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.

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? :)

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 :)

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.

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?

If a better way of communication would be offered to the people, would they be happy 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.