FAIL: Spanish online newspaper design

by javier on 14/12/2009

Spanish online newspapers seem to be clueless when it comes to designing their homepages. Their strategy seems to be “put everything on the homepage, no matter how”. No order, no sequence, no freakin’ idea about reading patterns. I’m not making this up, check these screenshots, they speak for themselves:

The images correspond to El País, El Mundo and ABC.

These structures bleed consensus and politics from every pixel. I’ve been in a couple of these projects and I understand the politics behind a newspaper redesign. All the “we cannot harm our current readers” and “we need to find a spot for this and that” only leads to having the same again and again.

And the constant increase of screen resolution is not helping but increasing the damage. Remember when most newspapers went from 800×600 to 1024? Instead of using those extra pixels to make everything bigger and give some white space they came up with an extra column for junk.

Much has been said about how to renew online journalism. If they just started by questioning these obsolete structures… Jeez… I am so looking for the day when a big exec has the guts to get rid of commitees, consensus and departmental presence to make something different, some design where you see a strategy, a point, a purpose.

There are 14 comments in this article:

  1. 14/12/2009Agustín Jiménez says:

    Some people say that that is the best way for imitating the easiness of traditional paper browse action. Althought I don’t feel particulary committed to this solution It think there are some patterns and few good points about that:

    - Breaking news are always at the top (fulfilling first the informative demand issue) and soft content (social news, cultural magazine, TV, etc) is placed always below. This is critical and help me use the newspaper between two moods: I want know what’s happening versus I’m bored, let’s have some fun…

    - Each type of content is more often presented in a block way (horizontally), so you can switch (more or less exactly) between blocks of information using scroll jumps.

    - Despite the fact that home pages are obviously huge, I think it’s far more easy to remember where each type of content is placed in this layout than on the mental structure created by the menu’s hierarchy on users mind.

  2. 14/12/2009Olga Revilla says:

    We cannot forget the redesign of ’20 minutos’ paper. EVERYTHING is in the homepage.
    Reasons at http://www.alzado.org/articulo.php?id_art=406

  3. 15/12/2009Isilion says:

    I agree with everything above and I have been through similar situations in other environments, but I keep wondering if that is really what people would like. If you are used to have your whiskey with cola you probably wouldn’t like it if someone made you have your drink only with ice, although it is suppossedly the best way to enjoy whiskey.

    If a better way of communication would be offered to the people, would they be happy about that?

  4. 15/12/2009Pedro says:

    The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/thoughts/the_myth_of_the_page_fold_evidence_from_user_testing.htm

  5. 15/12/2009Graeme says:

    The “big exec” you are looking for probably doesn’t even look at the page, they’ve got people to do that for them. It’s more likely that the better design ideas are far further down the hierarchy, which is why they don’t get heard.

  6. 15/12/2009Reader says:

    I know about a chilean online newspaper (that doesn’t have a paper version in order to give own news and other media’s news) that was working on its redesign. It’s working well, but is still some chaotic: http://www.elmostrador.cl

  7. 16/12/2009¿Cuántos scrolls tiene tu medio? — Sicrono says:

    [...] quedé pensando un poco en la crítica que hace Javier Cañada a 3 versiones online de diarios españoles. No está muy desarrollada y tiene algo de fastidio, parece. Pero igual creo que tiene razón. Esa [...]

  8. 17/12/2009álvaro says:

    I’m one of those who Agustín is talking about… :)

    I think some spanish newspapers are, as you say, putting everything in the homepage without much thinking, but I would highlight two cases:

    20 Minutos: they imported form Norway the infinite-homepage-without-structure as a way to navigate. And it just works, for the type of content they sell (trivia nonsense softsex younameit). I don’t like it because I don’t like the content, but in terms of creating a product which has acceptance, it just works. ¿Is that bad or lack of design or design thinking? Another thing is who want to be in the business of selling crap…

    El Mundo: although I’m totally off the editorial line of the paper, I think they are doing a great job integrating different products and creating a home page which is the online equivalent of sitting in a cafe and looking at the paper for 10 minutes. You get to know what they talk about in lots of sections in a very easy way, at the same time you get fresh news in the top which gets you coming back several times through the day.

    I’m now getting to the bottom of the pages a lot more than years ago. You?

  9. 17/12/2009Javier Cañada says:

    @everybody, especially @álvaro and @Agustín Jiménez

    20 MINUTOS
    Unlike the ones I display on the post, 20minutos.es has a fairly dominant pattern: blog-like chronologically inverse listing of content. It’s designed for recurrent visits (you go there every X minutes or X hours to see what’s new). Moreover the content is designed for short attention spans (short pieces of content, bullet lists of facts…). They know about Continuous Partial Attention and they designed for it. Design with a purpose. That’s what others lack.

    @álvaro You are right, elmundo.es is designed to be browsed (or read or scanned or whatever) just like an old-style newspaper. But… NOBODY HAS 10 MINUTES FOR YOU ON THE WEB!!! It has to be designed for people with one minute or less who come back every 2 hours (and it’s not). Only the elder read online as they do on paper. Youngsters don’t and I presume these newspapers need the young audience or they’ll die slowly, day by day, losing a few hundred or thousand readers every day.

  10. 18/12/2009Juanjo says:

    What do you think about factual.es? It looks better, but it doesn’t fix the problem…

  11. 19/12/2009kaaliss says:

    I proudly work as a designer for the spanish newspaper mentionned earlier (not saying the name because I’m not promoting my company here).

    I say ‘proudly’ because I truly believe that we’re on the road to improvement and innovation, what is called in this article “guts”.

    I SOO agree with this article: all those online newspaper are awfull to read, awfull.

    We’re improving everyday the usability and the design of our product, to give to our users quality news into well designed individual and structured pages.

    I’m not making any free advertisement, I’m being myself and speaking as an designer, not a worker: I’m loving our intentions :)

  12. 20/12/2009Javier Cañada says:

    @juanjo There are a few things about factual that I like, although I haven’t used it enough to get a formed opinion. I feel a bit uncomfortable with the horizontal scroll, though. What do YOU think?

  13. 20/12/2009álvaro says:

    I think that the average reader of El Mundo does have 10 minutes to scan that front page and even click in several pieces of content. Stats are there to confirm this. Not everybody is engaged in everyday use of lots of online destinations. On the contrary, most people is only checking 2 or 3 destinations on a daily basis.

    Moreover, I would like to know the stats regarding how many people gets to the bottom of El Mundo homepage, but I bet that the number have grown dramatically, and it keeps growing.

    Not that I think El Mundo is perfect and nothing should be changed, but I think they are doing a great job.

    And to finish this interesting conversation… for which newspaper have you started working? :)

  14. 14/06/2011Fran says:

    Hello, how are you?…

    so in your professional opinion which is/are the best online newspaper, in terms of:

    • design
    • usability
    • readability

    i am in the need to redesign an online neswpaper (not very important) however i would like to make it important, visually attractive and legible. Usable both for readers and editors. I would greatly appreciate any advice.

    Thank you.

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