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The New York Times Redesign is Live

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Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#81

Post by j_baker »

tomelders wrote: post #32

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 understand your complaint. NYT is a news source. HN/Reddit/Digg are content aggregators. The two things serve different purposes. It's like complaining that your faucet hasn't kept up with watering things like your water hose has.

You like getting news from aggregators like HN/digg/reddit? Great! Do you think that news is well-presented when you find it (via the above aggregators)? That's a completely separate question.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#83

Post by wtallis »

Kartificial wrote: post #16
xux wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they redirect to mobile.* though

So they still hold on to the old train of thought of desktop users and mobile users. Shame really.

There will always be good reasons to design a site differently for touchscreens than for keyboard+mouse devices.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#85

Post by timjahn »

j_baker wrote: post #81
tomelders wrote: post #32

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 understand your complaint. NYT is a news source. HN/Reddit/Digg are content aggregators. The two things serve different purposes. It's like complaining that your faucet hasn't kept up with watering things like your water hose has. You like getting news from aggregators like HN/digg/reddit? Great! Do you think that news is well-presented when you find it (via the above aggregators)? That's a completely separat…

Isn't a news source like the NYT also just a content aggregator? They're aggregating all sorts of content (business, technology, sports, weather, etc.) and displaying it to you to consume.

In both scenarios (reading HN/reddit or reading the NYT/Chicago Tribune), you're consuming content from some sort of layout. I think it's fair to compare those two to each other.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#86

Post by philip1209 »

johnnymonster wrote: post #41
k2enemy wrote: post #18

I hope they find ways to speed things up. When I return to the main page from a story, I have to wait five seconds while items on the front page bounce around as things load. This is on a very fast connection and a mac pro.

They have some extremely poor performance optimizations err NO performance optimizations on the front page. TONS of individual unscaled images loading. Someone might want to introduce them to a product called "Pagespeed"...

It looks like they're running Varnish for caching the pages - is the main issue the images?

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#87

Post by fastball »

timjahn wrote: post #85
j_baker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your complaint. NYT is a news source. HN/Reddit/Digg are content aggregators. The two things serve different purposes. It's like complaining that your faucet hasn't kept up with watering things like your water hose has. You like getting news from aggregators like HN/digg/reddit? Great! Do you think that news is well-presented when you find it (via the above aggregators)? That's a completely separat…

Isn't a news source like the NYT also just a content aggregator? They're aggregating all sorts of content (business, technology, sports, weather, etc.) and displaying it to you to consume. In both scenarios (reading HN/reddit or reading the NYT/Chicago Tribune), you're consuming content from some sort of layout. I think it's fair to compare those two to each other.

News aggregators are not hosting the actual content, which is very key to the design. For news articles, usually you want to post a small blurb or a picture, where as a news aggregator is nothing but the title.

News websites also need to maintain visual continuity between the navigation and the articles themselves, while aggregators only need to design navigation.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#88

Post by AJ007 »

roadnottaken wrote: post #45
tomelders wrote: post #32

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…

The Drudge Report skews heavily for an older (50+) male demographic (going by Quantcast.) The design is text heavy, small fonts. A more static version of HN/Reddit, from one or two contributors rather than a community.

Design has not changed since 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19971210093544/http://www.drudge...

19 million+ US uniques makes it a very important news site (NYTimes has about the same amount.)

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#90

Post by room271 »

tomelders wrote: post #32

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 sympathise to some extent. But this is not an entirely scientific perspective. The NYT will undoubtedly have performed significant user testing and also looked at the metrics (articles read, time spent, etc.) before making this switch.
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