BBC News redesigns...
The newly redesigned BBC news launched last night - the redesign being an attempt to keep the basic UI and architecture of the site intact while bringing its design in line with the rest of the BBC. The most substantial change is the shift from a 640px to an 800px wide layout, which has some clearly positive consequences. The available space for the articles themselves is now substantial, but not so wide that your eyes have trouble finding the beginning of the following line. However, the redesign isn't perfect, and if I was forced to pick holes with the way it has been restructured they would be:
- I miss the news being in one column. The single column format - much like the weblog format - highlights chronology, promotes the idea that the material is novel, cutting-edge, breaking news. Having three news stories grouped at the top is an interesting shift with one obvious advantage - it allows them to decide what story demands the most emphasis rather than which story is simply the most timely. Unfortunately it now feels more like feature-content than news content.
- The internal home-pages (cf. Scotland) don't seem different enough from section to section. It's quite easy to get disoriented within the structure of the site - as if you were in a huge building where all the rooms looked the same. I think this problem could be very simply resolved by sizing-up the signage (increasing the size of the page-heading alone would probably help considerably).
- The "good recent features" bar that spreads horizontally across the front page and sectional home-pages (three pictures with taster-copy on a beige background) produces some HTML layout issues. Primarily, it restricts what you can place in the top section of the third content column. The Education section has a prime example of the problems it can cause. There's too much copy inside it, which is pushing the horizontal bar down the page, leaving a block of white space in the middle of the central content columns. And if you limit the length of the text on that side, you can end up with nasty gaps of white space there as well. It might not sound like much of an issue, but I wonder what it looks like with text-zooming on or unorthodox font-sizes.
- Fundamentally, my main issue is that there's clearly more screen real-estate available but there doesn't appear to be the same amount of actual news on the page. I suppose the only way to do that would be to measure the area of all the illustrative images, the number of stories linked to and the number of characters spent on the page on the stories involved. Has anyone got the time to do this?
What are your thoughts on the BBC News redesign? Leave a comment here and then head over to the discussion taking place over at Metafilter.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
I really like the BBC site, but the only downside I can see in the new version is that it doesn't validate to HTML or XHTML. I would have thought that the beeb would have been aware of the importance of such validation for accessibility issues etc. But all in all it's a great site. Yet again the beeb surpases the rest. [Also have a look here for some web designers views to the new look!]
→ Posted by: Anthony at February 19, 2003 1:20 PM
I really like the BBC site, but the only downside I can see in the new version is that it doesn't validate to HTML or XHTML. I would have thought that the beeb would have been aware of the importance of such validation for accessibility issues etc. But all in all it's a great site. Yet again the beeb surpases the rest. [Also have a look here for some web designers views to the new look!]
→ Posted by: Anthony at February 19, 2003 1:20 PM
Tom said: "but I wonder what it looks like with text-zooming on or unorthodox font-sizes."
Not that they've used resizable fonts. Their reasoning is a little shaky on this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2778423.stm
→ Posted by: buttercup at February 19, 2003 1:23 PM
I can't believe that in 2002 they've replaced the old design with another fixed-size table-based layout. BBC News is a site that clearly lends itself to a liquid layout with CSS positioning. Ngh.
That aside, first impressions are good. Information is more clearly laid out and generally more visually accessible than before.
→ Posted by: Marcus at February 19, 2003 1:32 PM
I have mixed feelings about it. Like you, Tom, I think the double column layout decreases the 'prominence' of news items, although I don't think it's really correct to assume they used to put the newest story on top. I don't like the features bar across the middle (I think it breaks the flow). And I also think that the site simply looks like it has less news on it, whether that's true or not. But comparing it to some other news providers, it's still fairly successful and the new layout works fine on my machine, so I can't be too nasty.
→ Posted by: Bobbie at February 19, 2003 1:45 PM
Yuck! The new look is awful; headlines with no detail behind them. The new look is suspiciously similar to cnn.com, but less readable. And CNN isn't exactly the model to be following at the moment anyway: it is losing ground heavily to Fox news (www.foxnews.com) which has a website with more detail about more headlines on its front page.
This is the nail in BBC News' coffin for me; I already thought their previous format was too heavy on images and sensational junk, and switched to the Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) which has lots of detail.
