The big problem that myself and many others have with Andy is that he is a professional. He is known in web standards and design circles. He builds web sites.
The big point here: He has been on the other side of the design process (I presume) explaining to people why things were built the way they were.
In Andy's "redux" he seems to forget this. Blatantly. Thats not to say he isn't right on some obvious things (the Times left-navigation on the Homepage) but for almost everything else he was pretty damn disparaging and ignorant of the process that churns out the end result. To a shocking level IMHO.
What Khoi is saying here is a very level-headed and polite response to Andys redesign. (BTW Andy himself says it wasn't so much a redesign, more like "I examined pressing issues for digital news").
If it had been a graduate who did the "redux" I would have smiled and said, "Come back in a few years working in the real world and you'll see things differently". So I was a little shocked that this came from someone like Andy.
Background Info: Khoi joined the Times in late 2005 or so. At that time the redesign for the NYT was well underway so he was not responsible for the look-and-feel that emerged. For the most part he has been trying to improve on the legacy he inherited - the Sectionfront and Article layouts, the Navigation bars on the Homepage - not Khoi's idea and he fought to change that (take a look at the Opinion section for example http://www.nytimes.com/opinion for one single sample of his stewardship).
Working on a startup is nothing like working client side at a place like the NYT. With the former, one can be agile and code up some easy edits in a few days, and push it out without weeks of deliberation. It's easy to pick out the navigation and say, "look, let's cut some of this out or hide it in secondary navigation." Good luck with that with corporations as big as the NYT. Chances are, each link is represented by a group that will be LIVID if you dare remove them from the exposed navigation.
Removing big ads from the homepage is nice for a pitch (actually to be honest, it is a very common strategy to emotionally lure people into a pretty but imperfect design to rework later) but would never get approved internally. You'd have to have a pretty convincing argument that losing a huge source of revenue would be counterbalanced by a large increase in viewership, and I don't think that's an argument he could win (in this specific instance).
I don't think the critics of the NYT where out of touch with reality. The big 3 French newspaper (lemonde.fr, lefigaro.fr, liberation.fr) are all much easier to scan than the likes of the NYT.
What I find ironic is that when Pump was posted, the alternate to WSGI - everybody jumped on the author and trashed everything about it.
Meanwhile some designer suggests that the New York Times trash their entire business and turn it into an ugly looking blog (with padding!) and it gets 500 upvotes.
At least the Pump/WSGI proposal was genuine interest and enthusiasm and not condescending.
This is a total repeat of the American Airlines redesign thread [1], which everybody should be familiar with. Some things are the way they are for good reason, and the reasons are usually very good when you are referring to a successful product or a billion-dollar company.
A site full of hackers is good at picking apart a naive technical idea... not so much a naive design idea.
The bigger irony is if you had these discussions on news.ydesigninator.com, the designers would have no opinion at all on the code, because they would realize that they know nothing. But with visual arts, it's easy for us programmers to bike-shed and act like we know something.
Not condescending? Maybe just because there's less text.
>What WSGI should have been.
That sentiment goes through nearly the entire page. And it's the same problem. But yes, it attracts more critique here because (I'd imagine) the majority of vocal ones here are less designery and more programmery.
I try to keep up with Khoi Vihn and Subtraction because I believe he always provides a balanced insight into respectable/high-design principals and the practicality of applying them to mammoth operations like the NYT and such.
In fact, his tone of decency and respect, despite the the off-the-cuff pronouncements made by Andy Rutledge is exactly the voice I've come to expect from Khoi. Which is awesome.
Also, this reminds me a lot of the Delta Airlines redesign fiasco brought on by another designer (http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html). It's really easy to sit back and critique the obvious flaws in design from within the ivory tower of photoshop, where you can arbitrarily remove advertisements and ignore the loads of user studies that entire teams have spent significant portions of their careers.
This is the kind of stuff that gives designers the MO of being 'decorators' who don't 'respect constraints' - operational or technical. As a designer myself, it's sad to see this behavior showing up again and again.
The only really egregious criticism was that "the front page of a news paper is not editorialized". Someone DOES choose what the most important stories are at the time of publication and puts those on the front page. That is editorializing. If all the stories were in reverse chronological order or alphabetical order or something, then it wouldn't be editorialized.
All the "terrible/unusable design" criticisms are quite valid today, I think. Maybe they weren't 5 years ago when the site was designed, but there is simply too much information to process now.
