The Vostok blog

There are 10 comments in this article:

1. 14/09/2010DamagedGoods says:

   Hi, Javier.

   “1. Headlines are turned into photographs making the most out of the visuality of the medium. Kind of like what the iPad feed reader Pulse did and what we did with filmin’s catalogue.”

   But there are big differences between a newspaper and a film selling platform. In a newspaper you have to communicate a particular information, in filmin you have to seduce. Which photograph do represent a tax increase, or a political agreement? I think that, for a newspaper, most of the times a well-written headline works better than an image.

   “2. The images are followed by a constant stream of news organized by time, with the newest item always at the top. Pretty much like Twitter (or Planetaki for that matter).”

   But that’s not what I’m asking for when I go to a newspaper site. I don’t want a teletype or a feed, I want a hierarchical summary of today’s most important news. I don’t want to miss the “cancer vaccine discovered” news, buried down on the stream because somebody fought each other on prime-time TV.

   On the other hand, I love the categories-as-filters approach!

2. 14/09/2010Javier says:

   Hey DamagedGoods,

   The post was written by Gabriela but I’ll answer you with much pleasure.

   > In a newspaper you have to communicate a particular information,
   > in filmin you have to seduce. Which photograph do represent a tax
   > increase, or a political agreement? I think that, for a newspaper,
   > most of the times a well-written headline works better than an image.

   I agree with you about the fact that not all pieces of information can be comunicated visually but sometimes a picture can tell you much aboout a news without consuming you so much cognitive gas: you see the face and you instantly recognize the topic, the relevance, etc. Think of a hurricane pic, or soccer players or a stock exchange.. a pic helps you decide wether it’s interesting or not.

   At filmin pics are not for seducing (on the catalog) biut to give a visual cue of what kind of movie you’ll get (texture, light, composition say a lot about a movie without showing moving images).

   regarding the stream of info vs. a daily compilation… stats prove that people stay seconds on a newspaper online as oposed to the half hour you usually spend when reading it on paper. More but shorter visits. That’s the pattern in today’s CPA’ed world. But that’s food for another day. We are about to release something related to that. It’s a surprise

3. 14/09/2010DamagedGoods says:

   Sorry, Gabriela! You should fix the Vostok template for including the post author

   I wasn’t talking about a daily compilation, I agree with the need of an active home page. But I’m not so sure about the “news relevance” removal of El Comercio design. I’m checking it right now: a bungee jumping wedding is more relevant than the new Economy minister designation, just because it has been published 5 minutes later.

4. 15/09/2010Elcomercio.pe: let the numbers speak for themselves - THE COSMONAUTS says:

   [...] could be doing well for all sorts of reasons, not just the ones we’ve mentioned (one column, non-stop stream of information and extensive use of images), but this graph has given [...]

5. 15/09/2010Javier says:

   DamagedGoods, you say…

   > I’m checking it right now: a bungee jumping wedding
   > is more relevant than the new Economy minister designation,
   > just because it has been published 5 minutes later.

   If your point is that the wedding is less important than the minister thing then you are making a journalist judgement that has nothing to do with design. Perhaps it is that way because elcomercio-pe want it that way.

   If your point is that relevance should be expressed with position and size (an important piece has to be bigger than a non relevant, it has to have a privilleged spot) then you say that time is not the main rule for sorting content.

   If time is not the main rule and I am visiting every 30 minues then I’m going to get the same news every time and I won’t be able to get the new stuff I came for.

   My point here is that time should be the main criteria for sorting information when your website is generating a constant stream of info and it’s meant to be checked every 30 minutes.

6. 16/09/2010César Astudillo says:

   Regarding this, I’m starting to have the rather provocative feeling that carefully tuned readability + high content throughput speed eat information architecture for breakfast.

   I mean, if you concentrate your design effort in allowing the reader to comfortably and effortlesly scan as much headlines per second as possible, it will be the very reader who will easily pick up the ones *he or she* considers relevant (photos should help a lot in this, BTW). And the relevance criteria of each *user* beats the hell out of the relevance criteria of any *journalist* or *editor* when it comes to just getting more pageviews. The ethernally broken promise of personalization was with us all the way. Don’t try to personalize: just give a heap of content in an easily scannable way, and leave the work to the most powerful personalization engine ever built: the reader’s brain.

   This is the reason why the New York Times’ tiny iPhone app is still my favourite way of reading the paper, well above their comparatively confusing web, or the much sexier but ineffective “Editor’s Choice” iPad app.

   This might be also the reason why the folks at Google Search care for the SERP’s speed just as much as for results quality.

   A third example is Spotify vs Pandora/LastFM. In my opinion, if we compare both products as a means of music discovery, Spotify’s sheer speed of operation makes user-driven free exploration in Spotify much more powerful than any perfectly trained, well-conceived recommendation algorithm. If you want good serendipity, just multiply the things you can come across hundredfold and then you can stop worrying so much about how smartly chosen those things are.

   I got the feeling that this is why this newspaper works well, and this explanation would not necessarily be sensitive to any hypothesis of reading frequency.

7. 17/09/2010Javier Cañada says:

   Thanks César,

   You point at something I find very very relevant and new: on the internet newspapers should no longer use position and size to make editorial statements. They just have to choose what gets and what doesn’t get published. That’s what should define them as oposed as a news agency (Gabriela pointed this out to me two days ago).

8. 17/09/2010César Astudillo says:

   This reminds me of the time when Scott McCloud came to realize that the Web was providing comic authors with an “infinite canvas”. Newspaper editors are used to the old habit of managing paper real estate as a finite, scarce resource. In Web newspapers, with today’s bandwidth, screen real estate is a virtually infinite resource. The scarce resource to manage is not so much square pixels as the reader’s attention. And this resource may be finite, but it is renewable. As long as you keep on giving the user a good reason to believe there might be something readworthy down there, she will keep on scrolling down and down and down…

9. 26/09/2010Heidi C. says:

   There’s a new app for iPhone/iPad called Blancspot that reminds me a lot of El Comercio’s headline-in-picture. Reviews at the App Store are not that good and users complain of not enough news updates, but the design seems to be the most liked “feature”. http://www.blancspot.com

10. 27/09/2010Gabriela Lendo says:

    Interesting. As a matter of fact Heidi we are working on something similar ourselves. There’s a whole universe to explore when it comes to using images to convey information at a glance, especially when you’re using visual platforms such as the iPad. We’ll keep you posted.

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