The Reader Experience

The first time I dreamt up a publication, I thought about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to present it. My focus was on my creative expression, and what that might tell a reader about me and my views of cycling. It was, to be perfectly fair, a largely selfish outlook.

As Cush and I began envisioning the site you are now visiting, we talked about who our reader would be and what we wanted their experience to be. That is, we discussed the audience we wanted to attract (everyone who likes bikes, not some subset thereof), and how we wanted site navigation to be simple, the pages to be uncluttered and without any pop-up windows or blinking ads.

Remarkably, as we examined so many current standards of site design, we kept running across features (e.g., a little dialog bubble icon next to a number to show how many people had commented on the post, a detail that simply scrolling down a bit would reveal) that we thought did more to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness or whatever, and nothing at all to improve the actual reading experience. I deleted a lot of crap.

We went with a serif font in black on a white background because readability studies have demonstrated that nothing else is as easily digested.

Not every cyclist will love every post we publish, but we can at least promise that if you click on the post, we have done our best to give you a pleasant reading experience.