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The New York Times Redesign is Live

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Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#91

Post by room271 »

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.

Mobile phones (via apps) are a lot more monetisable. Part of the decision may have been motivated by this (i.e. push mobile users towards the apps by limiting the responsiveness of the main website).

I'm not saying I agree with this (and I don't have any real evidence that this guided the decision) but it is a possibility.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#92

Post by tammer »

belluchan wrote: post #52
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…

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…

laziness, reluctance & stagnation are ways of looking at it. I think it's a misconception.

The idea persists that computers and the internet are peripheral to people's lives. Once upon a time, computers were devices purchased to expedite or enhance analog activities. This is no longer true.

As long as you're employed in a 'developed' country, your existence is mediated by computers. You depend on networks and there is no avoiding them or living without them. The difficulty in recognizing this is that the change happened gradually - there was no one moment when suddenly the whole world went digital. We still have analog brains that live in a world built while computers were enormous calculators. At the core, though, is pride. The idea that something is lost when you use a computer, that you took the easy route instead of buckling down and doing something "yourself". It's a problem of perspective.

I agree however that until you've shaken the misconception, you can become a target for people who have. That's the digital divide.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#93

Post by brianstorms »

I like the new design, especially the more iPad-friendly article pages.

But what I am most happy about with the new design is that the NYT didn't break the backdoor into reading any article behind the paywall, if you're not a subscriber.

If you run into the paywall that blocks your reading an article, just fire up whatever Twitter app you use (I use Echofon), type the text of the article's headline into the search, search for it, you'll find tons of results almost always, and just click on one of those links.

Presto, you're now reading the article free and clear.

TL;DR If you arrive at a NYT article via a shared social link, you can bypass the subscription paywall.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#94

Post by donkeyponcho »

brianstorms wrote: post #93

I like the new design, especially the more iPad-friendly article pages. But what I am most happy about with the new design is that the NYT didn't break the backdoor into reading any article behind the paywall, if you're not a subscriber. If you run into the paywall that blocks your reading an article, just fire up whatever Twitter app you use (I use Echofon), type the text of the article's headline into the search, s…

There's a browser extension called Gorbachev that makes this a lot easier.

For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gorbachev/mfojdgde...

For Safari: https://github.com/matthewleon/gorbachev-safari

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#95

Post by tomelders »

sd8f9iu wrote: post #72
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 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?

I wasn't arguing for that, that road leads to gizmodo and TMZ. I'm talking purely about how the content is presented, and within that there is still room for hierarchy and emphasis, but what the NYT has produced is a muddy incoherent mess.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#96

Post by tomelders »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #70
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…

> the common or garden user Reddit and HN traffic is not common. It's a small share of the general population, and further, probably overlaps little with the target NYT audience whom they want to upsell to a paid subscription. I read HN; my extended family has never heard of it. This reminds me of people who are unaware of how small the combined market share is for rdio and spotify, or why networks don't abandon cabl…

Reddit gets over 100 million uniques a month. The NYT gets about 12 million.

I know that the two organisations work very differently behind the scenes but as some one else here mentioned, they're both content aggregators at their core. And let's be honest, if a story is on one news website, it's on all of them so it's not like the NYT is a special place that has all the news no one else has.

There's a lot of reasons why reddit gets much more traffic, but I genuinely believe the way they present their content is more accessible to more people, and that's why they can so successfully grow and retain their user base, and I think that's why simple list presentations consistently win out over complicated presentations. Flip book might be a more sensible comparison, that's an aggregator and it's a bore to use after a while.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#97

Post by tomelders »

fastball wrote: post #87
timjahn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see your point. News sites want to post a blurb and a picture, but reddits traffic tells me that users don't really care.

And a news site can still have a simple headline page AND consistent when you click through to the articles.

Also, I'm not saying there's no room to add emphasis and prominence to some articles, but I am saying that the way they do it now makes no sense to me, and I'm a designer by trade.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#98

Post by Wilduck »

babby wrote: post #48

The design is overall asthetically pleasing. I just can't fucking take this trend of fixed bars molesting my vertical resolution and screwing with my habitual behavior of scanning from the top of the page down as I scroll. This site's top bar on single pages is so edgy that it's not even at the very top (a concept I've at least gotten acclimated to) and manages to blend into the actual article content due to low cont…

I agree totally. This trend is infuriating. When I have to read an article on the site with a top bar I often go into the developer tools and delete that node from the DOM. There are sites that make even that measure impossible, like gmail, which is even more infuriating.

I use a small screen most of the time, and it sometimes seems like the designers of these sites have never looked at their website on a monitor smaller than 30 inches.

If it's so important that I be easily able to reach some navigation, put a tiny, unobtrusive, go-to-the-top button in a fixed element off to the side which will pop me back up to the nav bar.

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#99

Post by sd8f9iu »

tomelders wrote: post #95
sd8f9iu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I wasn't arguing for that, that road leads to gizmodo and TMZ. I'm talking purely about how the content is presented, and within that there is still room for hierarchy and emphasis, but what the NYT has produced is a muddy incoherent mess.

What road are you talking about that leads to Gizmodo and TMZ? The one I described (ranking by upvotes) is used by HN and Reddit.

And if not the ranking, what part of HN, Reddit, etc. are you praising over NYT?

Do you like just the listing, without the ranking? I think the latter follows from the former. I don't like listing, because it orders articles and artificially gives the higher up ones more importance. NYT headlines instead assign things to levels and categories, based on page location and headline size. Also, in many of the sub-sections, news is organized roughly as its added (newest-oldest), and its assumed that it's important enough to read if it's in the NYT.

Or do you just like the plain text presentation? Fair enough, but I like having more context on the home page.

It may seem messy at first, but as a long-time reader, I love the NYT site for its rich and informational presentation (and content).

Re: The New York Times Redesign is Live

#100

Post by mattmanser »

tomelders wrote: post #97
fastball wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see your point. News sites want to post a blurb and a picture, but reddits traffic tells me that users don't really care. And a news site can still have a simple headline page AND consistent when you click through to the articles. Also, I'm not saying there's no room to add emphasis and prominence to some articles, but I am saying that the way they do it now makes no sense to me, and I'm a designer by trade.

Reddit, like HN, actually deals with a huge range of sources where all the content is written very differently.

News sites are written consistently. All news stories follow the same format, with the first paragraphs summarising the story. The news site knows if a picture in the story is relevant.

Reddit & HN actually tell us nothing about the best format for news because they quite literally can't serve their links up in a format like this. Each source is too different.

Though I also think it's too busy. But I do not agree at all that HN or Reddit can tell us anything about news sites.

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