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New Boston Globe website design

bostonglobe.com

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Re: New Boston Globe website design

#91

Post by Angostura »

tsunamifury wrote: post #46
chrismealy wrote: post #18

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

Very true. I've done layouts for newspapers before and I've noticed a few things: 1) White space looks wonderful, but for some reason we lend more 'serious creedance' to text that is small and crammed together. 2) Design is good to a point, but then drops off when it begins to feel 'commercial' I think after a hundred years of reading sloppily put together papers chalk full of the latest news, we sort of associate ba…

In the late 1980s there was a nice study that was produced with the advent of the then nwe-fangled laser printers. It showed that journalists were less likely to read a press release if produced in a neat, attractive sans-serif font, and more likely to read it for news content if produced in slightly distressed Courier.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#92

Post by karipatila »

Angostura wrote: post #89

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.

Where do you have to click to display a submenu? At least for me it all works on hover, while clicking will open another page.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#93

Post by maigret »

sogrady wrote: post #75

The real success here - if it is successful - will be convincing readers that have previously had free (for registered users) access to Boston Globe content at Boston.com to pay $208/yr simply for the new interface. It will be the same content, with a few exceptions, simply rehosted at a new site with a new URL. If they're able to convert even a subset of their current audience over, journalists everywhere will rejoi…

Definitely. Still I am not sure if subscription is adapted on the net - do they also offer single issues? As a buyer, I rather pay single issues. At the time where there were only paper issues, we used to take a subscription for the local or national newspapers. Now that the net has so much diversity, I want to multiply my sources. The single issue order that many iPad apps offer seem more comfortable to me.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#94

Post by pflats »

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.

It's worth noting that the Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times Co. I'd be somewhat comfortable (and admittedly, somewhat hopeful) venturing a guess that they're pushing this design as some sort of skunkworks project for their bigger brands.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#95

Post by Angostura »

karipatila wrote: post #92
Angostura wrote: post #89

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.

Where do you have to click to display a submenu? At least for me it all works on hover, while clicking will open another page.

Apologies, I posted before drinking my coffee. You're absolutely right.

What I meant to comment on was the fact that the menu displays when you hover, and then you have to be extremely careful to move your mouse vertically first, lest you accidentally hover over another top-level menu.

It's a question of ease of content-browing v ease of navigability. Having to click on a top level menu item would make the former slower, but would speed up the latter, personally I find the hovver-bother quite annoying.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#96

Post by goatforce5 »

cwe wrote: post #24
voidfiles wrote: post #22

I smell filament group( http://www.filamentgroup.com/ ). Anyone know who led the design?

This redesign is all over filament's home page, so it looks like they indeed were. EDIT: http://filamentgroup.com/lab/introducing_the_new_responsive_...

A video with some Filament guys talking about the project (on boston.com, ironically enough):

http://www.boston.com/video/viral_page/?/services/player/bcp...

Video says the site was by Globe staffers, Filament and Upstatement.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#97

Post by rglover »

Aside from having a great design, what's excellent about this is that they're working with new design concepts and implementing them well. Responsive web design is huge for newspapers and other sites with lots of text and images. The Boston Globe is hopefully the first of many great redesigns using this method.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#98

Post by goatforce5 »

okalex wrote: post #34
jgavris wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gracefully is subjective. media queries feel abrupt, even on my 'fast' machine.

It's not the transition from one layout to another that is graceful. Under normal circumstances, you're not resizing your browser to use a site. What's graceful is the fact that the layout is well suited for each and every resolution you throw at it, whether you're on a full-screen desktop or a mobile phone.

The Globe developed (and released!) an incredibly neat piece of software to let them preview changes on 10+ devices simultaneously.

https://github.com/marstall/shim

You can see it in use very briefly from 1m 18s in:

http://www.boston.com/video/viral_page/?/services/player/bcp...

They should release a video of shim in action. A video explains it much better than words can. (I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak of all their new stuff a little while ago.)

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#100

Post by Isofarro »

ra88it wrote: post #2

Resize the window to see how gracefully the site accomodates a wide range of window sizes (from a phone to a desktop monitor). [edit: After further reflection, I'm stunned by how well they pulled this off. Huge leap forward.]

I'm seeing the right hand adverts chopped off on the right hand side. Both of them. That's not good business if you are relying on advertising revenue to support the financial costs of running a site.

That's one of the drawbacks of this responsive design drive, they don't take into account content that needs to be at a fixed and known size. When an advert gets chopped off or disappears from above the fold - that pushes down the value of advertising on that site. Too much of that and the revenue generated this way drops.

There's no point having the surprised face on declaring that I don't understand the web and it wasn't designed for pixel-specific rectangular spaces. That requirement drives the sustainability of a large number of organisations, there's no point pretending it doesn't exist.

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