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 met regardless of the way the world actually works? Probably both.
Also, I think Digg deserves more credit for finding a successful mid point between lists and designed layouts.
That's not to say there's no room for design, but this new NYT layout is anything but design. It's the same wall of information with sporadic and indecipherable levels of emphasis made to look mildly palatable for another couple of years. If the NYT has anything interesting to say, I'll wait for it to appear on HN, Digg or Reddit.
It's not "bosses v. designers", it's a newspaper failing to grasp that when you put a newspaper online it doesn't have the same visual constraints a printed newspaper have. Either that, or it's the newspaper totally getting that they do need to look like that to not confuse the heck out of the large constituency of readers that are slightly older and less tech-savvy than the Reddit crowd.
But yeah, I'm with you, I'm pretty far down the procrastination list before I open a newspaper web-front-page.
I'm a fan of print newspaper layouts so the closer the digital product can be to that, the better.
This layout (as opposed to a list format)makes browsing and discovering articles outside of my normal focus areas much easier as the headlines don't all blend together.
I'm not sure what the best layout would be, but for a newspaper, the NYTimes current style is better than a Hackernews style list.
I wonder how much of thinking in the past affects more of of a newspaper's thought process on online?
For instance, NY Times insists on using the delivery model for charging for online access. Additionally, the local newspaper here tries to use every new shiny toy they can. At the moment, it's auto play videos. lol
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 stories with lots of upvotes or comments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 record or tape player. I qualify older with stagnant because as I'm getting older I'm aware that it's not so much about age than a common laziness and reluctance to deal with an ever increasing pace of innovation. And that reluctance affects us all because it comes with scams, toolbars, shitty ads and botnets.
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.
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.
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).
Are you honestly comparing reddit and hn to the New York Times? You can't just lump those sites in together as "news sites," they are completely different in content and purpose...
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.
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 cable tv revenue for cord cutters, despite how seemingly convenient and inexpensive they are. Most people listen to the radio (in the car). Most people subscribe to cable.
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.
I suspect it’s more that image macros and memes appeal to a wider audience than does the kind of carefully curated news, analysis, and longform content that the NYT produces. I guess I’m not really sure where to begin comparing audience metrics between reddit and NYT as if their offerings were similar at all? Is this a real comparison that real people are making?
Another thing Digg deserves tons of credit for is emphasizing visual journalism along with text. There is no excuse not to include at least an eye-grabbing photo with most stories.
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 contrast.
Please just stop doing this, everyone! We do not need a bar following us everywhere by default. As long as it doesn't cause render lag, fixed elements are fine when they're small buttony icons that expand.
At least they've gotten the snap-back right. Some sites, when scrolled to the top, do this awkward infuriating stuttery clip-in nonsense where the scroll position changes as the menu fits back into the content. Just stop.
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.
I like the clean typography, and appreciate that they were content with subtle changes rather than something "radical." But why, oh why, did they add one of those horrible floating bars at the top of the screen? Those things almost always break page-down, yo!
The only time I dislike the top bar is when they're too tall or there's not enough height in the view port. I think this one is as good as they get, though. I do wish they only enabled it at a minimum height. Designers only seem to think about min-width, not so much min-height.
True, I can still hit the space bar, but it does something different and broken. Try paging down on HN, and you'll see that the bottom 1-2 lines are preserved at the top of the screen, so you don't lose your place. Now try it on NYT: at least for me, there is absolutely no context preserved. That's better than the all-too-frequent case where a line is missed entirely, but it still makes reading harder. Plus, I'm so used to lousy sites that skip a line on page-down that I don't trust the NYT's version not to do so.
EDIT: They seem to do the right thing on articles, but not on the front page.
The front page is working correctly for me in Firefox 26. When I hit page down or space the two lines that were at the very bottom of the screen move to just below the top bar.
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.
I'm underwhelmed. They should have hired the firm that did http://globe.com . I'm actually puzzled they didn't considering their ownership of the Globe at the time of that redesign.
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.
Using Chrome, I configured nytimes.com cookies to "Clear on exit" from each browser session. Since I restart my browser at least once a day, and I only land on the New York Times as a result of links, I never hit the monthly limit of 10 free articles.
Open Settings, search for "content settings", click the Manage exceptions button, and add one for [*.]nytimes.com.
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"...
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."
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.
The article pages are somewhat responsive, while the index pages are not. I think that's a nice balance. I've always found responsive designs jarring when multiple columns collapse.
As a person that currently maintains separate versions for desktop and mobile - it is not shameful. It is just good sense.
You are still constrained with a lot of low power devices on the mobile side and old versions of IE on the desktop side. So it is big PITA to reconcile all of this.
In 5 year they will converge but right now it is too early.
The needs of both are the same: simple, readable design. Every time I see a site with these two versions I've found that I preferred one to the other, on both devices - either the desktop version's better even on mobile, or (usually) the mobile version's better even on desktop.
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.
The NYT redesign is a failure, on the public editor column's comments section 21 people liked the new design while over 700 people are complaining: Navigation. layout, fonts and accessibility are all hindering subscribers use of the site.
Visiting the site not very often I think I wouldn't have recognized it as a "redesign". Feels more like "some tweaks".
Was hoping for some whitespace, the elements are quite cramped together.
The font size on the article pages now seems better, but the homepage is still tiny. I zoom the homepage 120% (two steps in Firefox), but now I don't need to zoom the article pages. With a browser that remembers zooming per-(sub)domain, this works well since I read the international edition, which has it's own subdomain.
Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be met regardless of the way the world actually works? Probably both.
Also, I think Digg deserves more credit for finding a successful mid point between lists and designed layouts.
That's not to say there's no room for design, but this new NYT layout is anything but design. It's the same wall of information with sporadic and indecipherable levels of emphasis made to look mildly palatable for another couple of years. If the NYT has anything interesting to say, I'll wait for it to appear on HN, Digg or Reddit.