washingtonpost.com redesign

A little over a week ago, Jim Brady, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com announced a new layout for their home page. If you notice in the comments responding to Mr. Brady's announcement, the criticism is fierce. People are slamming the new design, swearing off the Washington Post website, and even calling on the ghost of Katherine Graham to haunt the designers.

Frankly, I agree with most of those comments. The "designers" took what I felt was one of the best news web sites in the world and absolutely ruined it by turning it into cnn.com or any of those other television news web sites. The design change is an insult to the reading audience's intelligence. In this post, I will examine where they went wrong. But first, a brief introduction to what kind of design I am talking about.

When people talk about web design, we tend to think of graphic design. That is, choosing layouts, logos, fonts, color schemes, and the like. However, graphic design is only one element of a larger design effort: information design. Information design takes into account not only how a page looks, but considers how efficiently and effectively the page conveys the content to the reader. Information design is the intersection of graphic design arts, content design (written and media communication), and usability (human factors) design. People want their information to first be easy to find, thought-provoking to read, and look organized.

The new washingtonpost.com home page fails to meet the basic tenets of information design, and I hope to enumerate the reasons below.

Reduction of page content. Mr. Brady lists the following as the primary motivation for the page redesign (boldface emphasis added by me).

One of the most frequent complaints about our previous home page was clutter, specifically the number of links and lack of open space on the page. In this new page, we've added more white space and cut down the number of long lists of text links. The hope is that these changes give the page more of an open, inviting feel and make it easier to scan. We've also moved to a more modular layout to make it easier to find your favorite home page features.

The previous version of the home page had three to five links under each block on the page. About five new links to stories under the National block, two or three links to stories under the Politics block, and five or six links to stories under the Metro block. Now, there are no more than two links to story under each section on the home page. To find the rest of the stories for the day, readers have to go through the menu and drill down into a subheading to go to a new page to find the latest news.

Usability best practices and common sense design states that number of clicks need to be minimized -- the more a user needs to click to find things, the more likely they will click Back and out of your page. Besides, it's just an insult to the reader. Reducing the amount of content is saying, this page has too much for you to handle so we will dumb it down and call it reducing clutter. One of the commenters phrased it best by saying, "if I want to look at white space, I can look at my wall." Also, we're not looking for "home page features", we're looking for the real news -- more on that to come.

Critical content disappearing. The Washington Post is the paper for the nation's seat of government. Where in the world is the politics section on the new page? The word politics doesn't even appear on the new page design. The rationale is to lump politics into the National section. Wrong! The National section is for news stories from across the country. The Politics section is the bread and butter of the Washington Post. The readers in this city and elsewhere in the world read the Washington Post because they are political and policy wonks, so why in the world does the new design hide the politics section?!

The Washington Post is also the hometown paper for the city of Washington and two neighboring states -- 8 million people. Now there's barely any local news on the home page -- only one story, one, above the fold, even on the "local edition" of the home page. Long time Washington Post readers refer to the local news section as the Metro section, and that's what we look for. Again, does the word Metro appear anywhere in the top half home page? Lastly, the big draw of washingtonpost.com, the web site specifically, was the content that was presented in online format only: columnists (local, political, opinion from both sides, and gossip), live online discussions featuring newsmakers, and political blogs. Those features now are hidden away behind some layer of navigation. The previous design featured all of these online-only features prominently on the home page. The new current design now has all of that hidden away. Lots of angry people as a result. Lots.

Page width is too wide. If usability has commandments, one of them would be to never have horizontal scrolling on a page. This is something that every designer has known since 1997. The new page design is so wide, it barely fits on my widescreen monitor when it is fully expanded to eliminate horizontal scrolling. 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 inches long) is easier than reading a printout from your word processor (sentences are about 6 inches long). This is also why newspapers are printed in columns instead of printed all the way across the page.

The new design has the eye constantly scanning left and right and it is annoying. Yes, the content is broken into columns, but there are large, prominent blocks in the right column that forces the eye all the way across the page. The previous design had two columns of real content, saving the third for smaller, less prominent advertisements. Now the third column, larger than in the previous design, has large advertisements mixed with content. Annoying.

Junk content. A new Smart Living section? A multimedia toolbar? Give me my Politics and Metro sections back. Readers go to the Washington Post to be their source of news and analysis, not their lifestyle magazine. I don't want the website equivalent of the "morning news" shows where they give me 4 minutes of news on the hour and fill the rest of the hour with junk. The only lifestyle features people want in the Washington Post are event listings and reviews of what to do locally around town.

Vertical line spacing. One of my biggest typographic annoyances is double spacing. Double spacing makes paragraphs more difficult to read on screen or on paper. It's harder to naturally establish flow between the lines when there is too much of a vertical gap between lines. In fact, one of the reasons why manuscripts are double spaced is to break the flow between lines so that individual words and phrases can be examined during the editing process. To re-establish natural reading flow, the manuscript is then typeset in single spacing for the finished product. In the new washingtonpost.com page design, they added more line spacing to provide more whitespace, but so much that it almost looks double spaced. No professionally printed book or professionally produced website double spaces their text, so I don't know why washingtonpost.com is trying to. It doesn't look cleaner, rather it looks awkward.

