just have the browser detect it?!?!
I imagine that a problem exists when multiple RSS feed links appear on the same page; however, I doubt this is very common — it hasn’t been for me, in fact, I have never had a problem and a subscribe to way-too-many blog feeds.
October 30th, 2005 at 9:22 pm
This is already a solved problem. Within the next year or so, every modern web browser will have feed autodiscovery and this will be a moot discussion.
At best you’re suggesting stopgap solutions which will likely be irrelvant when IE 7 ships.
October 30th, 2005 at 9:29 pm
Most RSS readers will locate the feed if you just provide them with the blog’s URL. (at least if the blog system is clever enough to provide an “alternate” link tag with the “type” attribute set to “application/rss+xml”)
The icon style isn’t really a problem, but there is another problem related to the feed. Maybe hard to believe, but not every visitor knows what RSS is. If such a user clicks the feed link, he will get the raw XML in his face. Not exactly user friendly. The feed should have a corresponding XML stylesheet providing a user-friendly page when the visitor clicks the feed link. It works with any decent browser and could display a brief tutorial on RSS and feed readers. Some blog systems provides this automagically, so does some third-party tools like Feedburner.
October 30th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
Safari sniffs out the rss on the home page and displays it in blue rectangle on the address line at the far right. Then just clicking on that blue rss rectangle the rss is automatically placed in the default rss reader in this case for me its called Newsfire. Then a simple return adds that feed to my reader. Just that simple. Click and return. Done!
October 30th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
If you are using an aggregator, you can almost certainly just ask it to subscribe to the main blog page - in which case it will do an auto-discovery and either subscribe or offer choices.
October 30th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
use bloglines and livelines extension. preview feed if you are not sure.
October 30th, 2005 at 10:56 pm
I don’t know why the icons are needed, with IE7 having a built in RSS auto discovery built in, what is the point?
October 30th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
I have all the logos on my blog. Why? Because the vast majority of those that use RSS don’t event know it. I use the generic XML logo for the RSS feed plus the ‘My MSN’ and ‘MY Yahoo’ icons for the vast majority of RSS subscribers that see the syndicated world as a ‘my’ application.
This is a problem though and NOT solved as some suggest: saying IE7 will fix it is not the solution.
October 31st, 2005 at 12:05 am
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) [Oz version of the BBC) does this quite well aswell. Here is there page describing what the XML icons etc mean: http://www.abc.net.au/news/services/default.htm .
October 31st, 2005 at 12:18 am
Safari has the best solution yet with the auto-detection. Nice to see IE7 picking up on that. And by picking up, I mean copying the interface completely. Firefox and Opera should follow suit. It really is quite intuitive.
October 31st, 2005 at 12:59 am
The orange XML icon is outmoded and makes no sense. I’ve debated this with Dave W. over e-mail and he’s just plain wrong on this one.
The orange XML icon doesn’t work for the following reasons:
1. Users shouldn’t need to know what XML is- many of them will never understand that.
2. The icon won’t make sense in many locales (don’t cite the Chinese People’s Daily- very lame example).
3. Since the orange XML icon doesn’t actually help the user subscribe, it is at best an incomplete solution.
I like Dare’s solution for having each “one-click” subscription option on his page. We need to have one-click subscriptions working consistently and a better way than the orange icon to identify where to click. If we do that, then we’ll have something useful.
October 31st, 2005 at 1:12 am
I think the underlying point is getting lost here and we’re nitpicking about feed icons again (how many times have we had this discussion?). The point of this post is that RSS usability sucks. It’s not just feed discovery, which as Dare points out is going to become, if it’s not already, a moot point (although I’m curious to see how the autodiscovery things deal with multiple RSS links on a page, javascript links, and other idiosyncrasies). What about trackbacks, viewing/posting comments from an aggregator, unified identity, blogs with only partial content in the description tag (*cough* SCOBLE *cough*), spam, archive naviagation, searching. We can rave about our various browsers autodiscovery, or our aggregators cool features, or our nifty orange feed icons until the cows come home. But on the whole, RSS usability *still sucks*! So what are we gonna do about it? Wait for Microsoft to proprietize it? Cause that’s why big companies proprietize things, because the community agreed upon standards suck (and if the standard itself doesn’t suck, then the documentation does).
