What strikes you immediately, as an outcome,  is that you cannot generally go wrong if the home page is picture heavy. This is something that I have noticed with some recent redesigns; the reliance on picture-dominated layouts seems to work out well more often than not on news sites.

And that that the Al Jazeera page is. More than text, pictures are used all over to present an overview of  site content. To the extent that text seems dwarfed by pictures all over the page. And with telling impact; I thought the pictures were really useful in drawing readers in to explore the site’s varied news content.  I haven’t seen pictures being used as much on the sites of  the TV broadcast organisations that have gone for a redesign in recent times.

That comes at a cost of course, because there isn’t enough space to feature too many story links and headlines.

The other interesting feature of the redesign  is how just two colours (apart from black and white, of course) have been used predominantly to not only enhance the visual appeal of the page but also as tool to categorise and highlight content. (The site uses more colours; but subtly).

The weak element is the page is the empty space in the middle - which could have been used more gainfully with a bit of tweaking.

The layout isn’t a complex one but definitely seems an improvement.

]]> http://www.onlinenewsdesign.com/?feed=rss2&p=631 http://www.onlinenewsdesign.com/?p=628 http://www.onlinenewsdesign.com/?p=628#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:42:33 +0000 admin http://www.onlinenewsdesign.com/?p=628 Sounds too good to be true but just imagine how useful this tool would be: you input jargon into it and get clean understandable English as the output.

This is something I came across on ‘Slate Labs’, which presents Slate’s experiments in multimedia jounralism. Before you get set to follow the link, let me warn you that its a product ’still in development’.

But you do get an idea of what it aims to do: "We used a murine model of myocardial infarction" becomes "We gave mice heart attacks after" once you hit the convert button.

I haven’t found something similar on the Net. Yes, there are lists of jargon - sometimes specific to a particular field, but nothing quite like what this tool aims to do - if and when its ready for use. How useful would something like that be useful in a newsroom. Seen anything like this anywhere?

So, that kind of interactivity will be not be restricted to those who have iPads or similar devices - Firefox’s multitouch capabilities will be experienced by just about any one who has a device that supports multitouch inputs and runs on Windows 7.

" This means that regular webpages are capable of using  multitouch input, allowing webdevelopers  to create new interactive experiences for their websites," said this post on a Firefox developer’s blog (head there if you want to read about how the API works - "The multitouch API is very simple and meant to get web developers started quickly").

"At the moment, we support devices that are compatible with the Windows 7 multitouch input, such as various models of notebooks and touchscreen-monitors."

You can see it in action:

And more here:

What’s interesting is that the Mozilla folks are planning to push for the adoption of the multitouch API they have developed as an open standard: "We hope this API is useful to get this feature in the hands of web developers. We will soon be starting dicussions to see how to standardize these APIs at the W3C. "

And as you can see browsers are becoming really powerful; just think of the fire power that new HTML 5 features and CSS 3 give designers and developers (a lot of which has got overshadowed by the talk about the video part). Once upon a time a multi column layout like the one you see in the screenshot below was a big deal - at least when the International Herald Tribune went for it at a time when browsers were in version 4.  Multicolumn layouts are not going to be a big deal with CSS3 - once the specs are implemented commonly.

But some news organisations are concerned about developments on the HTML 5 front. "The fact is that there’s still a lot of work to be done on HTML5 before we can integrate it fully into our products. As things stand I have concerns about HTML5’s ability to deliver on the vision of a single open browser standard which goes beyond the whole debate around video playback," said Erik Huggers,  Director of BBC Future Media & Technology in a recent blog post. The reactions to that post were just about as interesting as the post itself.

A recent article in CIO outlined how Toby Wright, CTO of the Telegraph Media Group, spelt out the benefits that Daily Telegraph enjoyed by relying on cloud computing for several of its operations.

