If I may take a moment to whinge and whine a tad; Websites like this infuriate me because for all their "design", sites like Reddit and HN (which are basically just lists) are delivering news in a much more consumable fashion, better suited to the eating habits of the common or garden user.
Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be met regardless of the way the world actually works? Probably both.
Also, I think Digg deserves more credit for finding a successful mid point between lists and designed layouts.
That's not to say there's no room for design, but this new NYT layout is anything but design. It's the same wall of information with sporadic and indecipherable levels of emphasis made to look mildly palatable for another couple of years. If the NYT has anything interesting to say, I'll wait for it to appear on HN, Digg or Reddit.
It's not "bosses v. designers", it's a newspaper failing to grasp that when you put a newspaper online it doesn't have the same visual constraints a printed newspaper have. Either that, or it's the newspaper totally getting that they do need to look like that to not confuse the heck out of the large constituency of readers that are slightly older and less tech-savvy than the Reddit crowd.
But yeah, I'm with you, I'm pretty far down the procrastination list before I open a newspaper web-front-page.
My dad finds sites like Reddit/Digg/HN totally overwhelming, and I doubt he's alone. It's generational. Sites like NYT use standard design techniques to direct your attention (font size, etc) that work really well for people that are more-accustomed to traditional media. And, frankly, seeing a huge-headline is a much more-immediate way to indicate the importance of a topic than scanning down a list and looking for stories with lots of upvotes or comments.
I don't understand your complaint. NYT is a news source. HN/Reddit/Digg are content aggregators. The two things serve different purposes. It's like complaining that your faucet hasn't kept up with watering things like your water hose has.
You like getting news from aggregators like HN/digg/reddit? Great! Do you think that news is well-presented when you find it (via the above aggregators)? That's a completely separate question.
Agreed. There's reddit and on the other end there's pinterest. Both of those work in their context, but this nytimes redesign is skeuomorphism and all that's missing is the fake paper background image. As someone else points out it's probably because of all the older, stagnant people who expect newspapers to look like this. If these types of people listened to music online you'd probably see spotify's UI look like a record or tape player. I qualify older with stagnant because as I'm getting older I'm aware that it's not so much about age than a common laziness and reluctance to deal with an ever increasing pace of innovation. And that reluctance affects us all because it comes with scams, toolbars, shitty ads and botnets.
I don't always want my news ranked in a list by upvotes and an algorithm, thank you very much. I find sites that rely on user input to rank stories are prone to spreading rumors and emotional, link-bait news. I trust the New York Times to present to me a variety of stories in what they think is the best way. What is it with this obsession with the idea that the view of the mob must be the best way?
Are you honestly comparing reddit and hn to the New York Times? You can't just lump those sites in together as "news sites," they are completely different in content and purpose...
I sympathise to some extent. But this is not an entirely scientific perspective. The NYT will undoubtedly have performed significant user testing and also looked at the metrics (articles read, time spent, etc.) before making this switch.
Reddit and HN traffic is not common. It's a small share of the general population, and further, probably overlaps little with the target NYT audience whom they want to upsell to a paid subscription. I read HN; my extended family has never heard of it.
This reminds me of people who are unaware of how small the combined market share is for rdio and spotify, or why networks don't abandon cable tv revenue for cord cutters, despite how seemingly convenient and inexpensive they are. Most people listen to the radio (in the car). Most people subscribe to cable.
Another thing Digg deserves tons of credit for is emphasizing visual journalism along with text. There is no excuse not to include at least an eye-grabbing photo with most stories.
The design is overall asthetically pleasing. I just can't fucking take this trend of fixed bars molesting my vertical resolution and screwing with my habitual behavior of scanning from the top of the page down as I scroll. This site's top bar on single pages is so edgy that it's not even at the very top (a concept I've at least gotten acclimated to) and manages to blend into the actual article content due to low contrast.
Please just stop doing this, everyone! We do not need a bar following us everywhere by default. As long as it doesn't cause render lag, fixed elements are fine when they're small buttony icons that expand.
At least they've gotten the snap-back right. Some sites, when scrolled to the top, do this awkward infuriating stuttery clip-in nonsense where the scroll position changes as the menu fits back into the content. Just stop.
I agree totally. This trend is infuriating. When I have to read an article on the site with a top bar I often go into the developer tools and delete that node from the DOM. There are sites that make even that measure impossible, like gmail, which is even more infuriating.
I use a small screen most of the time, and it sometimes seems like the designers of these sites have never looked at their website on a monitor smaller than 30 inches.
If it's so important that I be easily able to reach some navigation, put a tiny, unobtrusive, go-to-the-top button in a fixed element off to the side which will pop me back up to the nav bar.
I like the clean typography, and appreciate that they were content with subtle changes rather than something "radical." But why, oh why, did they add one of those horrible floating bars at the top of the screen? Those things almost always break page-down, yo!
The only time I dislike the top bar is when they're too tall or there's not enough height in the view port. I think this one is as good as they get, though. I do wish they only enabled it at a minimum height. Designers only seem to think about min-width, not so much min-height.
How do you like the typography? I find e.g. the italic font for the headlines in the left column or the small all caps serif format of the bylines to be somewhat detrimental to readability.
