Passionate Users and Logical Design
blogWhen you ask people what their favourite websites are, it is very rare for them to mention those flashy, award-winning pages that seek to impress. What people really like are the websites they go to on a daily basis (Facebook, Twitter, Online news etc). What they love is entertaining content presented in an easily digestible form.
As such, it is difficult for me to be objective about the Guardian website. It is my main source of news and opinion and is one of those sites I click on without thinking in idle moments. The design is obviously good, otherwise I wouldn’t read it.1
The Guardian website has for a long time remained stolidly marked by the typography and layout of the defunct Guardian broadsheet. Slowly, in dribs and drabs, it has been modernised to reflect the design changes that were made with the launch of the Berliner format. It is ironic that the instantaneousness of digital publishing should be so badly crippled by legacy content management systems.
The most recent change was to add a new masthead and the barebones of a new navigation system. The online editor, Emily Bell, announced these changes in a blog post, bravely inviting readers to let her know what they thought.
As anyone who as ever redesigned any website will know, people hate change. Change hurts because it makes you self-aware of things you usually do unconsciously, disrupting your usual flow. The comments were typically vicious, but the issue that most concerned readers was the lack of a direct link to the football news:
Minahbird put it most succintly:
“Well, the first thing I noticed is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to get straight to the Football home page from the main front page. I’m sure there must be others like me who frequently zip into the site to go straight to an overview of today’s football stories? It’s like buying the paper – yes, I go straight to the Sport section, but I expect to see the football news at or near the front of it – I’m not really interested in any other sport.”
This was repeated ad nauseum, and got me thinking about the purpose of site navigation systems.
What we want to do when we build a navigation is to allow the users to get to where they want to go as quickly as possible. A google search will do this best for an unfamiliar site. For a site that you visit daily the nav has to balance popularity with a coherent mental model of how it fits together.
Since it was launched years ago, the Guardian nav has veered towards the popular. In figures one to three you can see how clearly that is emphasised.
It is only with the latest iteration does the sense of a hierarchical system become important. A sub-nav shows as many sub-categories as are necessary. This is site architecture along Linneaen lines and appeals to one’s logical side.
Of course, at the same time that they are operated according to a strict hierarchy, the rest of the internet is embracing the notion of tagging – using multiple cris-crossing clouds to help users, whilst confusing editors who are responsible for implementing a system that has to be consistent.
Emily Bell wrote a follow up post in which she acknowledged the strength of feeling (whilst resisting making any changes). The attitude seems to be that if you give it a while people will forge new ways of getting to where they want to go. No matter how radical something is, it always becomes mundane with use. Even the Olympic logo has started to seem nostalgic.
My own possible solution to the great Guardian football crisis of 2008 would to have a block on the front page devoted to the latest football news which can immediately take you to the football section? You could even thing about making such blocks modular, as with the new BBC site has done, allowing users to customize the site as they wish. It would be a shame to alienate passionate users because of the clarity of your design logic.