“Users want to construct their own experience by piecing together content from multiple sources, emphasizing their desires in the current moment. People arrive at a website with a goal in mind, and they are ruthless in pursuing their own interest and in rejecting whatever the site is trying to push.” - Jakob Nielsen
Read Jakob’s article “Writing Style for Print vs. Web” for his thoughts on how writing for the web requires a distinct content style.
Sep 27th, 2008 at 5:59 am
I am not so sure this is true. There is an entire industry that has been created out of persuasion marketing and with the tools available to online marketers I think there is increasing influence over the user. Take stumble upon as another example. You can argue that this is the users goal but surely the site has the power. I think in this case Neilsen is outdated.