James Pearce of Facebook lifts the veil on traffic on open vs. native: “If Facebook Were Built Today, It Would Be a Mobile App”.
Apple & Samsung arguing over estimates
27
Apr
“The massive 12.5 million unit difference between the two estimates from Strategy Analytics and iSuppli puts Samsung either well above or below Apple for the quarter”, writes AppleInsider.
It will be exciting to see how 2012 pans out when it comes to the battle of the brands in the smartphone sphere.
Retina retina
30
Mar
Newspaper oriented design, a hefty cost for multi channel organizations
11
Nov
How newspaper design hinders good multi channel publishing
Most media houses are struggling with both the structural change of the industry as well as the tail of the digitalization. Through the last year I have been managing the rollout of new editorial systems in four Norwegian media houses with the purpose of simplifying the cross channel publishing process. Here are some of my reflections on the main blocker.
Good system, old newspaper design rules
Let’s jump at the conclusion first: Newspaper design is still far to paper oriented and that is a blocker to smooth multi channel publishing. I’ll try to tell you why.
Computers are very good at handling data. And data can be mapped easily to transform itself on its way from one system to another, or from one channel to another within one system. Mapping and handling data is not the problem. If you have your leadin in the pre-leadin box, no probs, we’ll style it back to the leadin. Photo in wrong dimension and you need to place something in the IPTC while travelling, no sweat.
So, I hear you say you need tidy XML for your archive or export to the PDF tablet solution provider? Well, we have XML, but is it tidy? Nope. Well, structure is, but not the content.
And here it begins back at the very beginning.
Media houses are still pre-occupied with delivering newspapers in print. It is the mother still and the daughters may be stroppy, but daren’t make mama cross. So even in the places we have had a complete redesign of the newspaper, the digital channels have been 2nd violin. I guess it is the last time in this media group. On the positive side, this re-design round at least came with a font set that could be embedded online.
So, what’s the problem?
Well, newspapers still come with many human made rules, and even if a designer creates an idea of a newspaper, the news desk is there to break those rules every day. They are mapping the news towards how the story should be told. The designer, on the other hand, is creating a durable idea that can live, or die, with this fact. Still though, in the downfall of newspapers in print, many designers are moving towards feature and magazine design also for newspapers, not taking in the fact that this is to be produced every day, not every month, and also for swift channel change. And here the fun begins.
Not saying it’s the designer’s faults, though. They are just being told to design a newspaper that stops the crashing from high altitude. And it seems like magazine look is an attempt at doing that. (Let’s discuss the success or failure in that later sometime.)
That, in the midst of a structural change towards digitalization.
In the beginning of the project, we had an idea of making systems talking fluent with each other. And so we did. And when they started talking, they started disagreeing: “XML og API says you are sending subheaders to me, but they look funny”. “Well, yeah, it’s because the newspaper has kicker titles and not subheaders, silly”. “Uh, oh”.
We managed to map all fields correctly, but the use of them differed because of the difference in design. Throw a little human error on top, and things are looking even bleaker.
Some newspapers have a design that almost look like an early HTML-structured document. <H1>Here is the title</H1>, <body>here is the body copy</body> and here is an image <img src=…jpg>. To send this between channels must be a lot closer to the ideal than when paper designers have used the preleadin for leadin and leadin for intro body and photo credit should always be correspondent byline if the photographer used his own car outside the city limit and the subheader is not really a subheader but a kicker in bold starting each sentence. If you don’t know the difference between a subheader a kicker, only look at the difference in my subheaders. The one starting this paragraph is a kicker. Now try to make this one nice as a subheader in a channel that hasn’t got kickers…
The last waltz
My guess is that this years’ redesign projects is the last one with paper and online designers not being in the same department, making the newspaper design the leading force. Simply because well structured data is the solution to both quality in multiple channels without a lot of human work (and more errors) and hence cost effectiveness. Newspaper oriented design is too often not a cost effective design for multi channel purposes. Their designers should be trained in XML first.
So who has to back down and change their product?
<Short paragraph here>The newspaper designers</Short paragraph here>
Responsive news design, what’s in it for you?
09
Oct
Boston Globe has had front-end lovers as well as digital leaders dragging the lower right corner of their browsers over the last few months, awing at how the page changes as you make the window smaller or bigger. “This is it”, they are thinking, I guess. But they seem to be forgetting that it’s only on their PC screen they actually can play around with the window size like that.
