byJoeyBaker » Edit: Web Design

Design Says to Shovelware: ‘I Need More Whitespace’ — a Design Critique of TIME

Joey — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:00:58 +0000

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.

Similar Posts:

A Web Design Critique of Google News

Joey — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:49:53 +0000

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. Google has an … involved … relationship with the media industry. Newspapers have accused Google of stealing their content, rumors say Google thought about buying a newspaper, and much to the chagrin of journalists everywhere, Google started linking to Wikipedia in the Google News results.With all the hype, you’d think Google News was an incredible product that attracted a ton of pageviews. (Actually, Yahoo News gets more hits) In truth, Google News reveals itself to have many poor design principals, and, despite some good ideas, to be an eyesore that is really designed for one purpose: act as a search engine for news articles.

Highly customizable: Easily the best part about the design is the amount of control given to the user over the content they want to see. Google throws out the idea that every user needs to see political and world news. You can setup search modules to show very customized content too.
Color coded: it’s trivial, but an important visual cue. This works pretty well in the nav bar, but the execution on the rest of the site is poor. They take a strong visual cue, and tone it way down.
Google Juice: the site is really geared to be used as a search engine, and it shows. From the wonky side navigation, to the really cool “recommended for you” section that uses your search history to find you news, Google News is clearly designed to search your news, not browse to it.
Art? What art? OK, there is some art, but its really small. Visually impressive, this site is not.
Link List: Can you avoid the impression that the page is just a huge list of links? I can’t. It would be nice to have some attempt at styling, design, etc…
Summaries: Google News works because of automation, but the lack of hand-crafted summaries really limits the usability.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Illustrations & Maps online New Media

Overall, Google News design gets a 2/5. It’s got customization, but it’s really not a friendly UI. The site clearly uses a grid style design, but there’s too many eyelines – I can’t decide where to look.As an execution of the ‘river of news‘ concept, gNews misses one key aspect – you can only have one river at a time, or else, the eye gets lost. Google gets this right with search results, but somehow that design philosphy didn’t carry over to gNews.Perhaps my best suggestion for Google: bigger images. Much bigger. Draw the eye in.

Similar Posts:

A Web Design Critique of the Newsweek Redesign

Joey — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:40:45 +0000

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.

Newsweek Homepage Critique

Publish at Scribd

A few css issues on the new redesign. I recommend: max-width :)

Update

Looks like there are still some css issues to be worked out too. This is a close up of the top slider section.

Update2

Looks like the content of the change isn’t that great either.

Similar Posts: