Decoration: How do they look? Decoration summary table: non-distinguished, selective, modest, moderate, striking, selectively animated, animated |
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The outward appearance of the anchor influences the entire piece--a key to the look and feel of the overall design. We identified a range of decoration styles from non-distinguished to animated. These descriptions are not absolute: what one reader considers a modest or small amount of decoration may be moderate to another. If the anchor is decorated, then the eye is drawn to it. If the anchor is hidden, then the ergodic nature of the anchor rewards the reader with an additional interpretation of the work. How a reader views the entire site or work Anchors are often the most decorated part of a piece and thus usually drive the "look and feel" of a hypertext. The default web look is a moderate decoration (white pages, blue underlined text links, purple for visited links, black text, well defined menu bar on top and/or down the left hand side). Sites that deviate from this basic template evoke a daring, artsy, innovative feel--while sites that stick to this standard automatically adopt a veil of respectability. Moreover, sites that deviate from this are asking readers to learn a new convention (whether it be menus that look like headings such as USA TODAY [65] or bold rather than underlined anchors such as A List Apart [2]).
How a reader approaches the link The amount of work needed to manipulate an anchor indicates how much time will be required to view and interact with a piece and how important the interpretation of the anchor is to the content of the piece. Hidden anchors (non-distinguished and not in a menu) require the most time investment, as the reader must spend additional time to identify and locate the anchor. Selective anchors require reader involvement to reveal the anchor location, and thus require thought and intent to uncover and follow anchors. Decorated but stable anchors (modest, moderate, and striking) require a moderate time investment, as the reader does not spend time identifying the anchor. Selectively animated and animated again require an investment, not to find the anchor but to watch and interpret its behavior. Range of anchor decorations The vast majority of efferent sites use moderate links, perhaps from the plethora of web design books that advocate this structure and the growing expectation of underlined anchors. To address reader expectation, businesses are quick to jump on a standard where artists avoid boundaries. On the other hand, the aesthetic range of creative exploration uses all of these techniques and more. Literary and artistic endeavors are not limited to strict expectations, but delight in subverting these expectations at every turn. In addition, animated anchors provide a chance to tell a story, and thus have the ability to persuade or induce emotional responses--a complex content that would be very difficult to convey in a static state. Most stand-alone popup ads tell a story (albiet a simple one) to hook their readers into watching and clicking. Dynamic decoration The default setting on web pages is to change the anchor color to depict if the reader has or has not visited the destination node. Jakob Nielsen promotes this his May 3 Alertbox: "Changing the color of visited links has been part of Web browsing since Mosaic arrived in 1993, so it's completely standard; almost all users understand it. . . . Currently, 74% of websites use different colors for visited and unvisited links, making this design approach a strong convention that people have come to expect." [100] . Modest changes (from grey to lighter grey in In The Changing Room [8] or from green to lighter green in The Pines at Walden Pond [39]) promote an easier flow and do not attract attention to the amount visited or not visited. Moderate changes are often back to the non-anchoral color, (A List Apart's [2] anchors for visited nodes are identical to nonanchoral text). Penetration [30] goes a step further and highlights anchors leading to a partially read node in yet another color. While dynamic decoration is common with embedded anchors and text menus, our sample did not find any distinctions made in graphic menus. While flash sites can also show this distinction(Garnier Fructis [20]), most of the flash sites did not. Further, sites that used non-distinguished anchors or graphic anchors did not use a dynamic distinction, either. Sites such as What We Will [66]and War Games--Catch the LandMine!! [40]) used a single anchor, and thus the distinction would not apply.
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Decoration summary table | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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