Don’t get me wrong, I like RSS/ATOM/syndycation/community standards, I’m just making a point.
-Paul
October 31st, 2005 at 1:17 am
This is kind of confusing, considering your opinion on the IE rss icon proposals a few weeks ago…
I definitely agree though, RSS could use a usability boost, but I don’t think that icons, in whatever shape or form are going to solve it.
The way I see it, it takes quite a bit for people to see the benefits of rss. Rss aggregators are too fragmented at this point. I wonder what it will take to make rss apple simple. Maybe some ‘love’ from MS.
October 31st, 2005 at 1:48 am
I disagree with the use of the orange XML button. I think letters XML should be replaced with a more general “Subscribe”. That button should take you to page with all of the sites subscriptions options(email, rss), as well as XML buttons with a description of RSS/XML feeds and a suggested preferred method to read them(google reader or bloglines, on my site). If you want, offer a simple link on the front page, right next to the Subscribe button that links powerusers automatically to the XML link.
The only problem with this method is that it takes a lot of effort that most web projects aren’t likely to be willing to go through.
October 31st, 2005 at 1:50 am
To Dare Obasanjo, Stefan, Tetra et al,
Yes, most browsers and readers will have auto-discovery built in, but that’s not all RSS feeds are used for. What if you want to add the feed to Google Reader or netvibes? The point of having an easy-to-find icon or link is that you have a direct way to pick out the link without the need for special software.
As for Zeldman’s site, yeah there is a link in the sidebar, but I couldn’t find it for ages, and the fact that Robert couldn’t find it either is an example of exactly why we need the easy-to-find icon.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:14 am
Could we stop talking about “RSS” or “XML” and speak in terms that normal people can be expected to understand?
October 31st, 2005 at 2:32 am
Scoble, I took a look at Molly’s blog and yours and I’ve gotta to say that it’s much easier to subscribe to her’s than yours.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20051030180645
October 31st, 2005 at 2:40 am
Maybe a button with the word FEED will do. :)
October 31st, 2005 at 2:50 am
Jeremy: do you call your DVD player a “device that plays movies on physical round-disk-shaped media?” Why not?
October 31st, 2005 at 2:51 am
Randy: I wasn’t complaining about Molly’s blog. We were on another blog site when we got stuck while demonstrating RSS at the Blog Business Summit. Sorry for not making that clear.
October 31st, 2005 at 4:36 am
A VCR isn’t a “VHS player” is it? Is your “web browser” actually a “HTML navigator” or a “HTTP communicator”?
See, you cam come up with examples that do and don’t suport your point. But why must we make the acronym stew even thicker? Where will this insanity stop?
This ia about subscribeing to web sites. Period. Plain and simple.
October 31st, 2005 at 6:37 am
I think the biggest usability issue with RSS feeds ins’t “how do I figure out the URL”, but “what do I do with the URL”. Clicking on the link - which is what my mom would do - doesn’t work. At best you get a page of XML, which looks like junk to my Mom.
The best thing right now is that most readers will “auto discover” the feed URL, given the website URL. So you can drag the URL from the browser location field into the reader’s location field, and poof, you’re subscribed. That works with SharpReader most of the time.
However the better thing would be if clicking on the link accomplished this. The MIME type of an RSS feed should cause the browser to launch your RSS reader. Or maybe we need a different transport indicator, like rss://domain/url instead of http://domain/url, so that the browser knows what to do when a feed link is clicked.
I totally agree that the usability of feed discover and subscription is a big reason why RSS feeds are not used widely by more people.
