Category Archives: News Sites

Bad Color Contrast, Analysis of New ReadWriteWeb Design

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ReadWriteWeb has recently changed the design, the website looks more organized but the colors they chose could be a serious problem for a lot of people.

It’s an extremely important usability issue to choose the right color contrast. A lot of people have color disabilities and the combination of red on white could really become a problem.

ReadWriteWeb Design 20071218

In my opinion, the new ReadWriteWeb design is too shiny, it bothers my eyes, I just don’t feel comfortable looking at it. Actually, the red on white and the green on white are the most common trouble contrast options.

Designing for the people with color disabilities is actually designing to everybody, better color contrast will be preferred by all your users.

Make Clear How Your Rating System Works

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Users might be a little bit confuse or sceptical about the news or products you are offering if you don’t make clear how those items get to the top. If your site is using a rating system make it clear how this system works.

I read about NORG.com, a kind of local Digg, at TechCrunch and wanted to check out this site. I’ve found two usability flaws, the one that drove my attention first was that each story title has a number next to it but it is difficult to guess what that number is for if you don’t know what the site is about.

Norg Home 20071116

Second usability problem is that it’s not totally clear the way they rate news. How this happens? No information at the About page. Also, users looking at the Top Stories ranking could be a bit confused, logically the story with more votes is at the top, but it is not clear to me that the number next to the title is the number of votes. Maybe their interface could be improved.

Norg Rating 20071116

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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.

Fishing Users with Content Headlines and Blurbs

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Driving users to full stories and content could not be that easy. What news sites do is to present headlines with some more lines of the article. This usually works fine, for example the New York Times use a good design: picture, plus headline, plus blurb.

NYT 20071114

But sometimes some content like pictures and video don’t have a proper text description to fish users. Of course, the image itself is a hook but if you add some descriptions to your media content in you web interface users will feel more attractive to click and go farther into your website. Here a bad design example, Yahoo! is missing the hook.

Yahoo 20071114

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