Paul Bolls: "Brain-friendly online news websites are not only more likely to actually make people smarter about the world around them ? my simple way of stating the ideal objective of journalism ? but also provide a more effective advertising environment." Photo: Julie Willbrand
One of the things that we have learned a lot about in just the past 10 years is the human brain.
It's now to a point where researchers are hypothesising that the world is not very "brain friendly."
One of those researchers is Paul Bolls, associate director and co-director of the
Psychological Research on Information and Media Effects Lab at the University of Missouris School of Journalism.
I met him during a conference at the
Reynolds Journalism Institute, which is on the Missouri campus. He gave a speech during a luncheon about how the brain processes news and advertising content.
He ended his speech with the newspaper website of his hometown up on the big projection screen.
"Oh, and all of this?" he said while pointing to the website. "This is all wrong."
That got my attention. I walked up to him afterward and we talked another hour. Then I went back to my hotel room and started sketching different looks of the home page and story pages based on what he said. The next morning, I handed over the sketches to Bolls. He said I was getting closer but there was still some work to do.
Bolls mentioned the Tulsa World in a Poynter.org chat Thursday because we are partnering with him and his colleague Heather Shoenberger on a research project this spring. The goal is to make guidelines on what works and doesn't work when it comes to web design.
Those sketches have been in the hands of web designer Chris Hickerson, who has done some great work polishing them for the research project.
Like Bolls said in the live chat: "I think intuition guides a lot of design and brain science often contradicts that."
To read more about what Bolls thoughts,
check out his blog.
We can't wait to show you the results in the near future at tulsaworld.com.
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