Elvis Blogs - Elvis McNeely

Congratulations to NewsWeek on a great usability web page. I stumbled on this article (http://www.newsweek.com/id/98022) this evening and was surprised to see a clean yet usable "main" content page. I say "main content" referring to the article (left column).

If you take a look to the right of the article text you will see a bluish-gray box with a few eye catchy icons and links: Type Size, Print, Email, RSS, Social Networks, Links to this article. A little bit of play for every type of Web user. Let's see why this is a good fit for a broad base of Web users.

Type Size: This is nothing new, providing larger text for "us" with bad eyes. In the past you would often see three letter A's (small, medium, large), once you clicked on them the font size would change to the size of the letter A. In this case the user can "scale" the font size. Just slide the slide bar and viola! Now you can get just the right size. Nice!

Print: Believe it or not, many online readers prefer to read from paper. Reading from paper is faster than screen reading and screen reading fatigues the eyes quicker than paper reading. Learn more (http://www.google.com/search?q=paper+vs+screens+site%3Aedu).

Email: Does the article nudge you or cause a spark within? Send it to your friend! This is a fun and great way for users to spread the word about something funny or important to them.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): With certain software and websites you can read news from multiple sites from one place (news reader). Most email clients now allow you to read news from your email. Alternatively you can use another solution, a web based news reader (http://www.google.com/search?q=rss+reader). News readers and RSS can save a lot of time for those who like to read from a lot of different websites.

Social Networks: For those of us who pretty much live and breath online, we have tools to organize and share great web sites. It was coined socializing; oddly know one is really doing just that. It is more like a poster board of important items that you and everyone else can see. I do find social networks useful for my daily web browsing. If I am traveling and don’t have my laptop I can browse those “important” websites from any computer in the world.

Links to this article: Readers like to know what others are saying about the article; Good, Bad, and the Ugly. This is a nice feature but can keep you reading for hours! For popular articles you might find yourself asking “How far does the rabbit hole go?”.

Now let’s move the left side of the article, you will see two pictures, the authors, and some links below them. First, the images are a decent size; small images can be a distraction sometimes. Second, now you have a way to interact with the author with the links below the image. There is no reason to go hunting on the page for how to contact the author.

The only other thing I think is noteworthy is the simple “discuss” or comment box below the article. No form fields to fill out just a simple text area box. For this page it is important to have such an option. I recall many a times I read a lengthy article and wanted to comment but no option was available. That is just irritating! Especially if you disagree with the content.

The far right column filled with ads, I don’t enjoy seeing ads, but as a web developer I know ads are what pay the bills. For the most part their ads flow nicely with the rest of the content. This is important to readers, website owners, and advertisers.

Web developers and designers do not always see eye to eye. I am a web developer but I am learning how to spot good UI, designs, good content flow and navigation. Most web developers really are focused on code and functionality. But making all of that pretty is not always an easy tasks. Designers find it easy to make “pretty” designs but usually prefer not to write code at all. For me, I like
the best of both worlds; I enjoy creating the functionality and seeing how it is possible to make it “pretty”.

Why did I take the time to write all of this? Mostly to point out to others good user interface with modern functionality. Newsweek has done a great job at reaching all different types of users. My post is a simple exercise to analyze a page with great usability. This webpage required a lot of teamwork from both designer and developer teams – and they have done a good job. Congrats to your website team Newsweek!