Our recent newspaper study dealt exclusively with the features present on newspaper websites. We didn’t look critically at the design of these sites. The adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible for web developers to create rich designs while keeping the file size of pages to a minimum.

In looking at newspaper websites, it becomes clear pretty quickly that their homepages are bloated. They try to stick as much data as possible on the homepage (including ads).

Given that, we decided to look at the file sizes of the homepages of the top 10 newspapers, and how much of that file size is devoted to advertising. Note that file size does not always equate to load times. Other factors such as the number of database calls and the quality of the hosting environment play big roles.

These numbers were grabbed using the Firebug Firefox extension. Sizes were recorded both with Adblock on and off, so we can get an idea of how much space is devoted to advertising. (more…)

The Barack Obama campaign has been rolling out new features on its website at an impressive clip. A campaign timeline. Headquarters pages for each of the early primary states. A mobile program. Good stuff and they are clearly doing a wonderful job online.

But in the process of launching this stuff, they’ve turned their clean, nicely designed homepage into a canvas on which to cram as many banner ads as possible. On launch, they had six distinct content areas on their homepage. Today they have eleven elements stuffed into the same space.

Below are the before and after pics. I cast my vote for before.

Before:

After:

Disclosure.

As we noted a few weeks ago, CNN launched a new beta site to test its features for its forthcoming relaunch scheduled for next week on July 1st.  The beta site is now off-line.  Senior Vice President and Senior Executive Producer Mitch Gelman explains on the beta site's blog that:

We've absorbed and dissected that feedback so we can evolve and craft a CNN.com that works for you.

So, to respond your suggestions, we took the Beta offline on Tuesday, June 26. We’re making some changes based on the thoughts you sent us…

Personally I find this strategy rather interesting.  Why not make one tweak at a time and make sure that the adjustments are what people wanted before officially lauching?

We'll just have to see how people react to the tweaks CNN is making based upon its feedback from its beta period. 

This morning, Steve pointed to me to the new beta version of the CNN.com website, which is now available for public testing. You can view it here and take a guided tour of the new site here. Following are a few things that jumped out at me: (more…)

Usabilty celebrity Jakob Nielsen has been the go-to authority on everything web-related for some time now. I have seen him in Boston, San Francisco and Amsterdam (I think). I have purchased, and been reimbursed for, several of his books. He’s a funny guy and a lot of laughs at seminars and yet I believe I am done with our friend. I think his principles have all been disbursed. I think, no matter what the future holds for us as web developers, he has said all there is to say on usability. I also can’t take his site anymore.

When I burst onto the web scene many years ago (I made myself laugh right there), Mr. Nielsen was a real help, and I appreciated his simplistic website and even understood his obvious dislike of designers. Websites in ’97 were full of (let’s face it) obvious mistakes, and having a guru to quote helped justify your design choices when dealing with clients. (more…)

I’ve always been an admirer of the concept and execution of the social news site Newsvine. I wrote about it glowingly when it first came out. Conceptually it always seemed like a good compromise between the chaos of sites like Digg and the top down nature of traditional newspaper websites.

With their redesign, they’ve pushed things in a pretty dramatic new direction. Essentially, the site is now a cross between the old Newsvine and an Ajax startup page like Netvibes. The site is beautiful and works wonderfully from a technical perspective.

But despite my admiration for Newsvine, you vote with your feet. And I’ve never really spent much time on the site because I’ve never found the content that compelling. I think there are a couple of reasons why: (more…)

CNN.com is the main national type of news site I visit on the web.  I do so out of habit and because I really dislike the websites of alternatives like MSNBC and Fox News. 

But they are starting to lose me due to the way they are using video.

(1) Our office is an open space and so to watch videos I either have to annoy my co-workers or unplug my headphones from my iPod and plug them into my computer.  And that's when I don't have my computer muted.

Due to this I really don't watch many  videos during the day.  I'm going to CNN to read news articles, blog entries and such.  For text.

