Five thoughts about the USA Today redesign
USA Today relaunched it’s site this week with a new look and a new set of interactivity and community-building tools. Yep, someone poked USA Today with the Web 2.0 stick. But does does it work?
Here are my five quick takes:
1. A Newspaper as an interactive community? On the new USA Today site, the biggest change is the addition of a host of interative, community-building tools. Readers can not only post comments on news pieces, recommend stories, and rate other people’s comments. Moreover, you can set up a profile, post your photo, keep track of other readers, and even blog on the site itself.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, but do most users that come to a news site want to read what other readers have to say about a news story? Do most readers really want to create buddy lists of other readers on a given site? Is it worth re-arranging the whole design and layout of your site to make interaction the central focus of your site? Ultimately, shouldn’t a newspaper’s web site should be about delivering its professionally-written content to the widest possible audience? All the extra gadgets and features are cool, but if they interfere with easy navigation, reliable content, and access to good content, why bother? Yahoo News is just a click away…
All the extra gadgets and features are cool, but if they interfere with easy navigation, reliable content, and access to good content, why bother? Yahoo News is just a click away… 2. Thumbnails as navigation? Prior to the redesign, USA Today’s design was simple and effective — clear navigation, color themes by section, and a rotating multi-header for top stories. In the new design, they top story space has been replaced with a odd experiment of image-based links. To the left of the top story, there are four thumbnail images that a user can hover over to preview one of the other top stories. But there is no text to help the user understand what the preview is about, or what the link goes to. A reader has to guess what a postage-stamp sized thumbnail is about and hover over it to get more of a hint. Is this really a step forward in navigation? Is USA Today really trying to make finding stories a game? Cute idea, but not really a design change that benefits readers.
3. Comments above all? As part of USA Today’s new embrace of reader interactivity, the redesign took a prominent spot at the very top of the page that previously linked to a rotating series of stories and replaced it with a box that highlights, in big text, excerpts of comments from readers. Visually, it is saying that user comments are as important as any of their stories. The decision to use valuable “above the fold” pixel space for glorifying random comments is a questionable one to begin with, but it’s poorly executed, either way. The widget of rotating quotes shows part of a comment and identifies the author, but doesn’t show what article they are referring to. Again, you have no idea what it links to. You have to guess what something like “beware of the channels you use to share ideas” means. Of course, if you click on the comment quote, it will take you to the story in question. But again, is navigation by guesswork and curiosity really an improvement in design?
4. Icons overload? On the new site, every story now sports icons and numbers that show the number of comments and recommendations for a given article. It’s a lot of visual clutter. Seems like USA Today really wants to be the mainsteam media’s Digg or Fark. But is that their real audience? My guess is that unlike the tecnho-geeky audience of many news-aggregator sites, USA Today has a lot of older reader who will be a bit baffled by all the funny-looking icons and numbers near every headline.
5. “A” for effort, “D” for Delivery. As you can tell, I’m not sold at all that a newspaper should try to fashion itself as some kind of massive, mainstam blog. But give them credit, they didn’t go at this half-heartedly — it’s clear from the redesign that USA Today now sees reader interactivity as the biggest function of its web site. In the long run, maybe this will boost USA Today’s traffic and it will become a model for other online magazines and newspapers.
Or maybe not.
Ultimately, whether or not the new focus on reader participation is a good idea, design-wise, I think it’s a mess. They’ve taken a clean, easy-to-navigate site and made it harder to use. They’ve made such a push for comments, that they’ve buried some of their content to make room for quotes from random readers. If they really think readers are coming to their site to see what other readers are saying, great. But if most readers are coming to read professional journalism, they’ve done those readers a disservice in the name of “progress”.
