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Washington Post websiteTo begin, here is Conway's Law: Any organization which designs a system . . . will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." Now, the announcement of the redesign of the Washington Post homepage: _______________________________________________________________________ "To our readers,
Here is ET's email to Jim Brady: Subject: Redesign of the Washington Post home page: PowerPointing the Post
-- Edward Tufte, March 29, 2007 |
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Washingtonpost.com creative director Paul Compton discusses the redesign here
The big false assumption is that difficulty of understanding is related to the amount of content, that more content inevitably means more difficulty in understanding. It is more often the case that to clarify something, add detail. And it is nearly always the case that clutter is a design failure, not a content attribute. The WP homepage is showing a trivial amount of content; how then can there be an information overload problem? This might be called the "PowerPoint fallacy," "Creative Director's Fallacy," "Designer's Fallacy," or "Magical Number Seven" fallacy. The result is that content is diminished in response to designer/marketing imperatives. In short, designer-driven design not content-driven design. Why is it that designer redesigns almost always reduce content resolution? The design of a news site should be largely driven by news junkies not marketeers and commercial artists. It is likely to be the case that the median washingtonpost.com reader has more interest in the news, more knowledge about current events, and a broader education than the median washingtonpost.com interface designer. Could a Kindly Contributor please post some before/after images of The Washington Post homepage? Thanks. -- Edward Tufte, March 29, 2007 |
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Perhaps it's just a weekend hiatus, but my 3 favorite WP columnists are no longer directly
visible on the WP homepage. There's a pop-up menu, however.
Chris Cillizza, The Fix (on the
nuts
and bolts of campaign politics, nonpartisan insider reporting)
Dan Froomkin, White House Watch (a smart and detailed
compilation of
Bush news, the column is a useful corrective to the government house organ style of
some
WP reporting). It will be intriguing, shall we say, to see how many times White House
Watch appears above the fold in the new design
compared to
the old design. Brian Krebs, Security Fix (lively column on computer security news, a column that several times has alerted me to relevant computer security threats) -- Edward Tufte, March 31, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage The old Washington Post front page, courtesy of Kindly Contributor Jaime Chismar: -- Niels Olson (email), April 2, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage As a web developer myself, I must add a note here that this type of thing has occurred to me -- where client/employer insists on site redesign that strips content from the front page and/or needlessly conceals it, in spite of my protests to the contrary. All in the spirit of a "more splashy" look, or something to suit the interests of the graphic designers on staff, who never read or use the site at all. Then I field complaints on why the site has slipped in the Google search result rankings... It's gotten to the point where I ask up front "what is the goal"... ...is it to provide information to users, or to produce a snazzy banner/brochure style interface? -- naum (email), April 2, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage Edward - You make some very good points about the WaPo redesign. Which online news sites do you think are doing a good job presenting the news? -- Dave Koehler (email), April 3, 2007 |
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Google News The New York Times Arts and Letters Daily Arts Journal Romenesko
-- Edward Tufte, April 3, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage Here's the iA redesign comparison shot (iA design on right). Their site has much more.
-- Niels Olson (email), April 4, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage As requested, here's a side-by-side view of the WashingtonPost.com home page from November 7, 2006 and April 4, 2007. You can zoom in and download the screenshots from the Picasa page. -- Mark Alves (email), April 5, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage I took a look at the iA design posted above and I thought it was a great alternative. However, I find it difficult to make the argument that the Post and the iA designs are equal alternatives (implied by the side-by-side comparison) because there are unequal amounts of advertising on each design. Of course, I'd prefer less advertisements too, but one has to think of it as making an argument to senior management who has already sold ads or predetermined the ad to content ratio for the site. I think to make the case stronger, one needs to show three options side-by-side: (1) the current Post page, (2) an iA alternative that has equal amounts of advertising, and (3) the iA alternative that has reduced advertising, just to show the potential of what the page could be. I'm local to Washington, I'm a news junkie, and I'm a subscriber to Tufte's design philosophy, so this redesign hits me triply hard. And it's not just Tufte and above present company that are upset, an peek at the comments below the editor's note shows many unhappy comments. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/washpostblog/2007/03/editors_note_about_our_new_hom.html I'm hoping that someone picks up on what just happened to the Post website and uses this as a textbook example somewhere in not only information design books like Tufte's, but in general web/graphic design books too. -- Kendrick Hang (email), April 6, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage "Above the fold" screenshots from Editor
& Publisher's top nine
newspapers and Google news, without, and then with, Ad Block
Plus and
NoScript.
