washingtonpost.com redesign, round 2

Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com posted an updated announcement today on the redesign of the site. Below are some of his follow-up comments in response to other users.

As for a daily chats, they are now near the top of the home page, right below the opinions box. We promote one major chat at a time, with links to a few other chats/transcripts. The flyout schedule will be on the page by week's end, and will be curious to see whether it makes it easier to find things.

Question for all of you: Did you use the Discussions button in the global navigation at all? It didn't appear it was used very much based on traffic, but if it was being used, that would be good to know.

...

Jane, curious on the dumbed-down theme that ran through a lot of these comments. What we cover and what we promote in the news hole hasnt [sic] changed, so wondering what is giving people the impression that the page is dumbed down. I'd argue making something easier to read by adding white space and an easier-to-read font is an entirely different issue. We have side-by-side printouts of the new and old home page, and I don't see much of a difference in terms of amount of news on the page. I'll see if we can publish this so you can make your own judgements [sic].

After calming down a little bit from my initial frustration and venting it in my previous post, I wrote the executive editor a comment and posted it as a response to his comments.

Mr. Brady,

I understand the motivation behind tickers. They supposedly are able to show multiple lines of information in one line's worth of space. However, echoing some of the comments above and in the previous comments page, a lot of people are scanning the front page very quickly, multiple times a day at work to see the new news. We don't have the time to drill down into each of the individual sections when we are at work. (At home, whether it be the web site or the Sunday print paper it's a different story.) The ticker interface forces one to wait, tick, tick, tick, five or six seconds for the stories to flip by. I think people would rather see a list of five most recent stories they can look at in one second. Besides, the Washington Post is the hometown paper for a population of 8 million. You figure we can afford more than one line for Metro news.

Measuring the number of clicks to determine how useful a feature might be a fallacy. If the information is all on the front page to begin with, the reader wouldn't even have to register a click. I think that's definitely the case with the Live Discussions. It was nice seeing a list of the daily discussions so I could tell if I wanted to join it or read the transcript. If it wasn't interesting to me, I didn't click it. If it was, I did click to read it. Fact of the matter is, we're not going to read every Live Discussion. So the number of clicks on Live Discussions from the front page shouldn't be an indication of how popular Live Discussions are, but rather how popular the particular discussion topics are. When the goal of usable web design is to minimize the number of clicks to find content, measuring the number of clicks to determine which content is popular doesn't seem to make sense. If anything, increased number of clicks may be an indicator that the content is difficult to navigate to.

The density reduction (or perhaps the appearance of it) is what bothers me and many of your other readers the most. Two links under a heading goes counter to even the most basic style guide rules: one doesn't make a bullet list unless there are at least three items, one doesn't make a section unless there are three subsections underneath the section. Three is the magic number -- two looks sparse and incomplete. I think 3-5 items is the sweet spot, more than 5-7 items in any list and then it starts looking too long.

If you assume there are about ten sections of a newspaper, i.e. ten unit blocks on the website and one reduces the number of front page links from 3 to 2 each, that's 10 links taken away, a 33% reduction in content. A user now has to use the drill down navigation 33% more often than being able to just jump straight to the story. Even if this is a perception thing, as you claim, it really looks like we are getting shortchanged by reducing the list lengths from 3-5 down to 2 per section.

Regarding the page width, which a number of people commented about on the previous set of comments, people are good at reading down a page, but not across a page. Ideally, page content should be no wider than four or five inches. This is why reading a book (sentences are about 4-5 inches long) is easier than reading a printout from your word processor (sentences are about 6-7 inches long). This is the same reason why the usability gurus are ok with vertical scrolling but shun horizontal scrolling on a web page. The new design has the eye constantly scanning left and right across almost the entire width of the monitor and it gets (subconsciously) annoying. Yes, the content is broken into columns, but there are large, prominent blocks in the right column as well as the three-column wide feature bars in the middle of the page that forces the eye all the way across the page and then back. The previous design had two columns of news content, saving the third for smaller, less prominent advertisements and lesser read sections like the classified, real estate, etc. Now the third column, has advertisements mixed with popular content like most read articles. Even though the physical page width might be the same as before, our eyes are scanning horizontally all the way across the three columns, where as before, we were just scanning horizontally across two columns and saving the third for a vertical pass down.

Lastly, the line spacing (aka leading). The general typographic rule is to increase the line spacing with the length of the line. That is, if your line runs the length of a page (6-7 inches) then increasing the line spacing will help readers find their place when their eyes jump to the next line. (Grab a few books off the bookshelf, observe the relationship between line length and line spacing.) In print newspapers the columns are narrow, and as a result, the line spacing is very tight. I admit, print typography is different than web typography, but the columns here on the website are still relatively narrow, so it just looks really strange to have a larger line spacing, especially since many of us are used to the traditional line spacing in the print edition of the newspaper.

Just my observations... and I know you and your staff have been piled on in the past few weeks, to put it lightly. Keep in mind, we comment strongly because we care. You have very loyal readers who demand the best from one of the best newspapers on this Earth. Looking at the last round of comments, you have readers who are in touch and intelligent. We love the Washington Post -- it's both a newspaper for the world and a newspaper for our hometown -- and we want washingtonpost.com to be a great website. So understand when we get defensive when we fear the Post heading in the direction that television news has been heading towards in the past decades: four minutes of news at the top of the hour and the rest as fluff and commercials. We don't want a morning news show, we don't want CNN -- we want The Washington Post.

Kendrick

I should have added two more examples to the magic number 3 comment I had. When one writes an essay, the form calls for three supporting paragraphs. When one makes a presentation, there usually are three points (arguments) in the body of the talk to support the claim one is making.

We'll see what changes come about in the following weeks. I already see changes in progress and Jim Brady has promised more to come. From me, more design analysis to come. If I can find an image manipulation program that won't cost me an arm and a leg, I'll see if I can find and post some annotated before and after screenshots to highlight visually where my complaints are.