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The New York Times Redesign is Live

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Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#71

If I may take a moment to whinge and whine a tad; Websites like this infuriate me because for all their "design", sites like Reddit and HN (which are basically just lists) are delivering news in a much more consumable fashion, better suited to the eating habits of the common or garden user. Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be me…

My dad finds sites like Reddit/Digg/HN totally overwhelming, and I doubt he's alone. It's generational. Sites like NYT use standard design techniques to direct your attention (font size, etc) that work really well for people that are more-accustomed to traditional media. And, frankly, seeing a huge-headline is a much more-immediate way to indicate the importance of a topic than scanning down a list and looking for st…

Funnily, I find digg/reddit/hn easy to skim, while NYT's front page layout is overwhelming to me (well, not easy to quickly skim for interesting content).

So I guess it depends on what you're used to. As usual.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#72

If I may take a moment to whinge and whine a tad; Websites like this infuriate me because for all their "design", sites like Reddit and HN (which are basically just lists) are delivering news in a much more consumable fashion, better suited to the eating habits of the common or garden user. Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be me…

I don't always want my news ranked in a list by upvotes and an algorithm, thank you very much. I find sites that rely on user input to rank stories are prone to spreading rumors and emotional, link-bait news. I trust the New York Times to present to me a variety of stories in what they think is the best way. What is it with this obsession with the idea that the view of the mob must be the best way?

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#73

The changes on the homepage a minimal, howserver they have made some big changes to the artical pages ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/business/international/asi... ). Note that you can now scroll through the entire article, no clicking next three times!

Ah, nice pointing that out. Funny that the homepage is not responsive, but the article pages are.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#74
Details about the redesign and technology overhaul: http://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/behind-scenes-nyt-...

i.e. "… using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments, Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework, etc."

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#75
The design is almost skeumorphic in its replication of an actual newspaper. I can understand wanting to do that for branding reasons, the same way Craigslist is successfully branded as anti-design. But the wall of information is just such a bad UX... if they want the site to look like the paper, they should redesign both to have a legible content hierarchy.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#76

If I may take a moment to whinge and whine a tad; Websites like this infuriate me because for all their "design", sites like Reddit and HN (which are basically just lists) are delivering news in a much more consumable fashion, better suited to the eating habits of the common or garden user. Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be me…

Agreed. There's reddit and on the other end there's pinterest. Both of those work in their context, but this nytimes redesign is skeuomorphism and all that's missing is the fake paper background image. As someone else points out it's probably because of all the older, stagnant people who expect newspapers to look like this. If these types of people listened to music online you'd probably see spotify's UI look like a…

this nytimes redesign is skeuomorphism

Really? I don't see that at all. This redesign looks nothing like a newspaper to me. The closest I can see to any newspaper metaphor is the left/right navigation to switch between stories, which really is nothing like how I switch stories in a physical newspaper.

The front page seems much the same, content-wise, but the article view is dramatically improved from a usability standpoint. The switch to single-page is a fantastic change in and of itself.

I'm interested to see if the new top nav and right/left experience does a better job of providing me with a curated news experience, which is one of the things that I really miss in most online news sources. The Economist's iPhone app pulls this off pretty well; I hope this helps highlight the editor's role for nytimes.com.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#77
post #40

How do you like the typography? I find e.g. the italic font for the headlines in the left column or the small all caps serif format of the bylines to be somewhat detrimental to readability.

I was just going to say the font sucks, there's a million free fonts on google fonts that look great... and they appear to have gone with times new roman for no particular reason.

Just ... wow.
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