It's sad that people still regard Andy as an "Industry leading expert". Andy voids his own agency's process with this this blog post. He does very little research, makes some bold statments, spends a few hours in photoshop and produces what? A poorly thought out, soap box "solution" with a pretty face. He gives no real thought to advertising, social component (comments, popularity and social media) or the politics involved with news.
The industry should do it's self a favor, hand Andy a muzzle and continue on to bigger and better things. He's scum.
...the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worse of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site.
This guy sounds like the redesigner really hurt his feelings.
Why not share the design constraints that the redesigner failed to consider? Wouldn't that be more productive than complaining about link baiting and criticism?
How could his feeling not be hurt—at least a little bit—when someone ostensibly knowledgeable comes in and dismisses his work as crap and proceeds to replace it with something stylish and trendy, but failing to meet the requirements?
Vinh's response was measured and appropriate and professional, much more so than Rutledge's original post. I see absolutely no reason why he should waste his time engaging in explanations and dialogue with someone doing a drive-by hit piece on his work.
Often knowledge of design constraints is part of an organization's competitive advantage. These are often painstakingly discovered through mistakes, and any competitor has to make the same mistakes to figure them out. If you tell everyone exactly what you did wrong, it won't take them long to start doing things right.
It's fairly plain to see that the "redesign" completely disregards any presence of advertisement. I'd say that would be a constraint failed to be considered.
But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside.
Redesigns, solicited or not, are very helpful to me. I don't care what internal politics the original product designer is grappling with. It's refreshing to see what outside observers come up with, politics and other restrictions be damned.
I'd hate to work for someone who was so critical of critical thought.
The thoughts he is critical of here are not those related to the design - it's all of the newspaper/media/NYT-bashing that takes up the first half of the essay. The designer makes a lot of claims about why things are the way they are for newspaper websites in 2011 without really backing them up, and seems to be assuming the worst about everyone involved.
The redesign on it's own is fine but the screed before that is the issue.
I thought it was very clear... Redesigns are good, but don't assume that as an outside designer that you have all of the relevant data.
I don't recall Khoi making a statement about the redesign itself, just the tone of the explanation of it. I got the impression that the choices made had valid reasoning behind them that may not be obvious to someone outside of the times. It had nothing to do with internal politics, but the realities of running a very large site. Design is great. Practical design is better.
You wouldn't want to work for someone who responded to critical thinking with equally critical thinking? I sure would.
Rutledge did indeed rant generally in his opening paragraphs a bunch of stuff about poor standards, lack of ethics etc in the industry with little to back it up, then segues to the Times as his example of the design problems (see what he did there?).
I don't care what internal politics the original product designer is grappling with.
Exactly my thoughts. The original article was harsh but not disrespectful - it's a critique of the end result, not anyone's capabilities, and it has lots of reason.
Just for perspective, Rutledge harped on Frank Chimero a few months back for getting his book funded on Kickstarter. He was making other brash, insensitive, and short-sighted claims that Chimero was hurting the industry and selling-out.
I'm starting to think he's a bit of a modern design muckraker, pursuing pageviews by stirring the pot. I suspect that Khoi picked up on it, which is why he smartly did not pass on a link and feed the flames.
It basically comes down to: if you think something is bad, try to understand why it was designed that way I'm the first place. You may not know all of the data or edge cases.
Having worked for a major metro newspaper's website, I'm fully aware of the challenges faced by Khoi and others. The homepage is the Mt. Everest of challenges within these organizations.There are so many considerations and limitations, which are compounded by the fact that so many people within the organization have a vested interest in the homepage design. It's impossible for people such as Khoi to push a design through without compromising at every step along the way. The end result is unrecognizable from where you started (or had originally envisioned). Such is life at a large news organization. We are powerless. And so we dream.
I'm not a designer and come into this not knowing who Khoi Vinh is. However, his site's footer - Visual design, layout and Cascading Style Sheets may not be reused without permission. - just reeks of self-importance. I'm really not allowed to make a high-contrast fixed-width three-column layout with header and footer without Vinh's authorization?
I realize this might be like coming to a software discussion and not knowing who Steve Jobs is. For all I know, maybe Vinh invented and patented three-column layouts and everyone's laughing at my ignorance.
I admire Vinh's reserve. Engineering is full of compromises, and few things are more irritating than the guy that walks into the shop and spouts out at the mouth, utterly ignorant of the historical context surrounding the compromises that have been made.
