CNN.com Redesign--the Good and Bad

This morning the big switchover to the new edition of CNN.com began. I’m sure the CNN crew are working hard still to bring the last set of pages up to the new design (health, tech and travel are a few still in the legacy version at point of writing). But this post isn’t about what hasn’t been done; it’s about what CNN has done with its web presence.

Design and Content
The design is fairly consistent with probably CNN’s largest competitor the BBC—three columns, universal large banner and navigation bar. Content however changes the game. BBC’s homepage has three columns of news, while CNN has decided to have one column of news, then one column (notably the largest and middle) dedicated to video content. Now obviously this is because of CNN’s dedication to video content as a supplement to news, but to me this just seems wrong. The real news stories seem marginalized. Dimensionally speaking, the news story listings make up around 5% of the total page area (above the fold). This just seems like a bizarrely small area for a news website. Further stories are broken down into categories below the fold. We’ll have to see how this works for them, one article I read recently says that ‘the fold’ has no bearing on today’s internet user (http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/thoughts/the_myth_of_the_page_fold_evidence_from_user_testing.htm).
The actual news pages look fairly beautiful. I’ve always been a fan of BBC’s pages which are headed by a large image or video. CNN takes this to the next level for their best content, increasing the size of the header. Whereas in the legacy version, had videos, pictures and article on separate pages, this brings everything together really nicely.

NewsPulse
New to this revision of CNN.com is the NewsPulse section (http://newspulse.cnn.com/). At first glance this looks like a fairly easy to use section. The top stories are listed, and there are more options to filter the stories. It’s a much more interactive feature than the BBC’s top stories. One note on UI, you can click on one headline to expand it, but you first have to close that headline before you can open another. The details are nice, but not at the cost of two clicks. (this has since been fixed--guess i shouldn't do a review while its still going live).

iReport
Thank you for finally integrating this into the CNN.com design. That blue for the legacy version was off-putting and caused some sort of cataclysm of brand in my mind. Also that’s a really nice flash interface on the homepage. I’ve never really found a point for browsing the iReport site, and this probably wont change, but it’s cool when iReports turn up the main news.

Profiles
Maybe they had this before, maybe they didn’t. Either way I signed up today to one minor nuisance: Usernames are limited to 12 characters. Anyone who knows me knows I use one username everywhere; the problem is it is 13 characters long.

The Overall
The design looks good, the news pages look good, and it seems friendly, but I’m still bugged by how small an area the latest headlines takes up—this should not be a secondary section on a NEWS site.

Facebook Rant Pt 2 –Social Diarrhea

Apparently I’m none done complaining about this latest update of Facebook(and neither is anyone else). Last time I took a mostly heavy approach on the design of the actual things now, but I believe there’s more to this problem then just the atheistic. I might have started to corner in on it in the last post, but my main complaint right now is the function of new new Facebook.

Social Diarrhea
Facebook calls its new homepage your stream. I call it social diarrhea. Why, well because it lacks any sort of consistency and content, runs contrary to anything normal and leaves you cramped and with a bad taste in your mouth. Ok, so maybe that’s a little far, but the changes we’ve seen in the past week are close to the worse thing I’ve ever associated with Facebook. What’s my point? Facebook is a social networking site. It always has been, and as far as I can tell the denizens of Facebook have used it so. These updates though, take us down the microblogging path that twitter has established. In combining these two, which were never really meant to be combined, Facebook arrives at a conscious stream that runs like diarrhea—watery and insubstantial—and ultimately interrupts the core function of Facebook (social networking).

A Photo Explanation
On the left (old new Facebook):
(a) green posts a photo of last nights party
(b) yellow comments on greens photo
(c) red sees yellows comment and reds photo and friend requests yellow because they met at last nights party

On the right (new new Facebook):
(a) green posts a photo of last nights party and a status update
(b) yellow misses the photo, but reads the status update
(c) red writes a status update about what he ate for dinner

And I Just Noticed
In creating this post I spent some more actually seeing some of the changes that Facebook has implemented. It seems everywhere I look I see something I don’t like. I just realized that Facebook has just completely dropped any sense of timeline from your profile’s wall tab. How does this contribute to a social stream? Who put on the arbitrary hat in this decision process?

Take Note
I’m not complaining here, Facebook, about change. I like change. I was for change in the past redesign. What I’m complaining about is fixing something that wasn’t broke. There are specific complaints here, all spanning from this one update. Next time Facebook, take some time to work out the flaws before jumping on a ship you don’t know is floating or sinking (I don’t even think twitter even knows).

I’m going to link this blog on huffpost again because it’s hilariously true.

Facebook Doesn’t Know (about usability and design)

So, waiting perhaps 36 hours more than some people seemed to have to wait to get their Facebook update rollout, I’m now stuck with something I don’t like. Which is surprising to me. Unlike the majority of the Facebook population, I was in favor of, and liked (for the most part), the past couple of updates and redesigns. But there’s something about this new layout that irks me. I’ll try to put my finger on it: a usability nightmare?

Rounded Images
Here’s a challenge. Look at pretty much everything on Facebook and tell me what type of corners everything has. Square. Now there are a few exceptions, but for the most part those have just been implemented. So why would Facebook change our user-icons to have rounded edges—it just looks awkward and un-aesthetical. My guess: twitter has squares and we can’t look like we were trying to copy twitter.

