Are those news sites or ad sites? It gets ugly.

Over at the Monday Note (petty much required reading here at CSJ World every Sunday night) Frédéric Filloux has performed an interesting experiment in looking at news site Web design - mask all the ads and see how much of the site really is left devoted to news.

It's pretty eye-opening. For instance, here is the French site 20 Minutes as Filloux found it the other day.

 He blocked out the ads with red.

Fascinating. There is some squishiness in this, because when I went to the site today, the big splash page and background he found were gone and there was a more subdued feel. Still, it shows how excesses have been known to pop up.

At the Swedish paper Aftonbladet, however, the ads still reign, just as he found them. Look at the mask:

U.S. sites seem a bit more restrained, but hardly without problems. Go to his post to look at the masked screenshots and judge for yourself. Consider this gauge he put together of where the typical page for various sites actually begins with news content:

So what does that say about concern for the reader given all that we have seen in eyetrack and similar studies about readers' reluctance to scroll more than about a screen and a half before they start losing interest?

Now, the scrolling dynamic is a bit different on mobile screens, where it tends to be built more into the psyche of the screens (plus it's easier to do with the flick of a finger). But as Filloux writes:

The weird thing is this: On the one hand, web designers seem to work on increasingly large monitors; on the other, the displays used by readers tend to shrink as more people browse the web on notebooks, tablets or smartphones.

The result is a appalling when you try to isolate content directly related to the news. (His emphasis.)

There are many forces pulling at online sites, not the least of which is the need to make money. But I find it fascinating how much of the real estate has been given over to ads. It seems to be the print mindset brought to the Web (you could often find, in the "good old days," inside pages with one or two short stories and a huge ad stack). But the online audience, as we know, is not "captive," and my experience anecdotally observing people's digital use is that they are not willing to be subject to the same kinds of thinking.

Mobile could change all this significantly, if it really does generate new design principles - and Filloux discusses some of the better iPad apps that have eschewed the "print" layout and "start from a blank slate in which a basic set of rules (typefaces, general structure of a page, color codes) are adapted to the digital format."

But we also know from experience that large swaths of the news industry will take the path of least resistance, which right now seems to be simply "scaling down" the cluttered website designed for the desktop and squeezing it into a smaller screen (perhaps not even with all the elements, but still with many of them including the ads).

I think his illustrations show why that won't work.

Yelvington on tablets

Steve Yelvington has a 10-point list of things worth remembering about tablets and mobile.

Worth reading.

My favorite:

It's not just another distribution channel. We should have learned this from the Web, but many of us didn't. A mobile device is an intelligent device with storage and sensors and the full power of the Internet at its beck and call. It can do amazing things. If you don't take advantage of those amazing capabilities, you will have a sad phone, and sad users.

How TSA has bulked up its app with crowdsourcing

The headline on this article from NextGov is Agency apps must be regularly updated or face obsolescence, but the really interesting thing to me is the detail on how the TSA has used crowdsourcing to bulk up its app:

The My TSA app pulls together Federal Aviation Administration data about flight delays and crowd sourced data about how long it's taking app users to get through security checkpoints at specific airports.

The app also includes a list of more than 3,000 items fliers can and cannot carry onto their flights or put in checked baggage. That list started at about 900 items but grew rapidly as travelers used a response feature on the app to ask TSA about unlisted items.

Similar direct user feedback and computer analysis of how travelers are using the app has helped TSA to home in on precisely what their app audience wants, Bonner said.

"At a minimum, you should provide some opportunity for users to provide feedback," he said. "Maybe there's a function you think will be a real knockout feature, but if you have a feedback mechanism, you may find out people don't understand it or aren't using it."

Worth considering for those in the newsbiz considering apps.

Don Norman: Why tablet and smartphone interfaces suck

OK, Norman didn't put it quite like that. The actual title of his article is Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards In Usability.

Don't let it throw you. As you'd expect from a usability expert, the article is highly readable. And it details why too many touch-screen interfaces suck: Buttons that don't exactly do what you think they might (or do more than you expect, like the back button that, hit once too often, takes you out of the application), mystery gestures that work in some cases but not others, ignorance of conventions such as what check boxes are supposed to do versus radio buttons, etc.

This isn't arcana. It's important stuff to think about as we enter the mobile era. Some of us are involved in design directly (not me, of course, but some of us here), while others of us have to (or at least should be) thinking about these things as we fashion content to interact with these systems.

Norman is one of the highly regarded usability researchers (partner of Jakob Nielsen).


In fact, I'd recommend taking a look at his whole jnd.org site. Some fascinating stuff about design and human-computer interaction, which I believe is too important to be left to the engineers. With the "printing press" effectively pushed to the desktop in many cases, journalists now have a dog in this hunt.

Eyetrack videos - iPad vs newspaper

French consulting firm Miratech has released some eyetrack videos measuring how someone reads the iPad vs. a newspaper.

Among its conclusions is that people concentrate more on print stories and have better recall.

Keep in mind, however, that these things tend to be era-specific. Tablets, etc., are still rather new formats. As their ergonomics and visual grammar are "learned," results are likely to shift as we've seen with some studies on linking.