Many users like to see what others are reading, buying or watching. Specially news sites know that having the possibility to check the most popular articles is very important for users, so they provide special popularity-based organization of news. A good example is the New York Times, they placed a link to the most popular section in a prominent position.
The New York Times organizes and presents the most popular articles in a neat way. They also add a small description below each title (e.g. “Articles most frequently linked to by bloggers on the Web”). What it’s important but missing at nyt.com is the time range, it might be not very clear for many users that this page is presenting the most populars for this day.
Digg, knows better the importance of the time range settings:
This time the BBC News site messed up, giving users to many choices and making a simple feature something complicated to understand. Here, the BBC shows a traffic monitor that tells users how busy the site is. Does anyone care? Also, the mos popular list moves all the time, it gets automatically updated on every minute. Is that necessary?
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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.
