The Modern Journalist

4 Thoughts on Design

My main point is that the tradeoffs should usually be skewed further in the direction of “Obvious” than we care to think. (Don’t Make Me Think, p 14)

I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about the editorial side of digital news, but that’s only part of the story. In fact, it’s not even half of the story because there are so many other aspects of a modern news organization (sales, marketing, circulation and design).

The irony is that the content is the third thing people notice about your site, which inherently makes it the second most important part of the site — if you go by the top down mentality.

The most important aspect of a site is functionality. When you type in the URL or click on a search link, that site better load — and load fast. Regardless of what the site looks like and what the site says, people want the site to work.

Every click is a promise to your user that they will have a functioning, fast experience. Break that promise, you’ll lose readers.

The second important aspect is design. Once that site loads, you better have an easy-to-use visual navigation that 1) let’s me know who you are what you do, 2) displays in simple terms what is important, 3) makes search prominent and 4) tells me where to start.

An epic fail on those four parts breaks your promise to the reader and will limit your growth. But there are ways to avoid that.

When you site down to architect your site, the first thing you need to do is take a serious look at what you do — and throw out every convention you have used in the paper.

Start from scratch. What you’re doing online is different than what you do in print.

You need to re-examine what you call sections; you need to re-examine how you construct and archive data; you need to examine what goes in a footer (there’s a standard expectation); you need to examine what goes in the header (there’s a standard expectation).

You need to understand that how you want your reader to use the site has no basis in the reality of how they will use it.

At Technology Review, the first thing I did was take our multi-topic area with two navigation systems down to one system with 5 topics. We eliminated near 60 navigation and sub-navigation terms.

You know what happened? Traffic spiked. People could more easily find what they were looking for because we simplified everything.

In a modern world, you don’t need tabbed navigation for EVERY subsection. Use tags to allow people to do targeted search — but do not combine that with the search box. Better yet, let the users tag stories along with your tags.

In the past ten years I’ve spent a lot of time watching people use the Web, and the thing that has struck me most is the difference between how we think people use Web sites and how they actually use them…We’re thinking “great literature (or at least “product brochure”) while they user’s reality is much closer to “billboard going by at 60 miles per hour. (Don’t Make me Think, p 21)

When everything on the page is clamoring for my attention the effect can be overwhelming: Lots of invitations to buy! Lots of exclamation points and bright colors! A lot of shouting going on. (Don’t Make me Think, p 38)

It’s also important to realize that not everything is important. It’s just not. I don’t care what people in your organization say, some of the crap that’s produced doesn’t need it’s own box on the home page.

Your home is a front door, window shopping.

Ask yourself what you do: what is your core mission? Once you answer that question, you can design an architecture with proper navigation (because your tabs will be in that mission) and you’ll understand what it is that you are trying to do.

Advertisers love that because they can determine the type of audience you reach; but your design architect will love you because they can easily create a series of layouts that enhance that mission.

That’s how you keep your pages from turning into a circus sideshow.

When we were redesigning Technology Review, we had a series of off-site meeting with the management team to discuss what our core mission was. We thought we knew, but it evolved over the course of the week. (Actually, we basically settled on what had been discussed with my information discussions with the other managers while we did the basic redesign: Information Technology, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Energy).

Our magazine and conference businesses were also important to us.

Since I left, they’ve added BizTech, Blogs, Video and Newsletters to the mix. The point is this: our core mission is to report on those 6 topic areas using 3 other forms of communication — blogs, video and newsletters — all wrapped with a conference.

That is the Technology Review experience.

Partly, I think, because good multi-level navigation is just plain hard to design — given the limited amount of space on the page, and the number of elements that have to be squeezed in.

Partly because designers usually don’t even have enough time to figure out the first two levels.

Partly because it just doesn’t seem that important.

And then there’s the problem with getting sample content and hierarchy examples for lower-level pages. (Don’t Make me Think, p 71)

The design process was a nightmare, though, because the editorial department would never sit down to tell us exactly what they wanted to do.

Instead, the print side — which hadn’t yet been melded with the online side to create one editorial staff — refused to sit down and lay out what they wanted. We received a series of generalities.

Finally, I told my boss — if they weren’t going to help, they would be stuck with what we did.

After a few stops and starts, Jason — who understood what we needed and supported us — convinced the print editors that buy-in was necessary. And after the print folks saw what we were doing — and freaked out a little bit — they came to the table.

While the site has evolved since I’ve left, the basic framework we designed is still the framework. There has been no front-end overhaul because: 1) we designed with Web principles (no more than a one-second load time, syndication based, simple navigation — which is different than the magazine’s navigation, btw), 2) we eventually included the entire staff and 3) we did a usability test on the project to see what was working.

But the reality is that we’re often dropped in the middle of a site with no idea where we are because we’ve followed a link from a search engine or from another site, and we’ve never seen this site’s navigation scheme before (Don’t Make me Think, p 85)

That last point — usability testing — is the most overlooked part of the process.

I simply refused to listen to any discussion that started with “When I use the Web…” because it’s counter-productive. We all use the Web differently; and we use the Web differently depending upon the task we’re trying to solve.

You are using this site differently than you use Google.

So designing for “the average experience” is ridiculous. If a researcher found an article through Google and came to our site just to read and leave, great. But I’m not designing my site for that person.

Instead, I’m working to make sure that the experience for everyone is simple, efficient and offers tools enough to complete any task they want with no more than a one-second load wait.

Throughout the design process, though, you need to develop several iterations of the site and test them. And if you don’t know how to construct and run a usability test, you probably shouldn’t be in charge of the redesign.

Web design is not graphic design. You design for web interactivity and functionality, not anything else.

Remember, functionality trumps design navigation and architecture. Design navigation and architecture trumps content.

When you’re running your tests, you have to make sure that you are testing functionality, design and content. They need to work together; however, when you’re making decisions about what goes where or what name is used, you need to keep that hierarchy in order.

Functionality –> Design Architecture –> Content

Otherwise you have a pretty site with good navigation that doesn’t work or you have a smart site where nobody can find anything and none of the tools work.