→ Posted by: Seldo at February 19, 2003 1:51 PM
Re: validation... it doesn't help that they have no encoding type and their DOCTYPE line isn't capitalised correctly. So the W3C validator can't even tell how to validate the page.
They seem to have cunningly set the page width to be two words wider than my browser window.
I like the extra width for reading stories but I don't like the two columns of headlines on index pages. They're both the same weight and importance so my eye doesn't know where or how to browse. With a single column there's only one way - down.
→ Posted by: Phil at February 19, 2003 2:39 PM
And Jesus, credit me with some intelligence and let me use paragraphs in my comments will you!
→ Posted by: Phil at February 19, 2003 2:41 PM
Just a reminder to some people... If you want to say something off-topic, then could you please do it by e-mail rather than on the site. Thanks very much.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 19, 2003 4:39 PM
Ooh. Saucer of milk! Back on topic (ahem) I don't think *detail* is necessarily the key, but clarity. I just don't really know what to look at when I load the BBC news page any more; nothing particularly stands out to my eye.
→ Posted by: Bobbie at February 19, 2003 5:55 PM
No matter what you think of Fox News or its website, remember that it's not news - they deal in 'fair and balanced' opinion, not news.
→ Posted by: James at February 19, 2003 9:08 PM
First of all, I like the design; in general, it's a huge improvement over the previous incarnation, which was showing its age. V3/800 is more elegant, cleaner and more in keeping with much of the rest of BBCi's pages.
Secondly, whilst the design is obviously finalised, you should allow some leeway for transition and adaptation to that design on the first day of the new look. The issue you raised re: white space down to the central content bar is one staff are aware of and will certainly overcome. I don't see much of a problem on the index as it stands now.
I don't think anyone is disputing that the top story plus the lower two continue to constitute the top three stories in the news agenda. If there is one thing, however, it's the reduced prominence of stories below this placing (ie. top right, flowing to bottom left depending on index), which don't now carry a standfirst in addition to their new, smaller type size.
But generally I'm wholly supportive - the new layout allows for much more promotion of material and is a great leap forward after many months of work.
→ Posted by: Rob at February 19, 2003 11:04 PM
I agree with Bobbie. Looking at it from the most basic level, nothing stands out and i don't know where to look first. The central column on all the pages seems to bash into the column on the right. The kerning on the right compared to the text in the centre also seems different and it's just too much detail trying to compete with the main story.
→ Posted by: denise at February 20, 2003 8:02 AM
Ah. I couldn't care less. I read it via RSS!
→ Posted by: Tom Morris at February 20, 2003 10:45 AM
I was actuallly thinking the same thing Seldo said about the new design now being CNN-esque. The primary reason why I go to Salon.com for news is that there's one column that lists all the important headlines one after the other in chronological order. I'm always rather frustrated by CNN.com because it's nearly impossible to tell what's new and what isn't. I'd have to go through all the individual categories (World, U.S., Entertainment, Technology...) instead of just one. Salon does use multiple columns, but they're clearly divided into navigation, current news, and a less-frequently updated features columns. I also noticed that the new BBC site didn't ask me if I'm in the UK or not, but that could just be because there's a cookie on this computer (I'm at my school's computer lab) that I'm not aware of.
→ Posted by: Bart at February 20, 2003 11:57 AM
The comment I am wondering about is this "as a result, there'll be less scrolling" quote from the editor. Are they basing the user's desire to not scroll on some sort of real data or testing, or is this a hunch or decision made by a designer/boss?
Will there be a "Glass Wall 2: Electric Boogaloo" that goes into details such as their usability issues?
→ Posted by: Ben at February 20, 2003 3:01 PM
In regards to sending off-topic things via e-mail, I have an off-topic thing, but I literally cannot find your e-mail address anywhere on your site.
→ Posted by: Ben at February 20, 2003 3:06 PM
I've knocked out a quick example of how this could look over at The Copydesk.
→ Posted by: Martin Conaghan at February 20, 2003 3:07 PM
RE: CNN-esque redesign. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't BBC News Online originally modelled on CNN.com? It seems that there's always been a resemblence between the two and this latest redesign is merely the Beeb following suit.
→ Posted by: Matt at February 20, 2003 5:03 PM