March 19, 2004

News design is flawed… and smoking is bad for you!

Winner, in my book, of the No Duh Award, is this great inter­view with Alan Jacob­son.

The prob­lem is that, except for me, and a select few, this is news. (In case you hadn’t heard, smok­ing is bad for you, we invaded Iraq, and Google “launched’ local search).

He’s got some good points, and some bad. Let’s recap, shall we:

Per­haps the most glar­ing flaw at many Web sites is that they look the same day after day. While a print edi­tion adjusts the layout of its front page to the news of the day, many news­pa­per home pages do not. They’re stuck with a set tem­plate, com­plains Jacob­son, and the daily news is crammed into it — whether this is a day with a huge story (Saddam cap­tured) or a slow news day (the local St. Patrick’s Day parade). Head­lines are all the same size, not adjusted to infer news value.

Dabo! We have a winner. I’ve writ­ten about the need to change your design before.

I’ll say it again, design is con­tent, if your head­line or photo was the same size on Sept. 11, 2001 as it was on Sept. 10, 2001, then you need a new CMS.

Small Ini­tia­tives brings up a good point regard­ing CMSes, if we ask for it, we’ll get it:

CMS ven­dors and inter­nal site pro­gram­mers would build variable-​template sys­tems if they were asked and paid to do it.

Let’s talk photo play:

The there’s-always-one-photo-on-the-home-page tem­plate is just silly when you have days that war­rant run­ning three photos. It’s den­i­grat­ing editors’ news judg­ment when the only option is to stuff a photo into a locked-​size tem­plate slot, no matter how impor­tant or unim­por­tant a shot may be.

I agree 100 per­cent, photos are con­tent. If you’ve got a slow word-​news day, but a good photo-​news day, then put some more photos up there.

And please tell me you’re not con­fin­ing your­self to just one photo size and shape, are you?

No self-​respecting designer or photo editor would accept having one spot, the same size and shape, for a dif­fer­ent photo every day. The con­tent of the photo changes, so the shape will have to as well.

Let’s move on to my favorite topic, scrolling…

The ideal home page, he sug­gests, would be con­fined to the limits of the size of a com­puter screen. That’s right, no scrolling. And the same goes for inside or article-​level pages.

Sorry, gotta dis­agree there, vehe­mently. What is a screen­full on the Web? Is it the res­o­lu­tion or the browser size? It can’t be either, they’re both sub­ject to change.

Print-​now-​Web design­ers, please, please, stop saying things like “below the scroll”, that’s a fig­ment of your imagination.

That said, a well-​thought-​out and well-​designed hier­ar­chy of infor­ma­tion will tend to put the most impor­tant con­tent near the top of the page, and the less-​important infor­ma­tion toward the bottom.

Come one, say it with me… “Hey hey, ho ho, ‘below the scroll’ has got to go!”

Besides, scroll-​wheels make it easy, and stud­ies pro­mote scrolling over paging.

But Chris, you say, with all that infor­ma­tion, how­ever will we pro­vide hier­ar­chy. Well, start with the prin­ci­ples of design: color, bal­ance, type, and their breth­ern. There might be some room for DHTML but…

Jacob­son believes that the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of bloated news-​site home pages will die off as more sites use DHTML tech­niques to hide con­tent and links under expand­ing nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments that become vis­i­ble as the user’s mouse is moved over a nav element.

…not if it’s fly­outs, please God, not fly­outs. If you’ve got to hide infor­ma­tion then use a click-​based method.

What might be inter­est­ing, though, is a home-​page design that lets you hide parts of the “index-area” that many front pages have. Couple the Javascript hiding with a cookie, and then presto you have a cus­tomized homepage.

There’s more to this good inter­view, and I’d also rec­om­mend Small Initiave’s take on it as well.

Filed under: Web design

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