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Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

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Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#41

Post by bglbrg »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #34
nikcub wrote: post #23

What I find ironic is that when Pump was posted, the alternate to WSGI - everybody jumped on the author and trashed everything about it. Meanwhile some designer suggests that the New York Times trash their entire business and turn it into an ugly looking blog (with padding!) and it gets 500 upvotes. At least the Pump/WSGI proposal was genuine interest and enthusiasm and not condescending. This is a total repeat of th…

It's ironic, but predictable. A site full of hackers is good at picking apart a naive technical idea... not so much a naive design idea. The bigger irony is if you had these discussions on news.ydesigninator.com, the designers would have no opinion at all on the code, because they would realize that they know nothing. But with visual arts, it's easy for us programmers to bike-shed and act like we know something.

naive is the perfect term. Rutledge's ideas about what news should be are quite naive, in fact. Of course good journalists should adhere to strict ethical standards, but all that stuff about how popularity should have no basis, and that "editorial" is a bogeyman? Sounds like he has little context for what news has been in our democracy, and/or just an idealistic worldview. There has never been a crisp line, and it's dangerous to imagine there could be.

I think the best designers get this "real world" aspect of news. Hopefully same goes for you programmers.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#42

Post by thoughtsludge »

Just for perspective, Rutledge harped on Frank Chimero a few months back for getting his book funded on Kickstarter. He was making other brash, insensitive, and short-sighted claims that Chimero was hurting the industry and selling-out.

I'm starting to think he's a bit of a modern design muckraker, pursuing pageviews by stirring the pot. I suspect that Khoi picked up on it, which is why he smartly did not pass on a link and feed the flames.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#43

Post by Darkmusic »

It's sad that people still regard Andy as an "Industry leading expert". Andy voids his own agency's process with this this blog post. He does very little research, makes some bold statments, spends a few hours in photoshop and produces what? A poorly thought out, soap box "solution" with a pretty face. He gives no real thought to advertising, social component (comments, popularity and social media) or the politics involved with news.

The industry should do it's self a favor, hand Andy a muzzle and continue on to bigger and better things. He's scum.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#44

Post by eric-hu »

palish wrote: post #37
esrauch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked for a couple billion-dollar companies, I am pretty sure you are giving them too much credit.

Why do you say that? It seems fairly certain that if NYTimes one day looked like a blog, then their revenue would dry up. It would scare away a lot of people, such as my dad, who don't like change and who don't care about whether a website has rounded corners.

On the other hand, Facebook has forced some fairly annoying changes with their chat interface, news feed and friend/group management. Maybe people won't be scared away that easily (put off is another story).

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#45

Post by resnamen »

I admire Vinh's reserve. Engineering is full of compromises, and few things are more irritating than the guy that walks into the shop and spouts out at the mouth, utterly ignorant of the historical context surrounding the compromises that have been made.

Fresh pairs of eyes are helpful, but there are definitely more constructive ways to offer solutions than operating under the default assumption that everybody else are idiots.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#46

Post by dasil003 »

dmbass wrote: post #5

...the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worse of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site. This guy sounds like the redesigner really hurt his feelings. Why not share the design constraints that the redesigner failed to consider…

How could his feeling not be hurt—at least a little bit—when someone ostensibly knowledgeable comes in and dismisses his work as crap and proceeds to replace it with something stylish and trendy, but failing to meet the requirements?

Vinh's response was measured and appropriate and professional, much more so than Rutledge's original post. I see absolutely no reason why he should waste his time engaging in explanations and dialogue with someone doing a drive-by hit piece on his work.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#47

Post by statictype »

ralphsaunders wrote: post #30
statictype wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we read the same article? Vinh was very respectful to the alternative design. That article you linked to contains a lot of unneeded and useless criticism of the Times that was only peripherally related to any actual design aspects of the site. When he goes off about ads, he's no longer talking about site redesign and is instead advocating that they change their business model. He's certainly free to throw his $0.…

If you read the first four paragraphs of Andy's article you'll realise the piece looks at digital news as a product, so it must address the business model as well as the design.

Well, that was kind of my point. It's completely valid for Andy to propose a new site design, whatever others may think of it. It's difficult to take him seriously when opining on the paper's business model, especially when he's being so harsh about it and hasn't really worked in the industry.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#48

Post by cdcarter »

ricardobeat wrote: post #29
tonydev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fairly plain to see that the "redesign" completely disregards any presence of advertisement. I'd say that would be a constraint failed to be considered.

I think you're missing the part that says Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages.

but...news isn't accessed only via subscription, so you can't really use that justification...

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#49

Post by akkartik »

nostrademons wrote: post #15
dmbass wrote: post #5

...the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worse of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site. This guy sounds like the redesigner really hurt his feelings. Why not share the design constraints that the redesigner failed to consider…

Often knowledge of design constraints is part of an organization's competitive advantage. These are often painstakingly discovered through mistakes, and any competitor has to make the same mistakes to figure them out. If you tell everyone exactly what you did wrong, it won't take them long to start doing things right.

I was thinking the same thing in different terms: open your sources, hide your test cases.

I'm sure the creators of readability have an awesome regression test suite. It would make no sense for them to publish it.

Re: Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)

#50

Post by hendrik-xdest »

This is mostly the same reaction I had when I read the redesign article. Andy blatantly chose to define what is news to drive his design. For example he defined that the most read articles list is not news. Like, the front page of Hacker News is not news because it is a list of elements that have been ordered by how many people read, comment or upvote them and not by the news value specified by grown journalists.
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