Wall Posts
Take a look at your news feed and quickly try to find a wall post. This might be because the news feed is now FULL of status updates (more on that later), or it might be because they display almost exactly like a status update. There is one difference and that is the tiny grey arrow, which to me doesn’t delineate a conversation at all. Suggestions: two pictures, quotes…doesn’t matter, just do something about it.

Notifications
Facebook’s thought process of this one is startling. Before Facebook had two places for notifications, the sidebar and the numbers next to the inbox. Now Facebook has three places: the sidebar for birthdays, the welcome banner for friend, application and event requests and the numbers next to the inbox. They couldn’t make this any more confusing.

Highlighted Items
Huge problems here. First off, by whose definition are these highlights highlighted. Personally I couldn’t care less what or who ‘ssenmodnaR’ is, or what ‘rar-rar’ is. Perhaps Facebook thinks I do, but I really don’t. You might have noticed in you’re news feed there is an option to hide a friends updates. Well you can’t hide a highlight. Here’s an idea: stop thinking for us Facebook ( And hiding ads in the highlights).

Icons
Again, questionable thought process here. Facebook: ‘hows about we get rid of all those icons that mark out what type of update is what, no wait here’s a better idea, hows about we get rid of all of them, except put them in the highlights bar’. Pick a design standard Facebook, this mix is confusing and un-aesthetical.

Not Enough Mix
Suddenly I’m stuck with a never ending list of status updates I don’t care about. What I really want is a decent mix of status updates, and to not have decent items I may want to view getting bumped off the bottom of the page by dumb updates like ‘don’t like new facebook’. I think you had it right last time Facebook. Keep it to three or four statuses at the top of the news feed, and have a separate section (like live feed) where you can see everyone’s up to date status.

Design Structure
Take a look at your profile and tell me how the content is divisible. Tabs. Well if this is the dominant design paradigm for Facebook, why have they done away with them on the homepage in favor of something completely different? It makes me think that Facebook has become so managerial and bureaucratically driven that separate divisions and brains are designing different pages at different times differently. Design structure unity is key to a good interface and good usability.

Combining publisher
Anyone on first glance wonder where the publisher went? I smiled and thought they’d abandoned the idea (I’d never used it except to update status). I was wrong. Turns out it’s hidden for on-click in textbox only. This is a usability flaw and a half, I always thought the idea was to have things as easy to access as possible in web design. Thought process: if I want to post a picture, I’m not going to type anything; I just want to click one button. Now I have to pretend to type a status update to get anywhere.

‘What’s on your mind?’
Basically, you need a different phrase. Of course you can’t use ‘what are you doing’ (twitter’s), but ‘what’s on your mind?’, to me, limits exactly to what I’m thinking about, and if that’s the case why haven’t they auto-inserted ‘is thinking about’ to every status box. Of if they’re mind/thinking updates, then their not status updates anymore.

We Will Adapt
The denizens of Facebook will undoubtedly adapt to the complicated, un-aesthetic and usability nightmare that is the new Facebook homepage. But right here and now it feels scraped together, a mish mash of a hundred different thoughts with no clear design patters, and no clear direction. It feels like Facebook when I first joined, which is a giant step back for a webpage, no tool, that hundreds of millions of people around the world use consistently everyday.

bloHG goes widescreen

I've just been playing with some of the CSS backbone to this bloHG to go along with some of the site-wide changes for the redesign (version 6). Look for the widescreen-ness of the bloHG now, fit for the 1024 browser window. Also i added in some spacing to the lines of the blog post--something that has been bugging me for a while now. That spacing includes modifications to the spacing of dates, blog titles and the paragraphs of the bloHG content. Finally, the header has been changed to coincide with the universal header for the mercury studios. In a last round of modifications to the bloHG i will hopefully add in links to the other site content like the rest of the site appears.

Back to Ba6 – Mercury Studios v6

I’m back for my excursion in Australia (read the blog, visit the site) and while ignoring my duties to finish updating the mini site I’ve been working on another new version of Mercury Studios (version 6 as far as I can count if you start from the very beginning). Yes, in what seems to becoming a yearly tradition the sixth version of Mercury Studios comes 5 years after the beginning of my life as a web and flash developer, 1 years and 3 months after the conception of Mercury Studios (what I call v4), and 1 year after Mercury Studios V5. With Version 6, I went widescreen and simplified the whole layout, giving each element its space. From what stats I caught from viewers, the majority of users had screens equal to or wider that 1024. I took advantage of this space and expanded my pages (as many others have done in recent months). Ill also be changing the way content is viewed. The news page is gone, with bloHG now taking center stage as the news and blog section. Flash was renamed to animation because, after all, interactive is also flash. Advertisements have also been incorporated in the pages other than the home page. That’s the bulk of the changes for this update, and you can see it right now on the homepage only. The other pages will follow for the beginning of 2009. If you have any comments, shoot an email to david@mercury-studios.com.
Also I was thinking of entering the Newgrounds Winter Flash-Off, but ill have to see what time this redesign takes and if I get any good ideas as well as completing my Australia Mini-site.