At a first glance, Boston Globe seems really clever. Probably because it IS clever. But for a news site it comes with a hefty cost: You give away some of the flexibility you need for a news site to tell exciting stories.
You are left with a news site edited by lists and priorities and not the storytelling tools you find on news sites edited pixel-perfect/WYSIWIG.
Let me try to explain.
I come from Scandinavia, where the largest online news providers spring out of the moderate tabloid newspaper designs of their mothers. Quite unlike the large international news sites deriving from either TV stations or broadsheet newspapers.
Remember that TV stations mostly were good at writing program info, and the broadsheet designs are very horizontally oriented. Very unlike vertical tabloid news newspaper design and also the scrolling of a vertical front page. The way they get away with their elegance is by very moderate use of images and graphics.
Examples of Scandinavian news sites:
www.vg.no (PC), tablet.vg.no (Tablet) touch.vg.no (Smartphones)
www.aftonbladet.se (PC), mobil.aftonbladet.se (Smartphones)
UGLY BUGLY PIXEL PERFECT
Designers hate Scandinavian online news sites. They think they are ugly, and that they break most common usability conventions. Multi-menus, lack of breadcrumbs and unified navigations, messy front pages and even more messy article views. Common for all of them is that they are made with a WYSIWIG editor, commonly Dr. Front by Aptoma, a tool that you can put on top of most CMS and design front pages however you want. But the front pages are just a messenger of the news desk taste, or lack there of according to the design community.
Common for all of them is also that they are extremely popular.
The benefit is that you can do nearly anything you want with your front page without programming for special events all the time. The problem with this solution is that you need to take into account how you design your site in order to make the same front work on large and small screens. If you want a one-size-fits-all solution, a full ten column design can give you huge challenges. And of course…uh…em…it’s in the hands of normal humans, not the front-end gurus.
To edit your fronts this way can be viewed as a pixel-perfect orientation towards editing. There is responsive design involved here as well, only that most sites do this on incoming with UA-sniffers that send the user to correct CSS depending on what device is at hand. Or on your lap.
RESPOND AND CONQUER?
Responsive to mostly the same thing but with media queries in the same lump of code. Match this with elegant sites like the Boston Globe and you have the front-end community laughing with joy. Finally, the world is listening. But there is a problem. The problem is news.
News is dramatic. News is storytelling. News is pictures, images and video put together for you to take part in what is going on in the world. News is not only aggregation of the world in list form, news is EMOTIONS.
Well, in order to succeed with elegant design with responsive CSS, you have to give some of the news delivery away. Unless you are coming from a thoroughly static broadsheet designed world.
MY SCREEN IS BIGGER THAN YOURS
So what is the solution? Well, I am not saying pixel perfect editing is better than responsive design. Both have pros and cons:
1) Pixel perfect: Good for flexible and dramatic storytelling, demands design that matches all screens to work across all sizes, and is of course a victim for the taste of the editor of the day. I’d consider this for sites what want to use more dramatic ways to present news, because of the flexibility.
2) Responsive: Good for more elegant sites depending on editing of priorities, not pixels. Good for coherent design, but lacks the ability to change looks without having a huge number of templates. I’d consider this very much for sites that contain structured information like city guides and food and drink section.
So what kind of news site do you really want to make? Something inbetween?
I’d say what gives you optimal control over your site is to divide the world into small screens and larger screens. Let the cache decide whether to respond with a large or a small site. Then let CSS do the rest. If you come with an iPhone, route directly to a 480px width site from the small screen subdomain. If you have a PC or tablet, bring on the large site CSS and let the screen size decide whether it’s a full screen version or a 1024px width iPad-solution you want to present.
It gives you more control over the code, it let’s your team work at the same time in separate codebases, it gives you a clearer caching strategy and gives more general flexibility when it comes to put in special events without making too much compromise. Design and developing agencies will tell you it is sizzling, but the life in a online news development department has different realpolitic rules.
Just don’t imagine winning prizes for dragging the lower right corner of your browser, watching your site change. It takes more than that.
FIRST YOU HAVE TO ASK: WHAT KIND OF NEWS DO WE WANT TO DELIVER?