Design vs Art Blog

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.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Breadcrumbs are use to tell users where they are, just showing the path to the home page. Yes, the word comes from the fairy tales, more precisely Hansel and Gretel, in which these two poor children are left alone in the forest. Then they left a trail back home of breadcrumbs but the birds eat their trail and they get lost. Without breadcrumbs your users will be lost in the forest!

A trail of links is the 21st century usability version of Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs trail. They are not difficult to understand but there are a few things to keep in mind. For example, make clear what they are, use the words “You are here” like Wal-Mart does in it’s site.

Wal-Mart also makes the last words to look different making the user to notice that she is there. On the other hand, Shopping.com uses the words “Back to”, which is not that bad but why would you use something that might confuse users when the “You are here” works so good?

Another mistake of Shopping.com is not to make the last words to look different. Their design is just fine, it could be better though.

Breadcrumbs could be a little bit confusing if they are not implemented properly. For example, msnbc is not making a 100% good job in their already messy site. If you click on the left side menu item “Travel”, then “News”, the breadcrumbs show you as last selection “Travel News”, a selection that actually does not exist. This word-game is unnecessary and could confuse users.

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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.

Popularity: 15% [?]