Really,
New York Times, really? I can't believe it. The old article skimmer was a gorgeous Swiss-like grid of impossibly clear and satisfying order. The number of elements was kept at a strict minimum: sidebar, boxes, title bar, simple arrows. The new and supposedly improved skimmer brings in so much clutter and levels the elements so that they are so visually similar that the eye glazes over the entire page as one rather than quickly skimming from box to box like the old one.
The New York Times is such a respected news source so it is a shame that this new design actually prevents the very thing it is intended to do: skim. Pardon the brusque criticism, but this re-design was a mistake and I intend to prove why.
One of the biggest follies in the redesign is the elimination of the hairlines that gridded out the page. This element made it very easy to make the jump from box to box while skimming. It also reinforced the equality of the text in the boxes. I can't begin to stress enough how important this detail is to the use of the site.
The colour palette has also been revamped. For some reason the new skimmer nixed the dark blue in favour of grays. The design director most likely reasoned this backpedaling by calling the new design "simpler," more "pure," and "in line with the visual identity of the black-and-white printed newspaper." Right. Okay. But leveling out the whole page in grays causes the eye to dance back and forth all over the place looking for a point to fix the gaze; in the old version the blue news headlines helped anchor the eye to streamline the optical process of actual skimming since it was the only colour on the page. The blue headlines were a useful part of the site, as that is exactly what users are looking to read and then decide to click from there.
The section sidebar jumped over to the right side of the page and so must realign itself every time you stretch the window to make it larger since more boxes come into the grid as the window becomes larger. Assuming one does not enlarge the window, the sidebar was an essential part of the quick skim since it enabled users to select their topic right away and then read the stories in a top-down mental process. The right-hand side bar forces users to first read or get distracted by the headlines on the page. In the same vein, the top bar became white (see "simple," "pure," et al above) so that it, too, becomes a part of the skimming content so as to sidetrack the eye.
Even the arrows were not spared. The old skimmer contained just the essentials: the page number and left/right arrows. First of all, why make them into buttons? We know to click on the arrows to go on to the next page. Additionally, we know what a left arrow looks like and what a right arrow looks like. Why, then, must they build in even more clutter by writing out "previous" and "next" -- they introduced 8 characters instead of 1 for the former. This is unneccessary and undermines the whole idea of skimming.
The ads. Okay, so apparently clicking the story to lead into the full article with all of its ads and banners isn't enough.
The New York Times wanted another ad unit to sell. Of course it breaks up the flow of the skimmer and by doing so, it prevents the eye from skimming by acting as a visual blockade or stopping point. If they really, really needed to keep the unit, the addition of those hairlines would have helped keep it contained to look less intrusive. And of course there is the problem of content-delivering web sites not realizing how valuable online advertising is these days. The cost per unit should be much higher. It is no longer 2001 -- advertisers are no longer skeptical about putting ads on the wild west internets.
And last but not least, why do they have so many typefaces going on? The beauty of the old skimmer was that the headlines were of equal weight except for the lead story, which was given two boxes' worth of width and a larger type size. Since it was in the same typeface as the rest of the headlines, it stayed in the streamline of headlines while still standing out. The new version italicizes that lead headline, which makes the eye get stuck on it briefly because it stands out too much.
I will be very interested to see the percentage by which the number of visitors drops. If you would like to encourage the New York Times to revert back to the old design, please
send feedback through this form or email Martin Nisenholtz, the SVP of Digital Operations at digitalsvp@nytimes.com.
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