Good Or Bad, Design Influences Behavior – A Look At Feedly

February 18th, 2010 - Jeff Turner

I realized this morning that my behavior has changed dramatically over the past two weeks.

Two weeks ago I made Feedly the home page for Firefox on my desktop computer. I did it after going through a few sites I hadn’t visited in a while. It was an experiment of sorts. I’d given up on my Google Reader long ago in favor of human aggregation via my social networks. I wanted to see if it would bring some value back to the RSS feeds I had subscribed to in the past. It did.

Feedly’s design changed my behavior. Good or bad, design influences our behavior. The noise of the Google Reader format influenced my decision to give it up almost as much as the value of the social recommendations I migrated toward. The clean, magazine-style design of Feedly has cut out the noise and allowed me to get to more information faster, moving me back toward my targeted material. That’s a good thing.

If you’ve never given Feedly a try, I think it’s worth setting up an account and seeing how it impacts your own behavior. Here’s a quick video to illustrate my thoughts. If you’ve given Feedly a try, what are your thoughts?

Related reading: 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock