News sites have to deal with long lists, usually of story headlines and related story links. Well there is the problem of making these dull information-packed pages visually interesting, and one way of doing this is to ‘add ambient visual data’ to them says this Neiman Journalism Lab post, referring to the experiment of a designer to redo the layout of a page of The Economist .

To start with, I like the idea of adding visual information in meaningful doses to a page. In this instance, designer Eliazar Parra Cardenas has used visual cues to indicate the length of stories that populate a list on the page.

For this, he has drawn inspiration from the idea that prompted him to create a Firefox plugin, Backbars that displays quantitative information in a kind of bar graph that is automatically integrated into the page along with the text.


Despite a recent uptick in interest, Cardenas says he still considers most news sites poorly designed. Happily, he thinks an array of small, quick-fixes that make quantitative data more easily digestable — like Backbars, naturally — can go a long way in making the online version of magazines and newspapers better at what they do best: conveying information quickly. “The most interesting direction of information design is not flashy, blockbuster visualizations but subtle, ambient layers,” Cardenas wrote.

It works fine with certain kinds of data - like the number of times a page has been bookmarked on a social networking site - but I am not sure how useful it would be on news page to indicate story length.

And where do you draw the line; when does useful information presented in ‘ambient’ layers turn into a distraction for readers? In this instance, I’m not sure how many readers would take a call on clicking a storylink based primarily on information, visual or otherwise, on the story length. The intrinsic news value of the story is what matters most to readers, I should think.

Maybe, there could be readers (in a hurry) who would consider the story length paramount, or maybe give weightage to both story length and its news value. But would their numbers be large enough to warrant the addition of visual information on the length of stories to a page?

Does the shaded bar graph add visual clutter to the page? (The icons of the flags of countries too seem distracting.) Here’s how this part of the page looks without these:

But the idea behind the experiment is a good one: making things easier for readers; subtly adding visual information layers to help them quickly navigate a list with a lot of dense information. Take a look at the original Economic page that Cardenas is experimenting with:

Maybe it will work better with other elements on a news sites. A list of the most popular stories? But the idea is definitely worth exploring.

Related post: Liven up those dull lists on the front page