The New York Times Redesign is Live
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be met regardless of the way the world actually works? Probably both.
Also, I think Digg deserves more credit for finding a successful mid point between lists and designed layouts.
That's not to say there's no room for design, but this new NYT layout is anything but design. It's the same wall of information with sporadic and indecipherable levels of emphasis made to look mildly palatable for another couple of years. If the NYT has anything interesting to say, I'll wait for it to appear on HN, Digg or Reddit.
But yeah, I'm with you, I'm pretty far down the procrastination list before I open a newspaper web-front-page.
For instance, NY Times insists on using the delivery model for charging for online access. Additionally, the local newspaper here tries to use every new shiny toy they can. At the moment, it's auto play videos. lol
This layout (as opposed to a list format)makes browsing and discovering articles outside of my normal focus areas much easier as the headlines don't all blend together.
I'm not sure what the best layout would be, but for a newspaper, the NYTimes current style is better than a Hackernews style list.
So I guess it depends on what you're used to. As usual.
Design has not changed since 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19971210093544/http://www.drudge...
19 million+ US uniques makes it a very important news site (NYTimes has about the same amount.)
Really? I don't see that at all. This redesign looks nothing like a newspaper to me. The closest I can see to any newspaper metaphor is the left/right navigation to switch between stories, which really is nothing like how I switch stories in a physical newspaper.
The front page seems much the same, content-wise, but the article view is dramatically improved from a usability standpoint. The switch to single-page is a fantastic change in and of itself.
I'm interested to see if the new top nav and right/left experience does a better job of providing me with a curated news experience, which is one of the things that I really miss in most online news sources. The Economist's iPhone app pulls this off pretty well; I hope this helps highlight the editor's role for nytimes.com.
The idea persists that computers and the internet are peripheral to people's lives. Once upon a time, computers were devices purchased to expedite or enhance analog activities. This is no longer true.
As long as you're employed in a 'developed' country, your existence is mediated by computers. You depend on networks and there is no avoiding them or living without them. The difficulty in recognizing this is that the change happened gradually - there was no one moment when suddenly the whole world went digital. We still have analog brains that live in a world built while computers were enormous calculators. At the core, though, is pride. The idea that something is lost when you use a computer, that you took the easy route instead of buckling down and doing something "yourself". It's a problem of perspective.
I agree however that until you've shaken the misconception, you can become a target for people who have. That's the digital divide.
Reddit and HN traffic is not common. It's a small share of the general population, and further, probably overlaps little with the target NYT audience whom they want to upsell to a paid subscription. I read HN; my extended family has never heard of it.
This reminds me of people who are unaware of how small the combined market share is for rdio and spotify, or why networks don't abandon cable tv revenue for cord cutters, despite how seemingly convenient and inexpensive they are. Most people listen to the radio (in the car). Most people subscribe to cable.
I know that the two organisations work very differently behind the scenes but as some one else here mentioned, they're both content aggregators at their core. And let's be honest, if a story is on one news website, it's on all of them so it's not like the NYT is a special place that has all the news no one else has.
There's a lot of reasons why reddit gets much more traffic, but I genuinely believe the way they present their content is more accessible to more people, and that's why they can so successfully grow and retain their user base, and I think that's why simple list presentations consistently win out over complicated presentations. Flip book might be a more sensible comparison, that's an aggregator and it's a bore to use after a while.
And if not the ranking, what part of HN, Reddit, etc. are you praising over NYT?
Do you like just the listing, without the ranking? I think the latter follows from the former. I don't like listing, because it orders articles and artificially gives the higher up ones more importance. NYT headlines instead assign things to levels and categories, based on page location and headline size. Also, in many of the sub-sections, news is organized roughly as its added (newest-oldest), and its assumed that it's important enough to read if it's in the NYT.
Or do you just like the plain text presentation? Fair enough, but I like having more context on the home page.
It may seem messy at first, but as a long-time reader, I love the NYT site for its rich and informational presentation (and content).
You like getting news from aggregators like HN/digg/reddit? Great! Do you think that news is well-presented when you find it (via the above aggregators)? That's a completely separate question.
In both scenarios (reading HN/reddit or reading the NYT/Chicago Tribune), you're consuming content from some sort of layout. I think it's fair to compare those two to each other.
News websites also need to maintain visual continuity between the navigation and the articles themselves, while aggregators only need to design navigation.
And a news site can still have a simple headline page AND consistent when you click through to the articles.
Also, I'm not saying there's no room to add emphasis and prominence to some articles, but I am saying that the way they do it now makes no sense to me, and I'm a designer by trade.
News sites are written consistently. All news stories follow the same format, with the first paragraphs summarising the story. The news site knows if a picture in the story is relevant.
Reddit & HN actually tell us nothing about the best format for news because they quite literally can't serve their links up in a format like this. Each source is too different.
Though I also think it's too busy. But I do not agree at all that HN or Reddit can tell us anything about news sites.
Please just stop doing this, everyone! We do not need a bar following us everywhere by default. As long as it doesn't cause render lag, fixed elements are fine when they're small buttony icons that expand.
At least they've gotten the snap-back right. Some sites, when scrolled to the top, do this awkward infuriating stuttery clip-in nonsense where the scroll position changes as the menu fits back into the content. Just stop.
I use a small screen most of the time, and it sometimes seems like the designers of these sites have never looked at their website on a monitor smaller than 30 inches.
If it's so important that I be easily able to reach some navigation, put a tiny, unobtrusive, go-to-the-top button in a fixed element off to the side which will pop me back up to the nav bar.
Note that you can now scroll through the entire article, no clicking next three times!
EDIT: They seem to do the right thing on articles, but not on the front page.
But what I am most happy about with the new design is that the NYT didn't break the backdoor into reading any article behind the paywall, if you're not a subscriber.
If you run into the paywall that blocks your reading an article, just fire up whatever Twitter app you use (I use Echofon), type the text of the article's headline into the search, search for it, you'll find tons of results almost always, and just click on one of those links.
Presto, you're now reading the article free and clear.
TL;DR If you arrive at a NYT article via a shared social link, you can bypass the subscription paywall.
For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gorbachev/mfojdgde...
For Safari: https://github.com/matthewleon/gorbachev-safari
Open Settings, search for "content settings", click the Manage exceptions button, and add one for [*.]nytimes.com.
i.e. "… using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments, Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework, etc."
You are still constrained with a lot of low power devices on the mobile side and old versions of IE on the desktop side. So it is big PITA to reconcile all of this.
In 5 year they will converge but right now it is too early.
I'm not saying I agree with this (and I don't have any real evidence that this guided the decision) but it is a possibility.
The article pages are great.
Anyone have side-by-side screenshots?
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("www.nytimes.com") {
#masthead {
position: relative !important;
}
}That's SUPER obnoxious.