For some papers this illustrates the amount of space given
over to advertizing, for others it illustrates a good idea: let the
content fill up the empty space if someone's browser declines
advertising. In the content-free design category, the Washington Post appears to be second only to USA Today, the McDonalds of newspapers. And still losses to USA Today. May be it's the special sauce.
-- Niels Olson (email), April 7, 2007 |
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The Popularity of Poor Design
According to this story from Editor & Publisher, USATODAY.com and washingtonpost.com are the second and third most read online newspapers, based on the number of unique visitors. Following the comparision images above, this raises the quesiton: if people still read poor design, what is the argument for improving design? -- John Jones (email), April 8, 2007 |
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The Washington Post statement about why they chose to redesign their website (posted at the beginning of this thread) seems to reflect some concern about popularity ratings, which are low compared to the leading newspaper website (nytimes.com). Or maybe the Post is comparing their performance against news websites that are not based on newspapers, such as Google News or MSNBC. Two of the leading news websites--The New York Times and Google News--have intense high-resolution news content. Thus my comment (in my letter to the Post) about the dumbing down of the Washington Post website. More generally, redesign efforts should not be foreclosed because the original design is considered popular. This is especially the case where the technologies of production and display are improving rapidly. For example, consider the continuing improvements in the iPod over the years. It's called "learning from experience." -- Edward Tufte, April 8, 2007 |
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Jim Brady, the Washington Post Executive Editor, provides an "Update on New Home Page" Some improvements are on the way. The language of the update--focused on news content--differs from the marketing- interface-designer-features style of the initial announcement of the redesign. The news- content approach will ultimately lead to a better front page. (A good start would be to call it the "front page" rather than the "home page"--that is, to use the language of newspapers, not the language of interfaces.) -- Edward Tufte, April 11, 2007 |
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And this it what it's come to at the Washington Post multimedia center (and newspaper). Or is it a brilliant parody? http://specials.washingtonpost.com/onbeing/
-- Edward Tufte, April 12, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage
You might appreciate seeing this marketing piece on Apple's website that profiles both Mr. Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com and Ms. Jenn Crandall, the producer of OnBeing. It sheds a lot of insight as to why washingtonpost.com is the way it is today. http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/washingtonpost/ A couple of things to put into perspective... washingtonpost.com is an entity separate from The Washington Post newspaper, both part of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (WPNI). Obviously, the web site draws from the work of the print newspaper as well as from its reporters, but from what I've read in the corporate information, washingtonpost.com is there to cull highlights from the paper for the web and provide web-only features. What I'm saying here is that the organizational hierarchy probably plays into the organization of the website. Hence, the washingtonpost.com logo is not the same as the masthead of the print paper and we see that the "print edition" or "today's paper" as it's labeled now has always seemed kind of detached from the remainder of the page. Second, I'm sure we're all aware of the pressures that traditional newspaper organizations face. Subscriptions are decreasing, ad revenue is decreasing, and as a result, newsrooms are shrinking. I get the feeling that washingtonpost.com has become the experimental proving grounds to find a new revenue source to make up for lost traditional revenue. In the words of one of my friends in the news industry, "we're trying anything and everything to see what sticks." Hence, they are trying to work all sorts of media into washingtonpost.com. Not all of it is bad, but of course, the problem is as Mr. Tufte stated, the Washington Post is a news organization -- that is its reason for existence. The fanciest multimedia and the neatest interface can't make up for a lack of depth in the content, which is going to be the trend if they continue to shrink the newsroom. -- Kendrick Hang (email), April 12, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage
ET writes: (A good start would be to call it the "front page" rather than the "home page"—that is, to use the language of newspapers, not the language of interfaces.) Unfortunately, even some real paper front pages are suffering from "improvements" similar to in spirit to those reducing the information content of WWW pages, as Kevin Drum of Political Animal notes (complaining about the Los Angeles Times redesign): Needless to say, the unavoidable result of this is that the front page has room for only four stories now, not the usual six or seven. Yippee again. And since pages 2 and 3 were given up to "navigational aids" and "briefing" items some time ago, this means that there's now a grand total of four actual pieces of news in the first three pages of the paper. If my navigational needs are catered to any further I'm going to need an LA Times decoder ring just to find anything worth reading.This is a reworking of a comment I originally made in "Instructions at the point of need". It seems more appropriate here. -- Derek Cotter (email), April 12, 2007 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage In my April 7th comparison of 'above-the-fold' news site screenshots, I illustrated the effects of advertizing on their layouts by showing them with and without AdBlock Plus. Debate over the economic impact of AdBlock Plus on the online advertizing model is now heating up as the New York Times, the software author, website owners, and others weigh in. For example, if the Apple developers had put AdBlock Plus on the iPhone, Max would have never had his mobile debut.