Bernard Golden, in the article said that Mr Wright listed these SaaS applications as ones being used by the Telegraph group: Salesforce for customer interaction; Google apps for email and collaboration; Ooyala for video distribution; Disqus for blog comments and Cordys for business process management and workflow.

"Essentially, Wright wants to get out of the business of running kit, recognizing that specialized providers operate less expensively than he could in a self-hosted data center. Moreover, he feels that security has improved, in that the cloud providers implement a far higher set of security practices than the Telegraph had in place or could afford to implement." It helped the organisation deliver greater value to customers and strategise better.

Content management

Many organisations are also trying out open source to innovate and cut costs in delivering online services. Open source has opened up new possibilities, not least on the CMS front.

The Texas Tribune site, for instance, was built using the Django framework. MySQL and Memchached, Amazon EC2 cloud on Ubuntu Linux with deployments managed by Rightscale make up the combination, according to the site’s lead developer Brandon Taylor. The front-end code was built from scratch; it was set up last year and made operational in a matter of weeks.

And not to speak of Drupal being used by a number of mainstream media organisations for their operations. But open source can be used for a lot more than that.

Don’t use CMS for special projects

  But first, news organisations should make a distinction between using their CMS for routine workflow and looking to other platforms for building innovative news applications and launching special projects.

In a post on Hacks/Hackers,  Scott Klein, the Editor of News Applications at ProPublica said: "My advice to news organizations trying to build applications: You’ll be quicker and have happier programmers if you leave the CMS to what it’s really good at, and let newsroom developers use what makes things easy for them….In fact, while there have long been interesting interactive applications on news websites, the heyday of complex journalism done using software — which I suspect we’re in now — couldn’t have started before the advent of the free, open-source rapid software development frameworks Django and Ruby on Rails."

It needn’t be expensive either, he says: "Developing outside your CMS also doesn’t mean your IT department has to purchase and support new servers. Another technology enabling deadline software is reliable cloud infrastructure products like Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), which is enormously scalable and, inexpensive relative to dedicated hosting. Most news applications managers I’ve spoken with use services like EC2 to deploy applications quickly with a minimum of long-term commitment. "

Doesn’t the word cloud figure there too?

Yes we can!

And in this context, here’s how things went when one newspaper decided to go exclusively the open source way - for one day. Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project tried to "re-imagine the newsgathering process with the focus on Digital First and Print Last" and sought to use "free tools found on the Internet, the project will – from assigning to editing- create, publish and distribute news content on both the web and in print." And the conclusion: "Can we do ‘what we do’ with freeware? Well, the answer was a profound ‘yes-we-can’! We proved that we can both publish online and in print using nothing but freeware."

Here’s how two major organisations handled it.

Google News, which recently introduced major design changes, oriented mostly towards better personalisation, gave back readers a bit of what they wanted: "…some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns….We made the option to switch between List view and Section view more obvious. And today we’re adding a third option in ‘News for you’….," said a post in the Google News Blog, responding to feedback.

Categorizing reader responses and deciding on the ones that warrant a design rethink is a tough task, for the responses could be based on idiosyncratic expectations or reflect real problems being encountered by users. Feedback survey forms are often used after redesigns, but the one Google News used, I thought, was pretty well structured in terms of defining user experience inputs.

The BBC, which also went for a major redesign, came up with a detailed FAQ explaining the changes and posts on the BBC Editors blog went into the rationale behind them. Again FAQs are not uncommon after a redesign, but the BBC went to some lengths to cover a lot of ground. The FAQs have been updated many times over, but in a post today the BBC blog said: "Most of you commenting here on the Editors blog have been critical, with many urging us to change the design back to the way it was. … Reverting to the old design is not something we’re considering, but building and continuing to improve on the changes we’ve made certainly is."

There is yet another (perhaps, very demanding) way of going about it: the Chicago Tribune made use of a platform provided by a third-party social support application to individually address issues raised by readers after a redesign in 2009.