Not enough differentiation between advertisements and content. Generally when one sees google ads on the right side of a page, it's separated out into a block, the typeface is different, you know it's an ad. Now, the ad links and the content links look the same, so it's harder to tell if you are clicking on a travel article or a travel ad. This is low. Since when did the Washington Post stoop to tricking readers into clicking advertisements? Respect your readers. Obviously they don't anymore according to this Q&A with Paul Compton, the creative director of washingtonpost.com. Compton's own words below.

Takoma Park: You're not asking advertisers their opinion here, you're asking users.

Be ad-driven if you like, but don't tell us it is for our own good. It isn't.

Paul Compton: I find it interesting that you see users and advertisers as two distinct groups. I'm sure that many of our advertisers are also our viewers. I look at advertisers as "us" not "them".

...

Washington, D.C.:"Paul Compton: I find it interesting that you see users and advertisers as two distinct groups. I'm sure that many of our advertisers are also our viewers. I look at advertisers as "us" not "them"."

I would venture to guess that of the universe of all your users, the percentage who are also advertisers is small.

Be upfront and honest about your motivations ... WP.com is a business that has to make money. I get that.

Don't blow smoke by telling me that there's no difference in the wants and needs of readers and advertisers, that we are all one big happy group.

As a reader, my ideal would be no ads to get between me and the content. (I, personally, would be happy to pay to subscribe to a low-ad or no-ad Web site.)

For an advertiser, the ideal would be maximum ad and the absolute minimum content required to draw the eyeballs.

We aren't stupid out here -- we know the difference. Don't condescend.

Paul Compton: The reality, as I see it, is that we want and need a large audience, and without that, we wouldn't have the reach which is so appealing to our advertisers. Yes we are a business and the site is free to our audience. One of the greatest challenges I have designing the site is striking a harmonious balance between important forces. Sometimes viewers goals, editorial goals, and advertiser goals naturally conflict with one another. That's the world we are in. My goal is to be the best we can be at respecting all forces and making them work together.

Like I said, people are mad. Compton's pompous response does not help either. Sure, you should defend your work, but if your readers/users/customers are angry, you'd better be listening to their words and re-examining things one more time. Compton almost serves as some kind of twisted metaphor for what Washington has become in many peoples' eyes: incompetent, arrogant, and unwilling to listen to what people want.

It makes me sad to see what they've done to washingtonpost.com. While on travel, I realized that two of the best papers in the country, and I would argue the world, are the New York Times and the Washington Post. You go elsewhere in the world and I guarantee you that many of the pieces are fluff, propaganda, and distractions. People around the world go to the Post and the Times to get their real news from top-notch reporters and not for the re-iteration of soundbites and talking points that politicians and their staff broadcast.

The Washington Post is best known for breaking the story on Watergate, and in more recent times they broke the stories on Abu Ghraib and Walter Reed, just to name two. The Washington Post is the definitive source when major political figures break headlines and when they break down. Why take all that great coverage off the front page and replace it with whitespace and a whole extra layer of navigation hierarchy?

Finally, if you want a more professional opinion than mine, Edward Tufte, the authority on information design, has something to say about the new design in his letter to executive editor Jim Brady.

Subject: Redesign of the Washington Post home page: PowerPointing the Post

Dear Jim Brady,

I've written a lot about analytical design and have, in particular, studied news websites (see tufte.com). I read the WP web page daily and, for many years, subscribed to the Post by mail.

One of the great principles of excellent information design is: "Clutter and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design."

Thus, if something is cluttered, the solution is not to blame the information and to reduce the resolution, but rather to fix the design. Thus good design can accommodate very high densities of material, as is the case for many websites.

When the information is thinned out (which nearly every commercial artist will seek to do), then the reader has to scroll and link more. Readers are best at scanning over a fixed high-resolution field and finding what they want. Scrolling is second best, and linking third. Good design can increase the content resolution of the page on the screen and at the same time reduce clutter.

The technical term for reduced resolution is "dumbing down." The next step in dumbing down is to provide readers with an interface to a newspaper: "anchor a placement," "short lists," "multimedia to better highlight," "iTunes-like buttons," "to better showcase [oh my] all the content that we have in that area." If your designers write and think like that, how can they design a decent site for news readers?

What has been added in the WP redesign is an interface to an interface. What has been reduced is direct and immediate access to the richness of your news reporting.

Imagine that the news area of the top of the frontpage of the newspaper were reduced by 30%. The home page is by far your most valuable news real-estate, probably even more valuable that the top half of the front page. And yet now the newly compromised home page has less of what you're good at (the news) and more of what you're not (interface design).

The redesign replaces news with design. The argument for doing so is bogus, because clutter and confusion can be reduced while at the same time the amount of available news increased.

The proper command to your web designers is:

"Make our webpage straightforward, and if possible elegant--and, no matter what, increase the amount of news available within the immediate eyespan of the viewer on the homepage. We want more of what we do well immediately visible. People come to our website for the news, not for the interface."

With best regards,

Edward Tufte

Well said, Mr. Tufte.