Monday, April 03, 2006

NYT's new design sucks


Decidedly more "content" (links to blogs, etc.), but I find the new design ugly and not user-friendly. Starting with the smaller font, longer pages, ad-heavy top screen, etc., I think I am going elsewhere for my hourly news fix. Both The Times and the BBC have better layout and navigation, I think. BBC even has a sidebar that gives links to the same story in other major newspapers of the world, a definitely cool feature: this site "gets" the web -- your overall value is not just a function of the content you provide but also a function of the links you provide.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree completely. But then again every new design change seems a disaster to me (probably says more about me). I wonder if you ever read Sportstar when you were young... If so, you'll be horrified to see what's happened to it now.

Rahul.

Anonymous said...

There are more photos and the colunists are now much harder to find but the font is the major change. By some standards it is a beautiful font and when I first saw it I was impressed, but I am now noticing how much less effective it is than the old font was. The main problem is that it is much harder to read the headlines quickly because they are in blue rather than black but also it is a more open font that is lighter than the old one (I don't think it is an issue of the size of the font) which requires more concentration to read against a bright background.

D. Sivakumar said...

Anonymous,

besides the font -- which *is* pretty -- the major change is the # of columns. It used to be essentially two columns of article titles, now it is 3 in smaller font, occupying about the same screen width.

Siva