I was just going to say the font sucks, there's a million free fonts on google fonts that look great... and they appear to have gone with times new roman for no particular reason.
I'm underwhelmed. They should have hired the firm that did http://globe.com . I'm actually puzzled they didn't considering their ownership of the Globe at the time of that redesign.
I like the new design, especially the more iPad-friendly article pages.
But what I am most happy about with the new design is that the NYT didn't break the backdoor into reading any article behind the paywall, if you're not a subscriber.
If you run into the paywall that blocks your reading an article, just fire up whatever Twitter app you use (I use Echofon), type the text of the article's headline into the search, search for it, you'll find tons of results almost always, and just click on one of those links.
Presto, you're now reading the article free and clear.
TL;DR If you arrive at a NYT article via a shared social link, you can bypass the subscription paywall.
I hope they find ways to speed things up. When I return to the main page from a story, I have to wait five seconds while items on the front page bounce around as things load. This is on a very fast connection and a mac pro.
They have some extremely poor performance optimizations err NO performance optimizations on the front page. TONS of individual unscaled images loading. Someone might want to introduce them to a product called "Pagespeed"...
i.e. "… using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments, Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework, etc."
The design is almost skeumorphic in its replication of an actual newspaper. I can understand wanting to do that for branding reasons, the same way Craigslist is successfully branded as anti-design. But the wall of information is just such a bad UX... if they want the site to look like the paper, they should redesign both to have a legible content hierarchy.
The article pages are somewhat responsive, while the index pages are not. I think that's a nice balance. I've always found responsive designs jarring when multiple columns collapse.
The NYT redesign is a failure, on the public editor column's comments section 21 people liked the new design while over 700 people are complaining: Navigation. layout, fonts and accessibility are all hindering subscribers use of the site.
Visiting the site not very often I think I wouldn't have recognized it as a "redesign". Feels more like "some tweaks".
Was hoping for some whitespace, the elements are quite cramped together.
[+] [-] tomelders|12 years ago|reply
Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be met regardless of the way the world actually works? Probably both.
Also, I think Digg deserves more credit for finding a successful mid point between lists and designed layouts.
That's not to say there's no room for design, but this new NYT layout is anything but design. It's the same wall of information with sporadic and indecipherable levels of emphasis made to look mildly palatable for another couple of years. If the NYT has anything interesting to say, I'll wait for it to appear on HN, Digg or Reddit.
[+] [-] mseebach|12 years ago|reply
But yeah, I'm with you, I'm pretty far down the procrastination list before I open a newspaper web-front-page.
[+] [-] roadnottaken|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|12 years ago|reply
You like getting news from aggregators like HN/digg/reddit? Great! Do you think that news is well-presented when you find it (via the above aggregators)? That's a completely separate question.
[+] [-] belluchan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sd8f9iu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themoonbus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] room271|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|12 years ago|reply
Reddit and HN traffic is not common. It's a small share of the general population, and further, probably overlaps little with the target NYT audience whom they want to upsell to a paid subscription. I read HN; my extended family has never heard of it.
This reminds me of people who are unaware of how small the combined market share is for rdio and spotify, or why networks don't abandon cable tv revenue for cord cutters, despite how seemingly convenient and inexpensive they are. Most people listen to the radio (in the car). Most people subscribe to cable.
[+] [-] akinity|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babby|12 years ago|reply
Please just stop doing this, everyone! We do not need a bar following us everywhere by default. As long as it doesn't cause render lag, fixed elements are fine when they're small buttony icons that expand.
At least they've gotten the snap-back right. Some sites, when scrolled to the top, do this awkward infuriating stuttery clip-in nonsense where the scroll position changes as the menu fits back into the content. Just stop.
[+] [-] Wilduck|12 years ago|reply
I use a small screen most of the time, and it sometimes seems like the designers of these sites have never looked at their website on a monitor smaller than 30 inches.
If it's so important that I be easily able to reach some navigation, put a tiny, unobtrusive, go-to-the-top button in a fixed element off to the side which will pop me back up to the nav bar.
[+] [-] masterleep|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|12 years ago|reply
Note that you can now scroll through the entire article, no clicking next three times!
[+] [-] dangoldin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huskyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] username223|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] johnchristopher|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] brianstorms|12 years ago|reply
But what I am most happy about with the new design is that the NYT didn't break the backdoor into reading any article behind the paywall, if you're not a subscriber.
If you run into the paywall that blocks your reading an article, just fire up whatever Twitter app you use (I use Echofon), type the text of the article's headline into the search, search for it, you'll find tons of results almost always, and just click on one of those links.
Presto, you're now reading the article free and clear.
TL;DR If you arrive at a NYT article via a shared social link, you can bypass the subscription paywall.
[+] [-] donkeyponcho|12 years ago|reply
For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gorbachev/mfojdgde...
For Safari: https://github.com/matthewleon/gorbachev-safari
[+] [-] nnethercote|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k2enemy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnymonster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tysone|12 years ago|reply
i.e. "… using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments, Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework, etc."
[+] [-] asimov42|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikemikemike|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mars|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janlukacs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notzach|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Tepix|12 years ago|reply
The article pages are great.
[+] [-] joshnyc2011|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nnethercote|12 years ago|reply