Instant feedback is a double-edged sword: it provides invaluable insights into how the redesign is working (or not), but at the same time websites are responsible for convincing readers that their views have been taken seriously and that at least some of their concerns are being addressed. Emotion cannot be de-linked from design and that makes this task even more difficult.

Food for thought:

- A balance has to be struck between the feedback of a vocal minority and the covert reactions of a silent majority - who may not want to spend time discussing the redesign.

- Should redesigns be set in stone? How far should a site go in rolling back changes - notwithstanding the hours of user testing and studies that have gone into the redesign.

- A well structured feedback form could be pretty useful in generating actionable input.

- Detailed explanations help in getting readers to understand the rationale behind the changes and mollifying them - but is that good enough?

- Metrics can point to broad trends in user reaction to the redesign. - Meaningful and specific questions that are worth answering should be answered.

- Running a beta site is an option.

- Should a community platform be used to address issues on an individual basis?

Here are some related posts:

 BBC presents screenshots of site redesign, unveils new look; to launch US, Cananda edition

Google News redesign - how far do the changes go?

Incremental vs radical redesign of news sites - which is better?  Usability expert Jakob Nielsen had in an Alertbox column last year said that "users hate change, so it’s usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually." …. Read on

Getting the readers going duirng a news site redesign It’s important to find ways of introducing readers to a major news site redesign: not only do they have to come to terms with it but also be motivated to provide feedback on it. …. Read on

Some aspects of the redesign have been revealed earlier: that the navigation moves up, for instance. But in a post on a BBC blog, eidtor Steve Hermann came up with new and interesting information: that a new edition of the site, aimed at readers in the US and Canada, is in the offing. It will be the default for the region.

The redesign looks elegant and colourful, the prosaic middle portion displaying the different news sections will feature plenty of photos in the redesigned version. That is a dramatic change on the page. The extreme right column has become very colourful - with those lists of plain headlines being replaced by pictures and links to video.

The emphais of the grid has changed somewhat - about which I had written in an earlier post.

The changes have been summed up as follows:
-New look: More space for the main stories of the day, video and pictures.
-Clearer labelling: More prominent labelling and highlighting of different types of content.
-Story pages: On story pages, we’re placing the day’s top stories and features alongside the story so that however you arrive on the site, you can quickly see the main content of the day.
-Video: A bigger video player, streaming with better quality. We’ll place that at the top of the front page
-Latest: The most recently published stories will be flagged on the front page with a “New” badge.
-Sharing: Links that allow users more quickly and simply to share stories with friends on social networks including Facebook and Twitter.

The changes are dramatic but pretty short of revolutionary; perhaps due to concerns that disruptive changes may alientate readers.

If there is one huge challenge in a site redesign, it is to draw readers to the rich and varied repository of hidden content that any large news site has. That is a challenge that has not been addressed head on in this redesign, I felt.

Resource: BBC Slideshow link

Previous posts:
On the changes in the grid
On the earlier home page redesign

The design has gone (boringly) horizontal and subdued, I thought. (Fewer underlined links too - Google had been somewhat daring and different in opting for underlined link-headlines). Maybe regular Google users might find it refreshingly different. There are some changes that the graphic below doesn’t cover - for instance, Fast Flip, is easily accesible now. As for the rest, here’s how Google (and I) see it.

Link to Google News Blog post about the redesign.

No, not at all. I’m describing the interesting and curious case of Phyl Gyford who thought that there was a thing or two about news websites that needed to be sorted out. And he went ahead and did just that - on his own.

Now before we go any further let’s note that he has experience as a freelance web designer and programmer.

The problem with news websites, according to him, related to issues of friction, readability and finishability which he has described in some detail on his website.

Friction has something to do with the flood of stories that a news website offers to its readers - they cannot be read without ‘performing an action’ like clicking on a link. As for readability, well, a news story on the web is less readable compared to one in print. And finishability has to do with not knowing what is the quota of news for the day, and the dissatisfaction that comes with it. (’There is no sense of an ending.’)