Fresh pairs of eyes are helpful, but there are definitely more constructive ways to offer solutions than operating under the default assumption that everybody else are idiots.
This is mostly the same reaction I had when I read the redesign article. Andy blatantly chose to define what is news to drive his design. For example he defined that the most read articles list is not news. Like, the front page of Hacker News is not news because it is a list of elements that have been ordered by how many people read, comment or upvote them and not by the news value specified by grown journalists.
This was the first thing I considered doing for a living when I got more into the internet back in 98~ (unsolicited redesigns), but I knew I would get into so much trouble and even legal implications. Nowadays if a site has king content and terrible ui/ux I'll just Stylish it down or stick to the feed and move on, if they can't bother to improve the experience the next one will.
Vinh's response is really true of any collaborative creative environment, from the arts to engineering. To evaluate or re-design outside of the context of the original project (it's requirements, business goals, stakeholders, etc.) can only yield an irrelevant conclusion.
The world also needs more poster re-designs for Kubrick movies. Here's my ideas for 2001, remember that scene at the beginning on a space station? That would make a good poster. What about Clockwork Orange? They could use the Ludivigo exterior in a poster too. I mean, why did they not originally do that?
[+] [-] donohoe|14 years ago|reply
The big problem that myself and many others have with Andy is that he is a professional. He is known in web standards and design circles. He builds web sites.
The big point here: He has been on the other side of the design process (I presume) explaining to people why things were built the way they were.
In Andy's "redux" he seems to forget this. Blatantly. Thats not to say he isn't right on some obvious things (the Times left-navigation on the Homepage) but for almost everything else he was pretty damn disparaging and ignorant of the process that churns out the end result. To a shocking level IMHO.
What Khoi is saying here is a very level-headed and polite response to Andys redesign. (BTW Andy himself says it wasn't so much a redesign, more like "I examined pressing issues for digital news").
If it had been a graduate who did the "redux" I would have smiled and said, "Come back in a few years working in the real world and you'll see things differently". So I was a little shocked that this came from someone like Andy.
Background Info: Khoi joined the Times in late 2005 or so. At that time the redesign for the NYT was well underway so he was not responsible for the look-and-feel that emerged. For the most part he has been trying to improve on the legacy he inherited - the Sectionfront and Article layouts, the Navigation bars on the Homepage - not Khoi's idea and he fought to change that (take a look at the Opinion section for example http://www.nytimes.com/opinion for one single sample of his stewardship).
[+] [-] jamesteow|14 years ago|reply
Removing big ads from the homepage is nice for a pitch (actually to be honest, it is a very common strategy to emotionally lure people into a pretty but imperfect design to rework later) but would never get approved internally. You'd have to have a pretty convincing argument that losing a huge source of revenue would be counterbalanced by a large increase in viewership, and I don't think that's an argument he could win (in this specific instance).
[+] [-] gorog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
Meanwhile some designer suggests that the New York Times trash their entire business and turn it into an ugly looking blog (with padding!) and it gets 500 upvotes.
At least the Pump/WSGI proposal was genuine interest and enthusiasm and not condescending.
This is a total repeat of the American Airlines redesign thread [1], which everybody should be familiar with. Some things are the way they are for good reason, and the reasons are usually very good when you are referring to a successful product or a billion-dollar company.
[1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|14 years ago|reply
A site full of hackers is good at picking apart a naive technical idea... not so much a naive design idea.
The bigger irony is if you had these discussions on news.ydesigninator.com, the designers would have no opinion at all on the code, because they would realize that they know nothing. But with visual arts, it's easy for us programmers to bike-shed and act like we know something.
[+] [-] esrauch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|14 years ago|reply
>What WSGI should have been.
That sentiment goes through nearly the entire page. And it's the same problem. But yes, it attracts more critique here because (I'd imagine) the majority of vocal ones here are less designery and more programmery.
[+] [-] scott_s|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|14 years ago|reply
"The New York Times presents a rather typical example of terribly-designed news"
"popularity has nothing to do with news"
"today's paper: irrelevant"
"the Times’ search results page is an excellent example of usable news design"
[+] [-] tonydev|14 years ago|reply
In fact, his tone of decency and respect, despite the the off-the-cuff pronouncements made by Andy Rutledge is exactly the voice I've come to expect from Khoi. Which is awesome.
