Advice on the design of online news pages from a ‘usability expert’
Poynter’s Sara Quinn posted a Q&A with a usability expert Bruce Tognazzini, formerly with Apple computer, Sun Microsystems and with WebMD.
Bruce has a problem with news web sites. They need to be more efficient for the reader, he says:
When you go to a news site, instead of getting the story, you get this giant ad that completely fills the screen. Up at the top, there’s a tiny little “x” box. If you can find it, you can click it and close it before the 20 seconds are over.
I’m sure they get a nice little piece of change from whoever buys those ads, but what I do is just hit the back button and hit one of the other links from Google News. I stop reading those publications. It’s as simple as that.
Interstitial ads are not the only problem. What is your home page experience? Does it take forever to download on anything but the kinds of connections you have in your own offices? Experiment with offloading all of the creative graphics and some of the ads to the articles and see if your overall traffic and advertising revenues go up as people abandon Google News in favor of their local paper, now accessible in 10 seconds instead of 45 seconds or more.
We’ve noticed the same thing. We’ll click on a news site and then wait for ages, it seems like, for the page to load. The little tag at the bottom left of our Firefox window tells us what it is, precisely, that our browser is trying to download. Most often, it’s something from an ad server.
This is often very frustrating for us. It must be for non-industry readers, as well. Hey, sell the ad. But does it have to include so much coding that it can’t easily be stuffed into a high-speed wifi signal?
Read the entire piece here. Look here for the popular Ask Tog about interaction design.
April 8th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
For a guy who specializes in user experiences, the Ask Tog web site is awful. Makes Google look like an SND gold.
April 8th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
I think Rev2Oh got it right when it comes to the way ads are used, at least in the way they are displayed.
I think advertisements, on the other hand, have it wrong when it comes to being a compelling item in anyone’s line of sight. The problem is that ads are not what people are looking for because they are not centered around community issues and individual lives. They are centered around a product. We’ve seen some ads that are life based and hopefully that will be a continuing trend.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:20 am
To be honest, VizEds site isn’t the fastest of loads … ;)
April 9th, 2009 at 7:38 am
As a matter of fact, it isn’t, Dean. You’re quite right.
But then again, what is VizEds? It’s a site specifically for visual journalists. You’re going to find a lot of visuals there. A lot. And large jpegs (and pdfs and embedded videos and so on) take longer to download, as we mentioned above.
The old NPD was one of my favorite sites, back when it still existed. Man, that sucker took FOREVER to download. But a) considering what it was — a huge database of newspaper visuals — it was understandable. And b) it was worth it.
To make my blog load faster, I keep only five posts per page. The downside: On a big news day, I’ll have posts from earlier in the day appearing at the bottom of page two. That’s crappy play for a current story that may be quite good and still of great interest.
Robb asked me, a while back, to consider going to a format where I give only the first graf or two of a story and then asking you to click to read the jump. This would speed up the pageloads here in the blog quite a bit and give me more story links out front. But as a reader, I loathe that. So I’m sticking with this format for now.
If anyone has any ideas how to make a site that caters to the interests and needs of visual journalists without using visuals, let me know.