So what Gyford did was to create his own version of The Guardian’s website (his preferred news source) using its Content API.

I’m not sure if it satisfactorily solves the issues described above, except maybe on the readability front. Friction there is, maybe of a different kind. And as for finishability - it’s a patience-testing-kind-of-finishability that is on offer. I was also curious to know if he would have anything to say about the new version (5) of Safari that promises a ‘distraction free’ version of web pages. He does. And not surprisingly, he also refers to the Readbility bookmarklet which performs a similar function. In terms of experience, his solution resembles somewhat Google’s Fast Flip.

There isn’t much of a departure from the design that was being tested out during beta.

The site makes use of colour to frame the key headlines. Designers who are conservative about using reverse video might have a thing or two to say about this. I think it adds to the visual dynamism of the site; but I’m not sure if this was the best design option to emphasize headlines. Is it time to say goodbye to headline font hierarchies, especially in the online domain?

Well, it is the home page and not the news site front page. The emphasis perhaps was on customisation and displaying the wide range of BBC’s media offerings. What I’m really watching out for - is the redesigned news site, of which we already have had some glimpses.

I had in a previous post, touched on the how the navigation has changed; and that we now knew what universal navigation across different BBC sites is going to look like. Other changes related mainly to way content is accessed and customised from the home page.

.

This is how the latest version of page looks like:

Links:

Page changes explained on the site.

Yet another post on the planned changes to the news site page structure.

The Living Stories model was centered on an ongoing news development - a kind of a news thread - that would be updated with new stories and associated content.

I had written in a post when the experiment was launched:

“A new online tool that, well, isn’t exactly going to revolutionize journalism,”  is how a Washington Post article described it.

New York Times, the other participant in the experiment, had this to say. “Living stories is a much-enhanced version of what some newspaper Web sites already do by grouping material by subject matter. In the case of The Times, the paper’s Web site has thousands of “topic pages.” But those efforts have not yielded heavy reader traffic or much advertising.”

Well, how are stories packaged in Living Stories? Links to the stories can be found on this  Googlelabs page.  Google had summarized the main elements of the format when it released the code for the project.

1. Unified Coverage

Coverage related to a story is connected and available on a single web page, which is the Living Story page. This web page includes news articles and associated content such as images, videos, graphics, background, feature articles, etc.

2. Story Summary

The Living Story has a running summary of the developments that have unfolded in the story so far. The purpose of the summary is to serve readers who are new to the story or have been loosely following it.

3. Story Developments

A story’s developments often provoke new coverage. In the Living Story format, the content of a story is organized by its developments.

4. Various levels of detail

Each story development offers various views that contain different levels of detail to cater to readers with different levels of interest.

5. Prioritization of story developments

Every story development and every piece of content in a living story is prioritized by how important it is to the story. This gives readers, particularly those who are new to the story or have not been following it closely, a choice of exploring only the most important developments, for example.

6. Remembering what the user has read

In order to provide a more personalized experience to each reader, the Living Story keeps track of what the user has read i.e. the "read state". The page highlights the changes and new updates since the user’s last visit so that he or she can quickly see what they need to read.

Those without the technical expertise to deploy Google’s code on their systems, can now try it out on a Wordpress publishing system if they know how to install Google’s plugin package and theme.

A post on Google News blog on April 29, 2010 had this to say: We hope the plug-and-play solution will make it easy for you to get a Living Story up and running in almost no time at all.

That’s an interesting move because the possible user-base for the Google model will expand hugely because of the availability of these plugin. And media organizations that do not want to play around with their CMSs or story presentation models might think of trying out this model on Wordpress platform. And a few journalists might also want to use it to tell others that there are a lot of ways of presenting stories on the Net. This is one among them - tried and tested. Successful or not, I don’t know - time will tell.