So what's the problem?  CNN is now all about video and its hard to find the text.    Of the items on the homepage, roughly 50% are web videos (see graphic on right for an example). 

I don't mind that they have lots of video.  That's great.  But I wish it all wasn't so intermingled.  Having to scan and discard 50% of the content is not a pleasant user experience.  I'll probably switch.

(2) CNN is still displaying videos in Windows Media Player format (which means I've had problems playing them in Firefox).  And they are still popping up their videos in controlled windows using javascript.  I hate that.  Please switch to Flash (which more people can see anyway) and stop using pop up windows.   You just shouldn't do that stuff anymore.

CNN isn't the only one making this mistake.  The John McCain for President site does as well by devoting pretty much its entire homepage to video clips and surprising users with video on what look like normal buttons/links at the bottom of the page (you are either muted or yelling at my whole office dude). 

In summary, I think people are going a bit too far in an effort to embrace the whole web video thing.  Video is a great and powerful thing, but not all the time and not in every circumstance.  Please remember that sometimes your users just want to read some text and move on.  Video should always be opt in.

We implemented a new WordPress plugin (Snap Preview) this week that uses Snap to provide visual previews of  links on mouseover.  Nothing revolutionary going on here, but it is nice plugin candy for people into that sort of thing (me). 

Screenshot below:

Go here if you want to install.

Jeff Jarvis points to an interesting post by Chris Riley that compares the editor-controlled content on the BBC homepage to the content on the BBC Most Popular Now page, which is determined by usage patterns of site visitors. He found editors and users were in synch in the stories they chose 37% of the time.

Reading this reminded me to write a about the Most Popular feature on the New York Time’s website. I am not a voracious reader of the New York Times but like to check in on it every few days. I do this not to catch up on the “latest news” so much as to read some of the great long form pieces they churn out on a regular basis. I read the Times more like a magazine than a newspaper.

The Most Popular tool is a great way for me to pretty quickly find the most interesting articles to read. Look at some of the stories they are highlighting today:

• Gilded Paychecks: Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices - A story about how professionals such as doctors are pursuing profitable alternative career options.
• What It Takes to Make a Student - A long piece that looks at whether “teaching poor children to act more like middle-class children help close the education gap.”
• Holiday Books: 100 Notable Books of the Year - Great list of the best books so far this year.
• One Spoonful at a Time - A very moving article about a mother’s struggle to get her anorexic daughter healthy.
• ‘Yours Truly,’ the E-Variations - Article about the hidden meaning of sign offs in email messages.

To me, the Times homepage is less interesting. It features links to articles about the big international news stories the day (which I’ve already heard about elsewhere), a bunch of business stories and some regional stories I’m not interested in since I’m in DC.

The Most Popular feature isn’t perfect - there isn’t an RSS feed to subscribe to or a way to view the most popular stories by topic (I’d love to drill down further). But for me it is a great way to quickly discover interesting Times stories I would probably have missed otherwise. The fact is the readers of the the Times are pretty smart folks and do a great job of identifying interesting content.

As a designer, I’ve struggled as how to best contribute to our blog. Most web design articles speak to people who aren’t designers and tend to focus on the obvious. I don’t intend to add to that.

So I decided to attempt a redesign of the USA Today homepage as companion piece to our recommendations to the newspaper industry. Senior designer Jei Park and I sat down and figured if we’re going to talk the talk, we might as well start walking as well. A couple of notes:

(1) In putting this together, we included every element of the current USA Today site. We wanted to come up with something that could actually be implemented, not something so conceptual that it could never see the light of day. In other words, we didn’t take the easy way out.

(2) We chose USA Today because it is the most circulated paper in the country, and which has had the same design for a couple of years. The point is to show what we think these things should look like. As a designer, the last thing I’m interested in is criticizing the work of other designers. That isn’t the point here.

(3) We want to hear your thoughts. If you like it, say so. If you hate it, say so. If you have changes you’d like to see, say so. If you think we’ve missed something, say so. We intend to act on the feedback and come up with a revised version in the next few weeks that takes into account what you have to say. The goal of this is to start a conversation about what newspaper websites should look like.

