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.
I Support iPhones, Not Internet Explorer
Over a year ago, I started telling my friends that, "I don't support PCs."
I had gotten really tired of being everyone's (free) tech support. The problems were always the same: My WiFi doesn't work! || How do I move to a new computer? || I have a virus! || etc…
That, and after going all mac for a few years, the PC interface just felt clunky to me. I really felt inefficient working on darn WinXP. So… I just told everyone to go get a Mac, then come to me if they ever had issues.
I went from doing 2-3 housecalls a week to one every six months.
Don't get me wrong – I love all my friends, but I've learned that in the drive to be a "nice guy," it's reasonable to set limits on what other folks can ask you. Without exception my friends would grumble, deal with my Mac evangelizing, and go ask someone else to fix their problem. There were no hard feelings (that I know of – I've had a beer with each of 'em :] and I'd guesstimate that 40% of them have now bought a Mac.
iPhone support
To the point of this post: this blog now supports iPhones. I finally got around to installing the wonderful WPtouch Wordpress Plugin, and I must say – it's rather snazzy.
In much the same way that I don't support PCs, I don't support Internet Explorer very well. But, to prove I'm an Apple fanboy, I do now support iPhones for the 6 of you who visited via iPhone in the last 30 days :]
Somethings make you think…
I don't know if this is because of my lack of IE support or some comment on the attention span of different browser users or an indication that the people who read this blog tend to not use IE, but a screen shot from Google Analytics on the right.
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.
Rev2oh | Classifieds: Use a Tiered Selling Strategy
RevenueTwoPointZero is a new group of very smart folks who are trying to rethink the business model behind journalism. After their conference last weekend, they've published a series of blog posts on their brainstorming sessions. I'll be responding to many (if not all of them) with the rev2oh slug.
A mockup from the rev2oh team.
The rev2oh team came up with a really solid plan for how newspaper platforms can redo their classifieds sales online. I was really please to see them include aggregating craigslist as one of the goals. After all, why should newsorgs try to create a new social network when a perfectly good one already exists?
The one concern I had when reading their plan was that the premium content is very much a micro-payment model. This does work, (see: ebay), but it's not very user friendly.
In part, this response is applying Jeff Jarvis’ question: “what would Google do?” Or, more appropriately, “What would Apple do?”
Apple is the master of simplifying their offerings. You can’t buy options for an iphone to get a brighter screen, bluetooth, extra data every month, and a fingerprint-proof backing. That many options is confusing. iPhone comes in two versions that differ in just one way: memory. A customer only has one decision to make, and that simplifies their experience.
And that, after all, is what this entire proposal hinges on: a better user experience.
How Newhouse Can Become Relevant Again
This post is in part a response to Lauren Rabaino’s post on how to change the Cal Poly journalism program in part an answer to the #collegejourn call for posts on how to improve college journalism education.
Lauren’s analysis of the way to overhaul the her journalism program seems to go down the right path. I would take it just a set or two further though and stop the broadcast concentration. I'm looking at:
- writing track: teaches reporting as any old print/newspaper prof would typically teach it, but with a strong emphasis on writing for the web. This naturally includes social networking, blogging, and audio production.
- visual-content track These are are photogs, broadcast people, & designers. Teach a little bit of print design, but go 40-60% with web design. Photogs and video folk ought to know most of what each other does. Photogs may get some studio and photoshop time that the video folk won't and the video people ought to focus a little more on how to produce BJ style stories.
- tech track: We need to be teaching/recruiting coders as journalists. Now that we’re on the web, we need people who are capable of running that infrastructure. We ought to be training people in web site design, database management and display, data-mining, website development, etc
I mostly agree with Lauren’s idea of scrapping the print track, as I’ve said, teaching print design is a bit like teaching someone esperanto. It’s not like print design is going to go away, but it is far less important that teaching web design to those in the journalism field.
Video
I’ll go ahead and cautiously agree with Lauren, video should be taught in some form or another to all the majors. I say again: cautiously.
Newhouse has a the ‘kid in the candy store’ syndrome when it comes to video. Soundslides are taught in beginning writing and photo classes, video/multimedia has become an integral part of nearly every lesson plan. The thinking is, ‘new media’ involves heavy use of multimedia and video, and therefore every student should be indoctrinated into the ways of ‘new media.’
This thinking is just … flawed. Beginning photo students just don’t need to know how to shoot video … it’s advanced skill that just doesn’t need to be taught to beginning students.
Besides, the video that Newhouse emphasizes is short-form, heavily edited video segments that last 1:30. I’m not at all convinced that the ROI is there.
Instead, Newhouse ought to focus on the basics of shooting video (composition, lighting, uploading, etc) for those not in the visual track and long form video (10 min) for the visual folk.
Social Media
Every program should heavily emphasis social media. How to leverage it for reporting, maintaining a personal and professional blog, twitter, podcasting, etc…
One nice thing about Newhouse is it is home to a lot of up-to-date, high-end equipment. This makes the job of learning and reporting much easier, but it’s all for nought if we’re not learning applicable information.
An active blog ought to be viewed in the same light as getting an internship – a requirement.
Old media
Just like the mainstream media industry, journalism academia is run by Baby Boomers and a select few in Generation X. Generally, these folk just don’t ‘get’ social media in the same way that us Generation Y kids do. How can they be expect to teach the value of something that they don’t value? Read the rest of this post →
Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » Introducing CSS Gradients
WebKit now supports gradients specified in CSS. There are two types of gradients: linear gradients and radial gradients.
Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Introducing CSS Gradients
For us geeky web designers out there this is just plain Cool!
For those not so geeky, it means this: what could have taken over 20 lines of code can now be done in 1. Oh and when you're browsing, you won't have to download all kinds of drop shadow images – which means faster loading times.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Hackers Exploit Poor Website Code
XSS attacks were becoming more popular because more and more websites were writing their own snippets of code so visitors could get more out of a site, he said.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Hackers exploit poor website code
Here's the downside the Web 2.0 – a lot of what web designers are trying to accomplish has never been done in quite the same way before. That means that they're writing a lot of custom code… and making a lot of the security mistakes that 'standard' code had eliminated years ago.
So… 'bout time we found a serious downside to Web 2.0.
Freelancers: How Do You Get Work? | Creativebits
- Craigslist
- Word of mouth.
- Referrals from a past job.
- My college buddies. (Especially Chris)
- My colleges job board for alumni
- Comedy Central/MTV job hunt board
- Monster.com
- Krop
- Freelancers Union
- Unsolicited resumes
Freelancers: How do you get work? | creativebits
Great idea for freelance work that I never considered: craigslist. Totally free and really well trafficked.
Mezzoblue § Mediatyping
The link below will get you to a pretty good article on recoding a site css for mobile content. It's got some links to a lot of basic info that designers should know.
A Guide to Web Typography | I Love Typography, the Typography Blog
This is a fantasic little summary of how to do typography on the web. It's a fast read, and a must if you're inexperienced with type (yes, it really does matter which font you use where) and into web design. A Guide to Web Typography | i love typography, the typography blog