Also, this reminds me a lot of the Delta Airlines redesign fiasco brought on by another designer (http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html). It's really easy to sit back and critique the obvious flaws in design from within the ivory tower of photoshop, where you can arbitrarily remove advertisements and ignore the loads of user studies that entire teams have spent significant portions of their careers.
This is the kind of stuff that gives designers the MO of being 'decorators' who don't 'respect constraints' - operational or technical. As a designer myself, it's sad to see this behavior showing up again and again.
[+] [-] dmbass|14 years ago|reply
All the "terrible/unusable design" criticisms are quite valid today, I think. Maybe they weren't 5 years ago when the site was designed, but there is simply too much information to process now.
[+] [-] Darkmusic|14 years ago|reply
The industry should do it's self a favor, hand Andy a muzzle and continue on to bigger and better things. He's scum.
[+] [-] Barnabas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmbass|14 years ago|reply
This guy sounds like the redesigner really hurt his feelings.
Why not share the design constraints that the redesigner failed to consider? Wouldn't that be more productive than complaining about link baiting and criticism?
[+] [-] dasil003|14 years ago|reply
Vinh's response was measured and appropriate and professional, much more so than Rutledge's original post. I see absolutely no reason why he should waste his time engaging in explanations and dialogue with someone doing a drive-by hit piece on his work.
[+] [-] nostrademons|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonydev|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|14 years ago|reply
Redesigns, solicited or not, are very helpful to me. I don't care what internal politics the original product designer is grappling with. It's refreshing to see what outside observers come up with, politics and other restrictions be damned.
I'd hate to work for someone who was so critical of critical thought.
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
The redesign on it's own is fine but the screed before that is the issue.
[+] [-] mbreese|14 years ago|reply
I don't recall Khoi making a statement about the redesign itself, just the tone of the explanation of it. I got the impression that the choices made had valid reasoning behind them that may not be obvious to someone outside of the times. It had nothing to do with internal politics, but the realities of running a very large site. Design is great. Practical design is better.
[+] [-] bglbrg|14 years ago|reply
Rutledge did indeed rant generally in his opening paragraphs a bunch of stuff about poor standards, lack of ethics etc in the industry with little to back it up, then segues to the Times as his example of the design problems (see what he did there?).
[+] [-] ricardobeat|14 years ago|reply
Exactly my thoughts. The original article was harsh but not disrespectful - it's a critique of the end result, not anyone's capabilities, and it has lots of reason.
[+] [-] thoughtsludge|14 years ago|reply
I'm starting to think he's a bit of a modern design muckraker, pursuing pageviews by stirring the pot. I suspect that Khoi picked up on it, which is why he smartly did not pass on a link and feed the flames.
[+] [-] mbreese|14 years ago|reply
It basically comes down to: if you think something is bad, try to understand why it was designed that way I'm the first place. You may not know all of the data or edge cases.
[+] [-] blueskittle|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshrice|14 years ago|reply
It's a constant battle between the ad department and the content makers, and then between the content makers themselves.
[+] [-] kstrauser|14 years ago|reply
I realize this might be like coming to a software discussion and not knowing who Steve Jobs is. For all I know, maybe Vinh invented and patented three-column layouts and everyone's laughing at my ignorance.
[+] [-] eropple|14 years ago|reply
(Yes, this is commonplace; his little footer blurb will probably do nothing to stop somebody who wants to, but I can't blame him for it.)
[+] [-] rexf|14 years ago|reply
Regarding the footer disclaimer, it's probably because his newspaper-like blog/site design is also sold as a Word Press theme. [2]
I wouldn't call him the Steve Jobs of his industry, but he has been a big proponent for (what I consider clean design with) grids. [3]
[1] http://www.subtraction.com/about
[2] http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/
[3] http://www.subtraction.com/2004/12/31/grid-computi
[+] [-] a3camero|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resnamen|14 years ago|reply
Fresh pairs of eyes are helpful, but there are definitely more constructive ways to offer solutions than operating under the default assumption that everybody else are idiots.
[+] [-] hendrik-xdest|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emp_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisBanner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] napierzaza|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hax2dyou|14 years ago|reply
He should have been honest and come out and said that. Instead, he chose to be a jerk.
Guess what Khoi, we do this for fun, so no it's not a waste of time. You clearly do not do your job well, nor do you enjoy it.
[+] [-] funkah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedjdziuba|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] uladzislau|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jblow|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesteow|14 years ago|reply