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New Boston Globe website design

bostonglobe.com

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Re: New Boston Globe website design

#81

Post by jedc »

idonthack wrote: post #54
Adaptive wrote: post #27

The real success here is not the fluid design (which is awesome). It's getting it through inside a traditional media company. I'd love to read a frank overview of that process as well as the design itself.

the designer is Ethan Marcotte, he's written a book about fluid (or as he calls it, "responsive") web design. http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design one member of the backend dev team was posting in /r/web_design over on reddit. if you're really interested, it couldn't hurt to post a reply and ask him about things. http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/kd2e9/boston_glo...

Ethan has written about his experiences here: http://unstoppablerobotninja.com/entry/the-boston-globe/

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#82

Post by andyking »

jeffool wrote: post #66
Adaptive wrote: post #27

The real success here is not the fluid design (which is awesome). It's getting it through inside a traditional media company. I'd love to read a frank overview of that process as well as the design itself.

Amen. Coming from a history of local news... God they don't understand web design. My local stations still have pop-ups.

I agree. The local newspaper here recently redesigned its website[1] with "social" rubbish baked right in, to the point where the paper's own news feed is now interspersed with the random ramblings of website users, Tweets, rants and ads disguised as articles. I particularly love the way reporters now have their Twitter names instead of actual bylines under their articles (hello, "moontunes1", "lexis1234" and "elksie"!)

It's a pointlessly "social" horror--they seem to have been reading too much trendy babble on TechCrunch or Mashable and too little UX literature. Who told them any of this was a good idea? We visit the local newspaper website to read the stories published by the professional journalists at that paper. If I want to read a stream of tweets and rants, I'll visit Twitter or a forum. What a mess.

[1]: http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/home

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#84

Post by alexkearns »

brackin wrote: post #69
alttab wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That app would be really cool if you could visualize data that imports from other sources. Imagine documenting your facebook pictures instantly through time via the site's meta data and links to the pictures themselves, etc. Well done. I noticed that the navigation gets borked when the screen gets really small. I think the choice here is to show a different navigation menu (rollover menus?).

This exists, look up MemoLane. They're a startup which is exactly like this but for your social network postings.

Of course, I am aware of Memolane. Significantly different product than ours. They are aimed at creating a timeline-based life history by importing all your social media.

We're aimed at allowing people create highly-customisable timelines on any subject for presentations. embedding on websites etc. We 're much more like TimeGlider, Preceden and BeeDoc's Timeline 3D than Memoland.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#85

Post by alexkearns »

toyg wrote: post #38
alttab wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That app would be really cool if you could visualize data that imports from other sources. Imagine documenting your facebook pictures instantly through time via the site's meta data and links to the pictures themselves, etc. Well done. I noticed that the navigation gets borked when the screen gets really small. I think the choice here is to show a different navigation menu (rollover menus?).

It could also benefit from better copy. "Everything from a timeline's colour scheme and date range to its background image and intro text can be changed in the Settings tab." -- a wall of badly-punctuated text, really unappealing. Kudos for the app though, it does look nice. More auto-importing and some iPhone action please :)

Not wanting to be confrontational but what are you talking about. There is nothing wrong with the punctuation of that text. It might not be Dostoyevskian in its elegance but it is grammatically correct.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#87

Post by alexkearns »

Scaevolus wrote: post #59
alexkearns wrote: post #7

I used a similar technique on my web-based timeline-software. The aim was for the timeline to work at almost any size. Not quite perfected it but getting close. If you want to play with the resizing, you can use this link - http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/43/Beautiful-web-bas...

The [More->] windows scroll too slowly. A full finger movement of the wheel only advances the text by a single line. It feels sluggish and frustrating.

We are aware of this issue but it is difficult to solve because each mouse works differently. For instance, the apple touch mice cause scrolling many times faster than the average mouse on a Windows machine.

If we speed up the scrolling for the average mouse, then scrolling will be ridiculously (unusably) fast with the Apple Touch mouse.

We have to achieve a balance -we may not have achieved the best balance but that is quite tricky to do. Bloody technology!

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#88

Post by alexkearns »

brackin wrote: post #69
alttab wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That app would be really cool if you could visualize data that imports from other sources. Imagine documenting your facebook pictures instantly through time via the site's meta data and links to the pictures themselves, etc. Well done. I noticed that the navigation gets borked when the screen gets really small. I think the choice here is to show a different navigation menu (rollover menus?).

This exists, look up MemoLane. They're a startup which is exactly like this but for your social network postings.

Sorry Brackin. I see you were replying to alttab, not me. So ignore previous post. :)

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#89

Post by Angostura »

There's a bit of UX failure here though. The first ting I did was click the left hand top navigation element which displayed the submenu.

I then moved my mouse to select a sub-menu item, crossing another top-level menu item which made the menu disapear.

Granny's not giong to like that, and I personally dislike having to be careful to move my mouse vertically down before crossing to a submenu item.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#90

Post by nikcub »

markmccraw wrote: post #71
chrismealy wrote: post #18

It's weird, when a layout is too clean it feels like the site is fake somehow.

I kind of get that feel too, and I think it might be related to the fact that many spammy/scraper news sites and amateur operations use designs off of themeforest or popular free WP themes, which tend to be fairly minimalist and white space heavy. Whereas pretty much all high end news outlets have extremely busy designs, and we have been conditioned to associate that with trustworthiness.

It is very strange how that works in our minds. You associate sites and immediately discriminate against the content because they look or 'feel' like other sites with less substantial content. For eg. the padding in Google+ gives me a feeling of amateur content (which it is). Same with sans-serif fonts - I got huge push-back at Techcrunch when I wanted to change the default reading font to a serif font, the feedback internally was that the site feels 'too serious'

The business of sites like NYTimes and WSJ make them feel 'authentic' for some reason. I have known this for a long time but couldn't really put my finger on what it was. I remember one of the first client websites I did back in 97 - we laid out absolutely everything that we needed on the page, but there was a lot of space, the client said that the site doesn't feel 'authentic' and I spent a lot of time simply thinking of things to throw onto the page to make it look busier.

I think this is something that a lot of developers and web designers know about, but for some reason I can't recall ever reading anything about it. If anybody knows if this phenomenon has a name or has any more information about it, please share. I have been reading a lot of design books this year and none have made mention of the link between a site being 'busy' and feeling professional

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