October 31st, 2005 at 8:37 am
Robert we had a great discussion on my site a few weeks ago following Dave Winer’s suggestion of a Subscribe button.
What we came up with is an orange Subscribe and a Help button alongside it - I think it works quite well. Have a look at the buttons in this post - they are free to copy, as is the help text.
October 31st, 2005 at 9:00 am
[...] Robert Scoble has written a post bemoaning the lack of standards in using RSS feeds and the consequent confusion which this causes : Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe” or “feed” or “web feed.” [...]
October 31st, 2005 at 10:12 am
[...] Microsoft の Robert Scoble は先週末にやたらと多量の記事を Scobleizer Blog にポストした。Blog Business Summit でハイになっていたのかもしれない。彼はその中でも Silicon Valley got my attention: the future of Web businesses という記事に着目して欲しかったようだ。 ところが実際には、RSS usability sucks という記事の方が tech.memeorandum のトップを飾った。こちらの記事はいろいろ反響を読んだ様子で、日本でも Polar Bear Blog で取り上げられている。 Scoble はこのことに不満な様子で、今日になって Say something sucks to get on Memeorandum という記事をポストしている。このタイトルを日本語に訳すと「memeorandum に取り上げて欲しければ何でもいいから suck と言え」とでもなるだろうか。その後 memeorandum は Web Business の方も載せたようだが、現時点でのトップは相変わらず RSS Sucks の方である。まあ彼自身 BBS では「人目を引くタイトルをつけろ」と講演していたので、それを自ら実証したのかも、とは言っている。 [...]
October 31st, 2005 at 11:01 am
Robert: Ideally, there wouldn’t be an RSS icon or link of any kind on a page… feeds should be found via autodiscovery, and presented to the user on request.
October 31st, 2005 at 11:29 am
Developing a standard for RSS is crucial. Preferably a solution which allowed people to click on an RSS feed button (whatever it says on it) which would automatically add it to that users list of feeds which would in turn be used by any/all aggregators that user employs.
But for now RSS usability definitely sucks. I looked into it quite recently, knowing nothing about it, but wanting to provide my users with the best possible solution. I found that IMHO there are four steps to providing somewhat usable RSS feeds:
1. Use a (white on orange) ‘SUBSCRIBE’ button.
2. Include a help button & help page.
3. Include a link to your feed in the head of your html (for autodiscovery).
4. Style your feed.
Of course how you implement these four steps will also determine how user friendly it ends up.
Anyone know offhand can blogger users style their own feeds without using feedburner or another third party solution?
November 16th, 2005 at 8:47 pm
Multiple feeds suck - switching to Feedburner and one feed
As has been written about many times before, having a bunch of different feeds with different names and formats is horrible from a usability standpoint and just dumb to begin with. Even I find it confusing when I try to add a blog to Bloglines and I…
November 16th, 2005 at 8:47 pm
[...] As has been written about many times before, having a bunch of different feeds with different names and formats is horrible from a usability standpoint and just dumb to begin with. Even I find it confusing when I try to add a blog to Bloglines and I’m confronted with five different options, and I’m a big geek. [...]
May 13th, 2006 at 12:14 am
Robert,
I know your Mom is your top priority right now, as it should be. It’s got to be very difficult and I extend my sympathies to you and your family.
The issue of RSS usability is indeed a big one. I’ve researched it for months and have just finished development of feedpass.com, a new tool for RSS publishers, bloggers, etc. that simplifies much of the usability issue. It’s essentially a landing page for RSS feeds, allowing content owners to use a single button that gives readers an array of choices for subscription and walks them through the process with ease. It doesn’t modify the feed in any way, so it’s compatible with Feedburner and all other feed management tools.
In addition, the site creates a monetization program that benefits both content publishers and anyone who wants to create a feedpass page link to the feed. In fact, the content owner can earn money from every person that links to his feed with a feedpass. It’s very cool.
If you get a chance, I’d love your opinion on it.
Jim
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