Subtraction

I personally find the design of nytimes.com to be cluttered, it’s not that the information isn’t clear or that it’s hard to navigate, it’s that the volume of information on each page is astronomical to the point of confusion.

It seems that there are constantly completely random stories and links scattered across every page, which makes it hard for me to focus.

They should take a note from alistapart.com, who’s primary achievement is the simplicity and clarity with which a vast amount of content is housed in a dead-easy interface.

I think a big driver of why we have these de-facto standards is that the web development industry is particularly prone to trend-following / bandwagonism. Whether it’s the people signing off or the developers themselves I think there is a strong tendency for companies to over-examine their peers’ and competitors’ work before commencing or changing their own. This seems to be why so many competing sites appear cut from the same cloth.

For example, I’ve worked on many a project where great ideas have been vetoed by insecure managers because “that’s not what xxxx is doing”. And just as often where features are included purely through a me-too motivation.

How else can you explain why so much of the web is suddenly in “Beta”, why upcoming web products now have pre-launch websites requiring “invitation codes” and any new web app just isn’t cool unless it has oversized input fields?

I think the only way to avoid this is for the industry to stop navel gazing so much and think about building sites for real users—not to impress other developers or emulate the flavour of the week. The key to innovation and developing better standards is to challenge the status quo and continue to re-evaluate and re-think problems that are too quickly assumed to be solved.

I like The Economist in terms of design and accesibility, among all the news sites.

NYT is too “busy” with all that serif, lack of padding and crowded headlines.

I find Times Select obnoxious, but I may have to buy into it, since I’ve been missing my weekly Frank Rich fix.

As far as the Times’ slow move towards embracing standards, it’s most definitely a good thing for them.  I won’t really comment on whether or not they’re being too slow or too fast about it because the Times site is so incredibly big that it’s bound to take them some time to fully migrate.

As far as design, I think it’s great.  I wouldn’t change much except to migrate it to good code and add a little (just a little) padding here and there.  But there’s no chance in Hell would I want to attempt it!

@oliver - The Times present an “astronomical” amount of content on each page because they produce and archive as much content on a weekly or even daily basis as ALA has in its entire history.

That’s like comparing an essay to an encyclopedia - I just don’t think it’s fair to compare the two.

As I’m from the UK I don’t really see the Times site that much. BBC News is the best news site ever, perhaps because the bbc dont have some 100 year old paper they have to try to emulate and of course there are no adverts.

The primary weakness of most newspaper Web sites is the static, mostly uniform and rarely changing layout. (You could also apply this critique to most online publications in general) On the NYTimes, for example, there’s almost always one photo on the right, four main stories to the left, and a few smaller stories below the photo. I almost yawn everytime I see it. What’s most unfortunate about this layout (besides the sheer soperifity of it making me snooze at my desk) is that it’s a step backwards from paperware. The layout to the newspaper changes every day (around grid-based conventions) to reflect the priority of news items. All the NYTimes does is put up a large font headline during large news stories.

re: Steve’s comment about the static nature of the content. Cut these guys some slack. Information has to be thrown up there probably within a minute or 2 of a breaking story. I think to a large degree that’s what dictates the nature of the front page design especially.

I agree with Steve as well; and I don’t think it’s an issue of the editors having 2 minutes to throw up stories—it’s a technical/production issue.

I’ve not worked in the design/production dept of a paper, but I’d be surprised if they created every frontpage layout from scratch each day. I would guess they have a library of templates, each allowing for different emphasis and story count and so on. If they need to blow through a column (within the grid still) for a specific case they can do that—the difference in doing that in Quark/InDesign/etc. compared to the work required to do the same in HTML/CSS is pretty significant.

So I think it’s largely that web page design/production is still too primitive to allow for this sort of (relatively) easy flexibility. I’d think they could still have a few variations, but in online publishing it’s often much deeper than just changing a template - the entire backend needs to be able to accommodate the variations.

I suspect in the next couple years we’ll start to see more variation in the pages, similar to print papers. And as for lack of illustrations, well ask an illustrator if you really want to hear a tirade on that! Long-standing gripes on the declining usage of illustrators and trend towards stock everything.

I wonder what the people at the Times would say to the ‘fishwrap’ theory of New York Times online pricing (’today it’s news, tomorrow it’s fishwrap’).  I’ve read this idea on numerous blogs, but it makes sense to me.  The New York Times archival content value, on an individual article basis, seems very low, unless you are the type of user who is probably already paying for a Lexis subscription.  Speaking personally, I’ve probably found several hundred articles in the Times archives that I’ve wanted to read, but I’ve never paid for a single one.  The pricing structure seems insane.  Furthermore, from the Grey Lady’s perspective, it would seem that maintaining her position as the “paper of record” would be of paramount importance, and every time a potential reader is turned away from an archived story by the fee system, a tiny chip is taken out of the pedestal.

On the flip side, *today’s* New York Times is of very high value to me, I’m already accustomed to paying for it.  I pay for timely access to the Wall Street Journal and numerous other internet resources, and I would certainly pay some percentage of a traditional subscription fee to access the day’s news.

The model seems backwards: make the archives free, make today’s news subscription-based.  It would also be possible to explore various single-viewing options (extremely small payments, Salon-style ‘Day Passes’, partnering with other companies to provide day passes as promotion...).  After 24-48 hours, all the premium content becomes free and accessible via the archives.  Email it to your friends, etc., etc.

What am I missing here?

The NYT Select program will finally answer the question about blogs’ ability to help shape public discourse. I’ve already seen a chart showing a noticeable drop in links to the Select columns after the imposition of fees. Will that be enough to devalue NYT’s currency of record, relevance and initiator of agendas?

Re: copying what NYT does to convince clients is a losing proposition in the long run, whether you call it best practice or not. You give doubting clients the perfect ammunition to devalue Design. You are saying it’s OK to copy big sites simply because they are big, for the design and performance of the NYT dropdown menu itself is pretty poor. Well, if it’s OK to copy one feature, your client might think, why not the whole site? Why bother with contextual thinking or original design? Why spend money on design research? Why create several prototypes? Why experiment at all? Why bother?

“the fact that ‘the Times does it’ is proof enough that a convention is widely understood and acceptable.”

Not necessary so. The whole visual concept of the NYT (as already discussed) is something that’s not likely to be followed by another team, so I see no reason to follow navigation/usability conventions by default, neither.

Also, from case to case, the approach and the decisions depend on the project at hand (nothing new, you’ll agree).

In the last six months, we’ve been working on a three different Croatian newspaper sites (and almost managed the fourth) and each has a fair share of differences. Some decisions were made by the designers and designers only, some by information architect, and sometimes we simply had to go after what the client requested, and hoped for the best.

Said that, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to follow any decisions/solutions blindly, if one has not a clear understanding of what factors preceded that decision.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to be able to maximise my browser window and have a news service add columns/boxes to take up the full width - that would give the feel of a big, opened newspaper.

I don’t like the New York Times DHTML menu. Granted, it’s better than many, but I think it’s ugly and feels kind of like a hack.

Moreover, it’s unnecessary. I never needed it before and I never use it now.

I know I’m come late to this article, but am compelled to comment anyway.  I think about these issues quite a lot and find almost all online versions of newspapers, NYT among them, to be among the worst the web has to offer in terms of layout, legibility, usability, information architecture and everything else that matters to online content consumption.

In fact I wrote about these things back in May, 2005. The article sums up my take better than I could regurgitate here. FWIW.