Mountain Magazine does some great work and great storytelling in the outdoor industry. Taos is an incredible brand with some intriguing changes coming down the pipeline. Snow Fall won a long list of marketing and storytelling accolades for the New York Times.

So why am I not excited about a piece of content that combines all three of these factors into one package?

Let me see if I can put into words whats been lodged between a few layers of instinct and suspicion for a while now.

Confessions
Some time after Snow Fall was published, people who had praised the impressive combination of journalism, design, and web development of the piece began to eventually confess they never finished reading it.

I was in that boat. The layout, the scrolling, the words, the homework that must have been done – it all blew me away.

But I never read more than about 20% of the piece. I love to read, so ever since I’ve been asking myself why.

Today’s Reader
I haven’t found hard and fast proof of this, but I’ve seen pieces of the puzzle surface and many traces in my own behavior and the behavior of others.

The idea is this: humans needs pages to get through long pieces of writing.

Why? Well, I think there are four reasons:

• Pages break up long content into a somewhat standardized length
• These pieces allow us to estimate how long reading will take
• These pieces also allow us to easily track our progress
• Pages help us start because we know we can easily stop and pick up exactly later where we left off

With that scaffolding in place humans can read entire books in one sitting. Without it we don’t know how long the reading will take, we don’t know if an interruption will turn previous reading into a waste, and we don’t know how close we are to the end. Our brains don’t have a standardized unit for scrolling.

Progress
In a way it’s like starting a race with no mile markers or idea of where the finish line is. Make it a 5k with signs every kilometer and the psychological difference is clear. It’s the exact same reason long surveys have progress bars.

The story about Taos is great, the design is beautiful and the dev work is impressive. I just don’t know if 17,000 vertical pixels is the best package for delivery.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.