In yesterday’s post about how Wall Street Journal displays it’s top related stories to drive additional page views, I looked at the design and asked the question whether it gets used by visitors.
Today, on Reuters, I noticed that they handle the task of showing related top stories slightly differently. Their approach is to display a line bar at the bottom of the screen that allows you to view the top related stories with one click. The question now becomes which of the two approaches gets more people to click and are there other approaches to this task.
The Reuters approach is a little more obtrusive because it doesn’t ever go away so it may work a little better. It’s clear that they’ve tried hard to make the bar as simple as possible so it doesn’t distract from the content of the current page. It doesn’t contain any pictures or additional color. In fact, it’s quiet boring, and this is why it might actually be a good element to test on a few blogs.
Stay tuned. We’ll do a test in January and let you know which approach worked better.