-- Niels Olson (email), September 10, 2007 |
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NYTimes as a model news website -- ET, August 1, 2008 |
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Response to A problematic redesign of the Washington Post homepage It's certainly not a leading news site, but six medical students at Tulane have been working a an unofficial portal our classmates, tmedweb.tulane.edu. The New York Times has been our design standard from day 1. We're not there yet, but we're working on it. -- Niels Olson (email), August 4, 2008 |
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Integration of website and newspaper Information should not be segregated by its mode of production--at last in general. Such segregation may be interesting to turf-warriors who administer the various production modes, but it is an impediment to seekers of information. Soon, for example, there should be no separate "multimedia" packages at news websites, since in mature news-gathering the multimedia will simply be part of a news package. For example, when The New York Times segregates multimedia into a separate area, they might as well also have a heading over all their traditional news stories "Many words, a few pictures, and perhaps a graphic." A sign of integration of news, regardless of the mode of production, comes from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/22/AR2008122201525.html?hpid=topnews I hope the Post will continue to carry several of my favorite web columnists: Robert Kaiser (wonderful Q&A on the presidential debates), Chris Cillizza (superb American politics blog), Dan Froomkin (White House Watch, former ET student at Yale), and Brian Krebs (internet security blog). I read these before any New York Times blogs.
-- Edward Tufte, December 22, 2008 |
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Why multimedia should be separate: it's lousy There is a very good reason for identifying non-text media by type. The vast majority of video, and many slide show, pages are most notable for high bit content, slow download rate (at least at the user interface), and (usually) low amount of useful information. The prime example is a video of news personality reading text against a background of an essentially static scene. Why spend two minutes listening to this when it could be read so much faster, especially in the case where the user is only looking for one or two pieces of relevant information? -- Richard Pietrasz (email), December 26, 2008 |
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Point missed My point about multimedia was that it should be posted as an adjunct in the file for the actual news story, for viewers to click through as they wish, rather than in the segregated multimedia file. At the major news sites and at ESPN most of the slide shows, graphics, and videos open up very quickly on a decent internet connection. -- Edward Tufte, December 26, 2008 |
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Washington Post failure to vet comments
The washingtonpost.com comment sections are overrun with nasty, bizarre, irrelevant comments. These creepy comments are published by The Washington Post under its logo. The trolls have detected the failure to review comments and consequently in most of the political columns the first comment after a story is posted comes from a lurking troll with a big attitude. Others rise to the bait, provoking a flame war, all published courtesy of the Post. Few rational people will contribute comments under these conditions, thereby completing the downward rant-spiral. In contrast, The New York Times comment postings are reviewed before publication; the result is usually an intelligent, civil, diverse set of comments and dialogue. For a good example at comment vetting at the Post, see how Robert Kaiser handled his thoughtful commentaries on the presidential debates. On the necessity of pre-publication reviews of comments, see our thread Moderating internet forums: What's smart, not what's new. -- Edward Tufte, December 26, 2008 |
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Response to Washington Post website: design issues The New York Times is exploring far-ranging ideas on how to display their content http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer -- Niels Olson (email), February 14, 2009 |
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Brian Krebs "Security Fix" is gone!
On March 31, 2007, I wrote this about my favorites at The Washington Post website: "Chris Cillizza, The Fix (on the nuts and bolts of campaign politics, nonpartisan insider reporting) Dan Froomkin (a former student of mine at Yale) was let go and went to the Huffington Post to do a critique from the left of the Obama presidency. Chris Cillizza fell off my radar after a dreadful parody of Masterpiece Theater and what appeared to be an effort to move to the Colbert and Stewart Daily Show league. And now, Brian Krebs of Security Fix, after 15 years writing on computer security, has departed The Washington Post: "Farewell 2009, and The Washington Post What a loss for The Washington Post. Brian Krebs is superb. -- Edward Tufte, January 1, 2010 |
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Mr. Krebs's blog is now at http://www.krebsonsecurity.com
-- Gregg Drube (email), January 4, 2010 |
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