Design Says to Shovelware: ‘I Need More Whitespace’ — a Design Critique of TIME
I took two lessons from Time’s Q&A with Bill Keller. The first, outlined in Dear Bill Keller, was intended be a short reaction to the piece, that turned into a 1600 word article.
This post outlines the second takeaway, and will be 1000 words. Pictures are worth 1000 words right? :)
Take a look at the comparison between the print and online layouts of that article below.
click for a larger version
The print layout is clearly, superior. It’s far easier to read, offers a summary of what the article is at an eye’s glance.
- Multiple Pages The online version requires the user to click to a second page to read the whole article. Yet, the print version fits handily on one page. WHY!?
There is no newshole online! Stop making it difficult for us to get to the end of the article! - Ads Admittedly, the print version shares a spread with a full page ad, but the content remains ad free. The online version feels cramped. There are two, small, intrusive ads, that serve to distract from the content.
- Styling is Gone This is a great example of why shovelware is bad for design. The print version nicely separates out questions, credits, and answers with font styles. The online version? Nothing. Someone just copy-pasted the content out of a text document. It’s much harder to read than the article, let alone tell that it’s a Q&A.
- The Sidebar is Distracting Even if Google is my homepage, there is far too much content presented to draw me in. The sidebar is full of irrelevant stuff that distracts me from the article. The clean, minimalistic design in print is far more eye-catching.
The Takeaway
- Use subheads Give the reader entry points. Especially online where people are used to reeading short blurbs of text are are prone to skimming as they scroll.
- Don’t forget the rule about one piece of dominant artwork It's amazing how truly good design never changes. Presenting one place for the eye to center on that sums up the content is a design trait that goes to the way we think – regardless of the medium.
- Leave some whitespace Clutter on the page makes your content hard to read. Just because your CMS allows you to dump in your content and move on, it doesn't mean you should. Giving this article the same amount of design time in both print and online would have helped a lot. I'd bet that the amount of design time for the web could be much less.
A Web Design Critique of Google News
I recently critiqued the redesign of Newsweek, and was pleased to see the positive response. I sorta promised that this would become a regular feature for me, so I'll try to hold to that.
I'm only looking at homepages. Critiquing a whole site is a lot of work. I'll do it someone wants to pay me though :]
After leading a webinar for CoPress on homepage design, I've done a lot of research into mainstream homepages – what works and what doesn't. For the second go at this, let's look at Google News.
A Web Design Critique of the Newsweek Redesign
Newsweek’s redesign/relaunch today revealed a much cleaner, more web friendly site. Many improvements have been made, and you can tell that they’re thinking hard.
However, there’s still room to improve. The essential problem with the site is that it still feel liks a newspaper site, not a online newsorg. Check out the embedded PDF for a look at the annotated homepage of the site and a few quick, overall notes below.
- The design is nice and clean with a solid red motif, but the widgets are sorta hard to tell apart, they don’t really have a bottom.
- I know that Newsweek is a partner of MSNBC, but promoting that connection so heavily may not be so smart. MSNBC should get equal billing (see: Slate and WaPo), or be totally integrated.
- The choice to push the blogs so heavily is interesting (They have a widget and a nav bar). Not bad, just interesting. I’m curious to know if that works out.
- Serious Fun is all kinds of UI hell. The side arrows to mean neutral is just down right confusing , and it’s got very prominent placement on the F pattern of user reading. I’m all down for turning polls into something more of a game, but rethink the UI here.
- Props for having links to other newsorgs. That’s a valuable service that Newsweek is developing. The fact that you get to the other site through a frame is, again, interesting. Cheers to experimentation.
