adrian holovaty

January 30, 2003, 10:47 PM ET

Post-Connections notes: Chron.com

Continuing yesterday's summary of my comments from the Connections conference, here are some thoughts on Chron.com, the Web site of the Houston Chronicle:

• The left-rail navigation is alphabetical. Several usability studies have said such navigation lists are harder to use than normal (categorical) lists. (I've discussed this topic previously.)
• It's great to see the clearly labeled last-updated time at the top of the home page. It'd be even more helpful (for non-U.S. readers) if the acronym "CST" were explained. There's no doubt people in Houston will know it means "Central Standard Time," but readers from other parts of the world -- visitors from Australia who stumble upon chron.com via a Google search, for instance -- might not. "CST" is a prime candidate for the <acronym> tag (as previously discussed); or, better yet, the word could be linked to a page explaining this particular time zone in depth, and providing a means for users to convert their own time zone to Houston's.
• At the top left of the home page, I see three links: "ARCHIVES", "MAKE THIS YOUR" and "HOME PAGE". I pity the user who clicks that third line, thinking it's a link to the home page. These small annoyances pile up quickly.
• On the lower right of the entertainment page, what's the difference between "Extras" and "Specials"? I'm sure the Chron.com producers know how they differ -- but, at face value on this Web page, they look to be the same thing. Some more descriptive keywords would help.
• The home page's basic, one-field search box has a "Clear" button -- a practice often discouraged because it causes more trouble than it's worth. Particularly for a one-field form, a "clear" button is unnecessary.
• On the home page, the labels "Today's top stories" and "Other news" are unnecessary; they communicate nothing that the visual design itself doesn't. And the former occupies precious screen real estate.

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January 29, 2003, 10:11 PM ET

Post-Connections notes: Northbay.com

I'm back from the Connections conference, and I've Web-posted my introductory presentation, which was a quick rundown of Web design pointers.

During our panel discussion, Jay Small and I critiqued the design of two news sites. Jay focused on the important stuff; I made annoying/nitpicky suggestions. Here's a sampling of some of the comments I made about northbay.com:

• The top of the home page has three search boxes -- a potentially confusing practice. Two of them (the left and right ones) point to the same search engine; it would clear up confusion if one of those were cut out. Until that happens, befuddled users might assume each search box searches a different part of the site, and, hence, might attempt their searches twice -- only leading to wasted time and frustration.
• Similarly, all three search boxes have a link to "Advanced Search."
• The left-rail navigation uses the word "More..." to give readers an explicit link to more content in each particular section. Many news sites stop short of this technique, linking only the section name itself to "more" content. Northbay.com's way is much better: Here, redundancy helps.
• It'd be helpful if today's date were labeled on the events calendar. And the "S," "M," "T," etc., shouldn't be underlined if they aren't links.
• Like many other news sites, northbay.com displays an ambiguous date on its home page. (I discussed this in depth several months ago.) Is it the last-updated date? Or is it simply today's date? Some short explainer text would help.
• The "North Bay Top 10" section on the home page makes excellent use of underlining "important" words. This makes for easy scanning, and is better than linking the categories (e.g. "Drama") or, God forbid, using the words "click here."
• On the section fronts (such as the Food and Wine page), headlines should be clickable. My friend Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman has written an excellent piece on why this should be done.
• Also on the section fronts, the events-calendar search box in the upper right is somewhat confusing. How do the days of the week (in blue) correspond to the search box? Does the green arrow next to "Wed" mean the search will be limited to Wednesday's events? This isn't the case, but the graphical grouping of these two elements suggests otherwise. I'd move those dates out of the box, in order to isolate the search form.
• The left-rail navigation mixes content-types and content-subjects. For example, in the "Entertainment" section, we see links to "Articles & Columns" (two types of content) and "Books" (a subject of content). This begs the question: Which link do I click if I'm looking for an article about books? It'd be less confusing if the navigation stuck to either type-based or subject-based sections, across the board.

I'll post my comments on the second critiqued site (the Houston Chronicle) tomorrow.

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January 26, 2003, 1:31 AM ET

Orlando, here I come

I'm off to the Newspaper Association of America's CONNECTIONS 2003 conference in Orlando, Fla., where I'm scheduled to be on a panel discussion on redesigning news Web sites. I'll be joining fellow news-design weblogger Jay Small in critiquing two recently redesigned sites.

Topics I plan to touch on: Usability, accessibility, Web standards. I'll post my short presentation and notes here when I get back.

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January 22, 2003, 10:07 PM ET

Busy, busy, busy

The other day, Craig Saila wrote: "A good estimate of my workload level is the density (or frequency) or my entries here."

Same here.

My weblog posting has suffered because I'm working my butt off on several work projects. It's challenging and exhilarating, and suffice it to say that when all is said and done, you'll wish you were a music fan in Lawrence, Kansas.

