USA Today: Mission Accomplished
When I read this morning that USA Today “refashions itself as a social network”, I got a little shock as I was worried that they are going to eat our client’s lunch. Fear nothing, client. Among information designers the USA Today redesign is a laughing stock.
Blue: Navigation
Red: Advertisement
Green: Content
Yellow: Brand elements
White: Passive whitespace
Ads dominate, navigation is scattered, the brand is weak, content elements look like advertisement. The User needs to invest a lot of attention to understand what is what. In short: Fire your designer.
Social is not the Story here
I know from my own experience that whoever redesigns a major site gets under heavy fire attack from the whiny dumbass I-liked-it-like-it-was users. But this is really another story. This is objectively bad.
Apart from Edelman’s Mr. Nice Steve Rubel, who always has a good word for everyone - even for us -, no one can seriously find a good word about USA Today’s redesign, unless they’re drunk or paid to do so. Yes, it’s good to be positive, and certainly, to open up is a necessessary and obvious step for newspapers, but if you look at what they did wrong with this one, social is not the real story here. This design is crap.
- They plastered the site with advertisement
- Navigation is a scattered bunch of words
- Navigational elements are not properly grouped
- Involuntary white space blows the grid into pieces
- No consistent link definition
- No visible horizontal or vertical structure
- Use of left, center and right align is random
- No leading of the eye from top left to bottom right
- Content elements look like advertisement
- Advertisement looks like content
- Brand hierarchy: Is this an affiliate site of Yahoo?
- The Yahoo bar suggests to “subscribe to paper”
- Popups all over the place
- The code is an embarrassing mess
- The first word top left is “buy a car”
- Browser windows get resized etc etc etc
Long story short: It’s useless, it’s impolite, it’s nonsense. And we wonder: How is this possible? Who designed this? Who hired these guys? Don’t you know that you ruin your brand with a bad user experience? Don’t you know that bad information design is perceived as a lack of manners?
How to do it better
It’s always easy to complain, but then when it comes to advice, people usually don’t really know. We have been lucky to be able to work for two months on a newspaper research project, so we are able to give out some free advice:
Newspapers currently have two interfaces: One is made out of paper and one is made out of light. The real challenge of a newspaper redesign is to connect those interfaces. And we are not talking about e-paper or any other Zukunftsmusik. We are talking about understanding the media and melting the media. Ask yourselves: How does print work? How does online media work? How can we connect and join them?
- Make your site readable, scannable, usable.
- Read this for heaven’s sake
- Pay your users for content contribution
- Make your paper scannable, usable, interactive
Unfortunately we have to keep secret on how to do all these things, as we don’t want any competitor of our client to eat our client’s lunch. Just one more word on technology: SNS and blogs are NOT the way to go. There is a much more obvious methodogical approach and it is strange that so far no one noticed what kind of publishing technology newspapers should use. Enough said.
Do newspapers really need to change?
That newspapers have to change is obvious. Don’t belive that staying as you are is going to help you in any way.
I’d even say that the Economist’s approach to the problem, to call the current downtrend of printmedia “A cause for concern but not for panic” a rhetoric misconception.
You don’t need to be a tech prodigy or visionary to understand that newspapers need the web: “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation, talking to itself.” said Arthur Miller back in 1961. What you think is the appropriate technology for that conversation nowadays?
3.6.2007
23:14
As always, very nice work, Oliver. Can’t wait to see what you guys are up to. I think I know what kind of technology you have in mind…
3.7.2007
01:02
“9. Content elements look like advertisement, advertisement looks like content”
That’s been one of the guiding principles of USA Today since it first published, long, long before the advent of the internets.
They’re just sticking with their brand philosophy there.
3.7.2007
09:07
Phineas,
Well, this “brand strategy” is dubious in print - and extremely self destructive on the web. Self destruction and brand strategy usually don’t go a long way…
3.8.2007
01:24
Is full justification a good patern for screen media?
What about light between words? We can control that in web so - IMO - we shouldn’t use full justification. What do you think?
3.8.2007
08:17
Kuba,
I experimented with full justification quite a bit and I feel that it kind of works - in English. It doesn’t work in German, as the words are too long and the whitespace between the words gets too big. I am still in checking mode though. Does it bother you?
3.9.2007
16:00
My favorite paid comment from the TechCrunch link:
Micheal, I am really glad to you have highlighted USA Today’s new web features and their commitment to buidling a user community. I have been a long-time user of usatoday.com, and I am thrilled with the fact that users can now post comments and that articles are ranked by popularity. I think their adoption of Ajax is also very cool!
Sounds natural ja nai?
3.9.2007
19:26
There is a German word for that: Jubelperser.
3.10.2007
01:07
Can you explain what you mean by ‘rhetoric misconception’ as in:
“I’d even say that the Economist’s approach to the problem, to call the current downtrend of printmedia “A cause for concern but not for panic” a rhetoric misconception.”
Time for a semantic checker?
3.10.2007
08:32
Mark,
Yes, that’s a little too short a formulation. I meant to take the attitude that it’s “A cause for concern but not for panic” rhethorically looks good, as they seem to acknowledge the problem, and as it looks good it seems true. But the rhethoric is so strong that it leads to wrong conclusions and misconceptions of the state of newspapers.
Of course it’s never good to panic. The misconception that “not to panic” leads to is this attitude: “We don’t need to act right away. We are still fine.”
Yet newspapers are not fine as they are.
1. If you look at the traffic of newspapers online one clearly sees that newspapers need to act now. Not in panic, but thoughtfully, intelligently and decisively.
2. The strong point of newspapers against blogs used to be: Better writing, profound research and the pleasure of reading nice sharp print. But the writing that can be found on the web is pretty good, the ability for users to comment and to crosscheck online information quickly competes journalistic research, and good information design outperforms the often annoying paragraphshort badly structured unscannable mass of text in print. Newspapers need to reinvent themselves now.