The design process almost always happens behind closed doors. Let’s see what happens when we get lots of good feedback from cross section of smart people. Click here or on the image above to see the full view. You can read Todd’s explanation of the features presented here. Tell us what you think.

After 200 of Enron's internal emails were placed in the public domain by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioned (FERC) back in 2003, innovative software company Trampoline Systems created the Enron Explorer based on their own SONAR platform. In the Enron case, SONAR was able to illustrate existing social networks and information by analyzing email content from the entire organization during the 1999-2003 time period. Though the 200 emails that became part of the investigation are not representative of every part of the company, the sample does give insight into internal communications at the highest levels at Enron before, during and after its collapse.

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With the recent news that the Iranian government has decided to limit ADSL bandwidth above 128 kbps for all ISPs (BoingBoing reported it before Reuters) without giving a reason, it makes sense that this is an opportune time to take stock of state-mandated Internet regulation (including content filtering and surveillance) schemes around the world.

We've done a post before on the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), an organization created through the collective efforts of the various Internet research centers at the University of Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford. The main mission of this group is to examine the phenomenon of state control over the Internet (filtering and blocking content, etc.) in various countries. The center has published a number of research papers on their site that are devoted to studying the anatomy and pervasiveness of state-sponsored filtering and information-control initiatives around the world. Case studies concerning content filtering and surveillance are currently available for the following countries:

• Vietnam
• Yemen
• Tunisia
• Burma
• Singapore
• Iran
• China
• Bahrain
• United Arab Emirates
• Saudi Arabia

In addition to case studies and other interesting publications, ONI also provides an interactive map that not only illustrates the state of the Internet in various countries, but also briefs the user on the level of filtering in the country, the way filtering technology is used, the state of the media environment and examples of sites that have been either blocked or filtered. (more…)

In the wake of the purchase of YouTube by Google, there has been a lot of discussion about online video and the various companies trying to gain market share in the space.  When you look at the various players, you’ll see a lot of different approaches.  Some focus on viral video.  Some focus on sharing videos with friends and family.  Some focus on serving the needs of video bloggers.

As someone who builds websites for a living, I’ve been looking at these services the last few weeks.  What I’ve been contemplating is using these services to host videos for some of our clients. 

We’ve built custom Flash video players for a number of clients and we will continue to do so for those who want or need a custom player.  But for clients that produce four of five videos a year, why not host the video using one of these third party services? 

You save time since all the services automatically convert videos into FLV (Flash) format for you.  You save bandwidth costs by hosting through a third party.  You also get a lot of value-added features that you aren’t going to have the resources to build into a custom player yourself.

We launched a website for the Washington Area Women’s Foundation earlier this week that includes a few videos.  After looking at four or five options, I ended up hosting the videos through blip.tv.  Here’s what I like about the service and why I chose it.

(more…)

eKarjala inspired me to take the time and dig up some fossils of today's most popular websites using the Wayback Machine. Click on the images to be taken to the archived websites and the text link to see today's versions:

APPLE (December, 1998)

  (more…)

While browsing Consumerist the other day for updates on the Krempasky vs. Popken debate, I noticed that one of the posts reported that Consumer Reports has introduced a Consumer Safety Blog. I'm a big fan of consumer advocacy and think it's a great idea. However, I can't say I'm taken with the site right away.

The blog has some obvious design problems. The features on it look pretty solid, but this screenshot depicts several details which make this blog unappealing to me.

1. Posts: I can't see the title of more than one post. While the headline "Cocaine Energy Drink" does grab my attention, I'm not seeing anything else, including the one that's on dorm safety (which is actually titled "Ed Comeau: Firefighter" as though it were paying tribute to Mr. Comeau), the one about Playskool's product recall and the one on bike safety. These headlines immediately would give readers more of an idea about what the blog is about than just the one on the Cocaine Energy Drink. (more…)