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.
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.