Aaaah, fresh air. All that cool, beautiful white space blowing around the headlines of the new LATimes.com layout launched this morning gives the immediate impression of clearer thinking, freer access, deeper thought.
It's not perfect, but as I said yesterday, anything would have improved the cramped, frenetic old design and this is a very solid effort.
Gone is the pay-to-browse barrier around CalendarLive's culture coverage and arts-and-dining listings (about time). Gone, too is the nasty, gnarled thicket of homepage links left by letting the entire navigation tree grow wild.
But the Times' interface designers made what I consider to be a fairly crucial mistake that, if corrected, could serve their audience better and driven users more consistently into the depths of the site - and more eyeballs to their advertisers ...
Hey, CalendarLive's free!
They parked two core database engines well below the fold, where users with smaller screens (most of us mortals) are not likely to see them without scrolling down. The Classifieds interface and the the CalendarLive listings interface are essentially hidden from view, giving a huge tactical advantage to CraigsList and the soon-to-be-replated LAWeekly.com.
Information-hungry web users want fast access to frequently-used data sources. They don't necessarily want what the Times gave them instead in the top-right quadrant of the page - an array of thumbsucker features labeled "Pacific Time" which feature (today) a feature on landmarks for illegal immigrants, the L.A. campaign-improprieties trial of a Hillary Clinton aide, a traffic story conceding the point I made yesterday (that the Texas study shows traffic's not worse this year) and a first-person column about walking at night.
That last paragraph was long, wasn't it? Was the information gotta-click useful for you? Me neither.
By putting such features up top, the Times editors are hiding one of its most magnetic assets for getting and retaining regular users. Maybe they're hoping instead that their core audience of news junkies will appreciate the prettier packaging and delightful array of interesting content ... and eventually stumble its way toward the databases.
But browsers browse. They'll find all those features eventually.
Information-users - who are intensely loyal to interfaces that serve their needs - seek.
And as focus-group after merciless focus group will tell you, no matter how much you snicker behind the smoked glass at how dumb they are for not finding something so obvious as a home-page interface - if they have to scroll for it, it doesn't exist, and if it doesn't exist on first impression, they'll switch to a site where it does exist. The left-column classified links (Jobs, Cars, Homes, Rentals) and the bland umbrella "Entertainment" in the top nav bar don't carry the same visual syntax as the search windows - and require an extra click-and-download before you can actually begin using the functions they represent.
On a brighter note, the home page CalendarLive interface is a pretty nifty machine: Click on a topic like "music," and a search window pops immediately without loading a new browser page, letting you search right away by genre or menu.
Unfortunately the fun ends there - you have to click through an intermediate "listing" page with address and phone number to get to a second page where you then have to scroll down past a not-very-useful chunk of boilerplate copy about the club to even find out who's playing there.
Mozila 1.4 was not amused. Note the blowout of the ad block, which lands all the way off-screen. UPDATE - that's been fixed.
News is handled a lot more cleanly - perhaps because story pages needn't act like interfaces. The elimination of the horrible left-column navigation links gives each news story lot more room to expand and more space for photos, links and multimedia elements. That space isn't being used to full advantage yet (most of the home-page stories hold only related links and section-related links in the right column refer space) but we can hope that the Times photo staff will get a little more front-end space on each story for the artwork, which is often buried in slideshows as an "optional," selectable chunk of content rather than an integral part of the story.
Back to the home page - as an inveterate traffic geek, I'm pleased to see the SigAlert.com maps linked more obviously from the home page. However, the links drive you to frames-only pages (ick) where the actual maps are shoehorned into the lower two-thirds of the page in favor of an ad-block and a static LAT.com header.
When you click the header to return to the home page, it loads it in the top frame only - essentially behind the traffic maps - but I'll assume that's just one of those post-launch bugs that we all know and fear.
Warts and all, though, this is a major improvement on the old LATimes.com design. Here's hoping they're not afraid to tweak it to meet their users needs.
Now, I wonder where they'll put that blog everyone's been whispering about ...
Posted by: mack_reed on Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 08:56 AM
Hey, CalendarLive's free!
Mozila 1.4 was not amused. Note the blowout of the ad block, which lands all the way off-screen.
