Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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I don't like the final result, and Rutledge dismisses many of the realities of site design.

I think the existing NYTimes site is among the examplars of good Web news site design. My principle gripe is that there's too much whitespace around the primary content. That's probably a consequence of both a 1920x1080 display (laptop), and highly aggressive ad blocking. (Yeah, yeah. I'll stop blocking ads when advertisers stop being complete fckwits about making annoying ads, and/or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.)

There are a few valid points Rutlege makes. Many of the navigation elements are little (or never) used by me, including the left and top sidebars.

I want my microcontent.* That means a brief story summary. I have an RSS reader and subscribe to the NY Time site on it. I rarely read it. Why? Because there's no microcontent. For most news stories, the first paragraph is all I need (actually, in all absolute truth, the headline itself is far too much). If I want to read more, that paragraph really helps make the decision to do so. Jacob Nielson's covered this topic very well.

Presenting the content on the homepage, while making for dense page, does make a good jump point. My eye can scan far more quickly than I can click back and forth through pages.

The classic wastes of time for me on the Times are:

- Video content. Really, text tells the story far more quickly most of the time. A video feature can be a benefit (and for some rare stories it's hugely useful), but I _don't_ think it belongs on the homepage.

- The "Talking Heads" features. There's something in how these are set up that frequently makes for a compelling lede, but fails to deliver. The format just doesn't work for me.

- The formulaic three-headlines-per-section on the front page. Some days some sections deserve far more news, and some sections (sorry, but "Dining", "Fashion", and "Automobiles" hold little or no interest) deserve none. To me.

Rutledge has succeeded in vastly simplifying the Times's front page. By removing most of the informational content and utility from it. His design works for mobile (and as he notes, the Times has a good mobile site). It's not a good full-featured site design.

Video content brings in 20x the ad rate of display ads. The news agency I worked for had a "push video for all content" stance because of this, I assume all other news sites have the same stance.

You bring up the biggest argument of them all, I had it every day with the site I was responsible for. I'm a minimalist myself, and the person I reported to was a everything and the kitchen sink guy. We had some heated arguments followed by days of ignoring each other LOL

I hated his approach, but our numbers did suggest many people landed to the front page each morning and read the whole thing. So having a lot of information and links on the page is very important. So assume your behavior validated as normal viewing behavior. Behavior changes through out the day though which sucks LOL

And the most amazing thing was user testing is near useless, the demographics, experiences, behaviors are so vast. Even as noted the time of day has a huge effect on readers.

So no matter what you do you isolate a community, so you compromise and compromise, and produce the most average pile of junk anyone has ever seen. But people understand it, sure they moan, but they get it. Go for the lowest common denominator.

The times uses the motif of a news paper online, I guess because it's contextually people understand. I don't know if by design or accident, but there is a level if usability there because of the fact.

Its messy but its reliable, and sometimes thats what design is about, not a great looking product, but something that does its job.

The lifesaver for me has been the "Remove This Permanently" Firefox plugin (well, that an the Flashblock plugin).

If something's sufficiently annoying, I just find its xpath and remove it.

Does this put me in the top fractional 1% of browsers? I have no doubt. Does this work for me? Yes. Does the 1% bit bother me? Not in the least.

If anything, it's the final trump card in an argument I've had with web-design geeks that the end-user ultimately trumps style.

Video very likely does bring in the money. I can live with that. But so long as I can rip out the offending content, I'm cool with it.

I've also seen some other good/bad paper designs. In the Bay Area, I'm continually amazed at how good the _design_ of the SF Chronicle is (the content's of course gone fully to crap), and how poor that of the San Jose Mercury News (in the capital of Silicon Valley) is. I actually did an analysis of how much (and respectively little) content was presented above the fold in each design.

Sadly each, even in their online incarnation, is becoming increasingly irrelevant and local-focus blogs/news services are emerging.

On the topic -- if you haven't read John Sealy Brown's _Information Rules_, I'd highly recommend his section on the community-binding element of newspapers (and sports teams). It's a strong indictment of micro-targeted / individualized news streams.

I've found ghostery and ad block plus do the trick for me :)

Cool, I've added ghostery, will play w/ it.

The formulaic three-headlines-per-section on the front page. Some days some sections deserve far more news, and some sections (sorry, but "Dining", "Fashion", and "Automobiles" hold little or no interest) deserve none. To me.

That's one of the big arguable weaknesses Andy could have mentioned. If you have a subscription to a newspaper website they ought to be able to algorithmically identify which sections and columnists you read the most and prioritise content from them on the home page. The problem with "visual noise" on headline pages is far more to do with displaying excessive quantities of uninteresting content than lack of white space; Andy's design goes too far the other way in leaving one homepage story above the fold on a typical user's browser.

I sit in the middle of blocking ads - I block flash, but leave images. Animations are distracting, and 'proper' advertising tends to use low levels of animation in their images (by 'proper', I mean that newspaper sites don't tend to have "you are the 1000000th visitor!" animated gifs)

The worse ad culprit I ever saw was an ad on article pages that would wait on a timer that would have you about halfway through the second paragraph... then expand to cover the article text. I can't imagine what kind of fresh marketing graduate thought that that would be a winner.

Also, regarding your comment on microcontent - it's often a necessity in the news world because Subeditor Bob has come up with a wacky headline that sounds witty, but out of context has nothing to do with the article. I'm all for the brief illuminating blurb.

Animated images win an instant ad-block from me.

Regarding headlines, Jakob Nielsen addresses this too: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

Traditional print headlines fare poorly in Web form.

There's been a fair amount written as to how HuffPo writes web search/link/click-bait articles and headlines as well.

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