Too many cooks in the kitchen?

Posted on March 5, 2007 by Melissa Worden

I’m a long-time fan and a former Web editor/producer of USATODAY.com. And that’s why I so badly want to like the site’s new design.

The interactive components — opportunities to comment located just about everywhere, ranking of stories, tagging and finding related content from other sites are the future of newspaper Web sites. And USAT appears to be leading the way.

(Beware what you ask for, however. Comments on this story about Elizabeth Hurley include “Who cares?”, “This is front page news?” and “She is a has been, thi [sic] is not news.”)

All this is great — except I don’t see ANY of these new features on my Mac via Safari. Comment and recommend links don’t work. I don’t even see the option in the top right-hand corner inviting me to log in.

Deep sigh.

But not all readers are enthusiastic about the interactivity. One reader commented:

“I don’t want a blog, I want a newspaper. Web 2.0 is nice and all, but good grief- user comments on the front page?? I don’t care what marcie has to say about exercising. I want my news back, and give me the old site layout while you’re at it!”

Speaking of layouts, the new design is way too confusing. My first question seeing the homepage: What’s the top news? The old design was a clean, categorized page prioritized by journalists; this one looks like a jumble of links with few visual cues to what’s important. They replaced the valuable “chatter” (summary text under the headlines) with bylines. But only sometimes — randomly a byline isn’t listed for some reason.

And just like Ryan Sholin and Mindy McAdams, I get lost in all the white space.

Mark Pott accurately describes the problem this way:

“The home page is a mess: It looks like it was laid out with a shotgun. There’s very little differentiation among the various sections and stories—they all mostly carry the same, confusing weight. The reader’s eye isn’t really sure where to go.”

I can’t help but wonder if this is a case where too many people had input on the design because it has clearly become a slave to the functions it’s trying to support. Here’s what I found from a USAT blog:

“The redesign was a five-month-effort involving scores of developers, designers, and producers. Naturally, there are features that didn’t make the initial cut, but we plan to continue development to add them and squash other bugs we’re still discovering. Still, we think it’s a big improvement and we hope you’ll agree.”

There’s a huge lesson here for us all to note: Design is as important as the content. And it can help — or hurt — as you tell a story. It happens on many levels from clearly explaining an info graphic to presenting the news of the day on your homepage and section fronts. Web readers are fickle by nature; they’re SUPPOSED to click around and away from sites. It’s what surfing is all about. But we can’t afford to give them any reason to not come back.

Comments

2 Responses to “Too many cooks in the kitchen?”

Kinsey Wilson on March 7th, 2007 2:23 pm

Hey Melissa: As you know from experience, the live design often looks and feels quite different than the comps. We rolled this out on an aggressive deadline and are continuing to make adjustments as we go. You’ll see some design tweaks over the next few days that we hope will go a long way toward addressing concerns that have been raised about the organization and readability of the page. Stay tuned. Kinsey (Exec Editor, USA TODAY)
Melissa Worden on March 8th, 2007 10:02 pm

You can’t be innovative without taking chances.

I think the designers at USAT are leaders in the industry, and I look forward to seeing the tweaks.

(Which I hope include accessibility for the Macs, too!)

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