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January 9, 2003, 10:42 PM ET

Recommended reading

A few links of interest to designers and developers of online news/information sites:

• Matt Jones: The Glass Wall. "A document detailing the design process behind the BBC homepage." Fascinating, and beautifully explained.
• Anne Conneen: The Best Designed News Sites
• Steve Yelvington: What are the best-designed news sites? "Good Web design is interaction design, not 'how it looks' design."
• Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman: Name your sections carefully. "Online editors might want to ask themselves whether their section names will still be appropriate 10 years from now."
• Columbia Journalism Review: Sixty-Seven Young Journalists and the Newspaper of Their Dreams. So what if I'm one of the journalists quoted? There are some good ideas here.
• Editor and Publisher: Newspaper Outsiders Offer Tips for Web Sites
• Steve Outing: New Year Resolutions: Fix Archives, Ban Pop-ups

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January 9, 2003, 9:51 PM ET

Blocking stylesheet rules from Safari

Mark Pilgrim has asked: Should Apple's new Safari browser have an intentional CSS-parsing bug that Web developers can exploit to hide specific styles from that browser? My answer: I don't know. But, just for fun, here's what that could look like.

/* Begin Safari v1.0 hide */
styles_to_be_hidden {
...
}
/* End Safari v1.0 hide */

It's that simple. Safari would ignore anything between those two comments. As an advocate of Web standards, I don't necessarily approve of such a technique. But here are a few devil's-advocate thoughts on why this should happen:

1. A need for this feature is inevitable. As Mark says, "Safari will presumably become the default browser on Mac OS X at some indeterminate point in the future, so lots of people will use it...CSS hiding hacks are evil, but the alternatives are worse."
2. It's easy to read. Any Web developer would be able to discern the purpose of this code by glancing at the comments.
3. It doesn't use any ridiculous combinations of slashes, asterisks and God-knows-what-else. Other CSS hacks, most notably the Box Model Hack, do.
4. It validates properly. The style-sheet validator ignores anything within comment marks.
5. It should be easy to implement in Safari. It's as easy as trimming anything between those comments.
6. It's future-proof. As the Safari developers release new versions, they could upgrade the hack. Hence, something hidden with /* Begin Safari v1.0 hide */ would always be hidden from version 1.0 Safari browsers (obviously) -- but in, say, version 1.2, after the Safari developers have fixed the bugs that encouraged Web developers to use the v1.0 hack in the first place, the new browser would not ignore the 1.0 hack anymore. Instead, it would provide a means for designers to hide code from the new version: /* Begin Safari v1.2 hide */. And so on, and so forth, until all browser bugs have been eliminated..

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January 6, 2003, 11:00 PM ET

On bookmarking entertainment listings

Which local entertainment sites I perused during my trip home to Chicago this weekend:

• Metromix
• Newcity Chicago
• Citysearch Chicago
• Sun-Times' calendar

How many event "detail pages" I bookmarked for further perusal later:

10.

What I decided to attend, after turning off the computer and thinking about it:

A collection of short plays at a small theater on Lincoln Ave.

What my bookmarks looked like when I came back to the computer later, looking for said theater's phone number:

How long it took me to find the site I'd bookmarked, on a slow connection, with only those page titles to direct me:

Way too long.

Whom I can thank for this inconvenience and usability problem:

1. Site marketers who obsess over stuffing Web page titles with unhelpful, unmeaningful keywords such as "entertainment, restaurants, events, hotels, movies."
2. Site designers who put up with that.

Which types of news/information sites should be most bookmark-friendly:

Entertainment listings.

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January 2, 2003, 12:27 AM ET

The need for archives by citation

Mark Pilgrim recently unveiled a "Posts by Citation" archive.

The archive lets you sort Mark's weblog entries by the sources he cites. For example, you can access every entry that cites The Onion, Jakob Nielsen, or The Washington Post. Plus, the archive page lists how many entries cite each particular source. (At the time of this writing, for example, he'd cited Dave Winer 26 times and Paul Ford 7 times.)

Such a system is made simple because Mark's blog entries use the appropriate code -- the cite tag -- to identify source names. That makes it easy for a computer to discern which pieces of a blog entry are citations. (Which, in turn, makes it easy for a computer to group entries that have similar citations, or calculate how often a particular source is cited.)

This new way of archiving has caused a stir in the weblogging community, but the idea isn't just a weblog novelty. It's a concept news Web sites should adopt and run with. Here's why that should happen:

It groups content in helpful ways

It's obvious that someone looking for quotes by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would benefit from an archive of all stories that cited him. Such an archiving scheme helps readers, researchers and journalists themselves.

It provides interesting meta-information about the site

I'd be fascinated to see a list of the most-quoted sources at the New York Times. Or, whom the Times rarely quotes. This type of information has an allure similar to that of "most-e-mailed articles" lists (such as Yahoo's).

It keeps the journalists in check

Most importantly, a citation archive would lay bare a news organization's biases by disclosing publicly which sources have been quoted more than others.

It's no secret that some "unbiased" news outlets quote certain groups -- say, members of certain political parties -- more exclusively than other groups. The American media watchdog group FAIR has published several reports revealing in detail some of these "official agendas." (One study concluded a PBS news program had "utterly failed" to be a fair, open forum because the show's guests tended to be of similar political leanings.)

If news Web sites made it easy for readers to see how often certain sources were quoted, journalists would have extra incentive to "get both sides of the story."

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January 2, 2003, 12:25 AM ET

Back in business

As the holidays wind down and my cross-country trips (Gatlinburg, Tenn., to Lawrence, Kan., to Chicago, to Lawrence, then to Chicago again) wind down, it's back into the weblogging routine. Happy new year, everybody, and I apologize for my temporary absence.

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