Archive for the “usability” category
Connecting people to people
Thursday, November 22, 2007The missing link in the concept of “community” on news organizations’ Web sites: Who are these people? New media consultant Marshall Kirkpatrick says you can add the necessary social glue without trying to look like a cheesy Facebook imitator:
… instead of adding a social network to their site, they should just add rich user profile [...]
Looking ahead to the ‘iPod moment’ for newspapers
Friday, September 21, 2007What the iPod has done to the music business, another device will do to the newspaper business, writes Charles Arthur, a technology editor at The Guardian. This is not a new notion, but Arthur’s post is particularly well written and thought provoking. More important, Arthur writes about the idea of change — not merely about [...]
Web design 101: What the audience sees
Monday, September 3, 2007A colleague from another university recently polled a Listserv about how students should test their online page designs. Here are some concrete data from this blog, from the FeedBurner statistics from Aug. 1-30, 2007.
First, the common screen resolutions used by real people:
You can see that although the screen resolutions larger than 1024 x 768 add [...]
Infographic: Minneapolis bridge
Friday, August 3, 2007The New York Times has put its well-developed graphic template (made with Flash, naturally) to good use on the bridge collapse story. I really admire this template. It’s clear to me that it eases workflow a lot — with the template perfected, the news graphics artists can focus on the images to be used, the [...]
Designing a much better news home page
Friday, July 6, 2007Every so often, I blurt out something about how UGLY most newspaper Web pages are. Ugly to look at, ugly to use, hard to parse, cluttered — all of the above.
Designer Andy Rutledge has written a wonderful point-by-point comparison, with illustrations, showing why USA Today’s recent Web redesign is “uglier” than CNN’s even more recent [...]
Disappearing multimedia: This is nuts
Sunday, May 27, 2007You have eight talented journalists working for hours under deadline pressure. They produce one of the best-ever examples of online storytelling. You post it on your Web site. You link it very prominently to the related stories. You feature it in the printed newspaper. And rightly so! It is a great achievement. It is a [...]
