A beautiful visualization on the NYTimes today from survey data of how Americans spend their time: sleep, working, eating, watching TV, etc. You can sort by age group, employment, education, and more. I love the simple animated transition when you click through different filters. And how the color and layout make look like layers of temporal sediment. Check out the visual: How Different Groups Spend Their Day.
But in this next image, take a look at the article page which links to the visualization. Just a tiny thumbnail, on a cluttered page. Every day the times churns out great visualization like this, unlike any other content source on the web. But article templates are overloaded with ads, including self-promotional ones. And the navigation has become a bit overwhelming.
I love that the NYTimes web team has pushed for increasingly unique features to augment the user experience. But with so many one-off features, the Times has become the equivalent of a hand-me-down automobile, jarring pieces reused and replaced, cluttered with random replaced components. Not a singularly design entity.
My fingers are crossed that the NYTimes Co. management gives Khoi Vinh the reins to redesign this site. And bet the house on it.
Ross,
You raise a fair point … if elegant design and simple user experience were the NYT’s objective. However, the real mission of NYTimes.com is to sell advertising inventory and induce clicks. To do this, ads on any page must be given prominence next to articles, prohibiting a focus solely on editorial, which is why the page looks cluttered and this lovely graphic is introduced as a boxy thumbnail. And users must be compelled to click through many pages (which allows all those CPMs to be sold). This is the reason why every web site for weather requires you to click through 3 or 4 pages to find the simple 4-day forecast you really want — that’s 3 or 4 times as many ads sold.
NYT has some interesting experiments such as NYT Skimmer or NYT Lens that allow readers with a skimming need, or need for better design, to enter NYT content that way. Those sites seem both tests and pressure-release values to attract readers more attuned to design nuance.
So I agree with your point visually, but think unfortunately the business model of selling ad space leads to poor design … deliberately, to get us bouncing around and seeing a bunch of ads. Publishers make money from ad inventory, so they present as much of it as they can up to the line of really, really annoying their readers.
Cheers.