Lean and Mean Optimizing Web page download time. 1/26/98 Back to the IntraNet main page

By Mark Gibbs
IntraNet, 1/26/98

What if no one had to shout, "Lights, camera, action!"? What if movies, radio, compact discs and tapes didn't exist? Our culture would be far less rich and information would flow much slower. By today's standards, it would be a low-bandwidth world.

Yet low-bandwidth information delivery is somewhat the nature of the PCs on our intranets. We've got huge amounts of computing power, vast disk stores and fat data pipes everywhere - all the support needed for great productions - but the picture is flawed.

We think of the PC as the quintessential business tool - our window into a world of information and knowledge. Even though they can show us a lot of data, PCs definitely are second-rate display tools.

For starters, monitors have a screen resolution of approximately 76 dots per inch (dpi). That's awful!

If someone gives you laser printer output at 300 dpi, you'll probably moan and complain about the poor quality. Yet you expect yourself and your co-workers to sit for hours on end in front of monitors that have only slightly more than one-quarter of the resolution. Worse still, the poor resolution is combined with poor color rendition, flicker and lousy contrast.

And it is not as if you've got much choice - that's as good as monitors get without spending a ridiculous amount of money.

So because of the characteristics of our primary display device, it is imperative to present information as efficiently and effectively as possible. Text presents a difficulty.

To get a decent amount of information on a monitor, the text must be small. But the smaller the text, the less legible.

However, text by itself is a thing of the past. With intranets, the effectiveness of information presentation has improved because it's easy to include graphics. As a consequence, our presentation techniques have expanded. We're realizing that the structure of online content is significantly different from paper content.

Consider a product brochure: It's full of information and data, which sometimes seems to be mixed with wild abandon. But we're used to the format, so it works. What we're not used to is having that same document dropped onto a PC. It doesn't work at all.

The product brochure needs to be restructured significantly to work online. The content needs to be divided into information about the brochure's subject and supporting data. Information such as product name, features, visuals and cost fall into the former category while data such as height, weight and power requirements make up the latter.

Once you've figured out how to decompose the document, you need to reassemble it into a structured presentation. The goal is to let readers drill down as much or as little as they need.

If you're going to get really clever, you'll need to add more sophisticated presentation tools such as Macromedia, Inc.'s Shockwave and Java applets.

Please note that I don't consider the use of Adobe Systems, Inc.'s Page Description Format (PDF) at all advanced. It's just a way of showing what paper versions of documents look like online and, although document producers might add navigation that is not possible with paper copies, PDF documents rarely make effective online presentations.

Sometimes, even the most advanced document presentations fail. This tends to happen when complex ideas need explaining and messages need to be presented and absorbed quickly. In these situations, audio and video work better than plain text.

Streaming video works well on PCs even given the limitations of most monitors. And adding audio is cheap - most new PCs come with audio. These factors will create great opportunities for putting streaming media to use on intranets (see related story, page 17).

For example, streaming media will have an enormous impact on corporate training. Today you feel compelled to send people to training courses because you know that comprehension and retention with in-person training is far better and quicker than with book-based training. Tomorrow, you'll have people sit at desktops that will be plugged into Web-based distance-learning programs.

And there's that product brochure on your Web site today. While your carefully crafted online version works well, it would have much greater impact reincarnated as a video presentation.

You'll see another jump in effectiveness when these streaming media presentations start to get really sophisticated. By embedding hyperlinks in streams, for example, users will be able to jump from one stream to another via a mouse click. But the transition to streaming media won't be easy. Your challenge will be to develop a vocabulary of techniques for streaming audio and video because those media are not like any other with which you've come to grips. It's one thing to produce streaming audio and video content but quite another to produce compelling content.

To get ready for this new media, start checking out the streaming products and try applying them to your information. I believe you'll find compelling uses in next to no time. Oh, and perhaps you'd better start practicing that "Lights, camera, action!'' thing.

Ready for the shoot? Send your scripts to imcolumn@gibbs.com or pitch your ideas at (800) 622-1108, Ext. 7504.