washingtonpost.com redesign, round 3

Last April, I wrote a full-length post here on this blog on what I thought was wrong with the washingtonpost.com redesign. Two days later, I wrote a follow up on this blog containing my posted comment to washingtonpost.com editor Jim Brady. Shortly after that post, I wrote a short follow-up on Edward Tufte's Ask E.T. forum topic on the redesign. The text of my post in the Ask E.T. forum appears below.

You might appreciate seeing this marketing piece on Apple's website that profiles both Mr. Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com and Ms. Jenn Crandall, the producer of OnBeing. It sheds a lot of insight as to why washingtonpost.com is the way it is today.

http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/washingtonpost/

A couple of things to put into perspective... washingtonpost.com is an entity separate from The Washington Post newspaper, both part of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (WPNI). Obviously, the web site draws from the work of the print newspaper as well as from its reporters, but from what I've read in the corporate information, washingtonpost.com is there to cull highlights from the paper for the web and provide web-only features. What I'm saying here is that the organizational hierarchy probably plays into the organization of the website. Hence, the washingtonpost.com logo is not the same as the masthead of the print paper and we see that the "print edition" or "today's paper" as it's labeled now has always seemed kind of detached from the remainder of the page.

Second, I'm sure we're all aware of the pressures that traditional newspaper organizations face. Subscriptions are decreasing, ad revenue is decreasing, and as a result, newsrooms are shrinking. I get the feeling that washingtonpost.com has become the experimental proving grounds to find a new revenue source to make up for lost traditional revenue. In the words of one of my friends in the news industry, "we're trying anything and everything to see what sticks.

Hence, they are trying to work all sorts of media into washingtonpost.com. Not all of it is bad, but of course, the problem is as Mr. Tufte stated, the Washington Post is a news organization -- that is its reason for existence. The fanciest multimedia and the neatest interface can't make up for a lack of depth in the content, which is going to be the trend if they continue to shrink the newsroom.

-- Kendrick Hang (email), April 12, 2007

The marketing video has changed since then, but the spirit of it is still the same. And if you go to washingtonpost.com right now, you will still see two logos: one for washingtonpost.com and one for the Washington Post. I have a correction to my above post though: the parent company is not Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), but rather The Washington Post Company. WPNI is in charge of washingtonpost.com and newsweek.com, while The Washington Post Company is parent to The Washington Post, WPNI, Express, Newsweek, Slate, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, and Kaplan (the educational services company), among other ventures.

Now, in this week's Washington City Paper, a story on what I mentioned above: One Mission Two Newsrooms. In addition to the story, the City Paper made a video to show how geographically separated washingtonpost.com is from The Washington Post.



My point still remains the same: why should readers care and have to differentiate what the corporate organization of The Washington Post Company is? Why are there two navigation structures on their website: one for washingtonpost.com and an alternate structure for the print edition of Washington Post (under the link Today's Paper)? To us, it's all one single newspaper. If I spot an article in the Food section on Wednesday, I have to figure out if it appears in the Arts and Living section on the washingtonpost.com main page or if I have to go under the Today's Paper link to find it the Food section under the print edition Washington Post.

Maybe this is just a classic problem in DC. Is the Washington Post just a reflection of the turf wars and bureaucratic infighting that is so common in so many workplaces around the region? This is definitely not the first time I've encountered multiple people or divisions in an organization vying for influence without regard for the greater organization. I will admit however that integration, within organizations and within the context of design is quite challenging. However, I still believe in the bottom line: people external to an organization, particularly customers and users, should not have to be exposed to the bureaucracy within the organization, especially in the form of design.

music animation machine

One of the people who attended the Experimental Two-Day Course by Edward Tufte last month was Stephen Malinowski, the creator of the Music Animation Machine.



Malinowski's work was shown in Tufte's course as an example of a multivariate information display. A key to interpreting the dimensions in the display:

• Musical themes are represented by color.
• The pitch of the notes are represented by placement on the vertical axis.
• The duration of the notes are represented by the horizontal length of the lines.
• The combination of different notes being played at the same time is shown by vertical overlap.
• And all of the above is being plotted over time (via scrolling).

That's five dimensions of data being mapped onto two dimensions, horizontal and vertical.

The point of this display is to help listeners who cannot read sheet music to visualize the music as if they did know how to read sheet music. By focusing on certain elements in the visualization, one can listen critically for details and hear things and anticipate things that would otherwise be difficult without any sort of visualization.

It's sort of interesting how one more clearly hears the notes that one is seeing in the display. Plus since we humans are so good at pattern recognition (relative to any computer), the visualization makes it easier for us to spot and hear little repeated themes in the music. This is the world that sheet music readers live in -- they can follow the score and see the music while they are listening to it. The great thing about Malinowski's animation is that it's intuitive enough that non-sheet readers, and terribly slow sheet readers who never learned how to read the bass clef (like me) can use it in place of sheet music. It's not meant to be a replacement of sheet music -- just an alternate presentation of it.

So what's the point? Is this just something novel and fun? Well yes, the Music Animation Machine is fun to watch and listen to, but there's a greater lesson to be told here. Visualization helps us draw out (in the figurative and literal sense) our understanding what is happening, not only in a piece of music, but in anything we are interested in studying in the world. The world is much more interesting than a line graph because it's so multivariate. However, the challenge that remains is how to effectively present multiple dimensions of information to help us understand the system at hand and tell the story of what's really happening.

the tragedy of suburbia

TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) releases another great talk, this time social critic James Howard Kunstler on The Tragedy of Suburbia. Although Kunstler has no formal training in architecture or urban planning, his talk is well-reasoned, well-delivered, and actually kind of fun to watch because of how energetic he is about the topic.