Obviously he's not a NYT reader. I love the times. It's not broken. Their website is fantastic in every way. You can spend hours upon hours on it and digest more content, in whatever style you wish to navigate. It has a certain unity within the chaos. But it's not really chaos. The content is the layout. You won't find any other News organization who understands design more than NYT. They let the content design the layout, not the other way around.
Andy turned NYT into a Wordpress blog. :|
I'll give him credit for the work though, but I personally think NYT is an exception. But go ahead, every other news website, you have Cart Blanche.
I feel the same. I think the NYT's online page is fantastic - so much so that I pay $16 a month for it. I think they do an excellent job of laying out pages online yet still feeling like a newspaper. I like looking around the page for different stories, just as I would in a newspaper page. It's engaging, and I can't help but scan the whole page, read the headline, check out the picture captions.
When I look at his blog-style page, my eyes just glaze over the headlines.
The NYT App on the iPhone is basically his mobile mockup. And I've found that even on my iPhone, I'd rather look at the proper front page.
Yes. While I think he's right about the top nav, I bristled at his knock on the massive list of sections in the left nav. It allows discovery in the same way a massive Sunday Paper sitting in your lap does. You glance at the headlines for a moment and then decide what you really want to read first.
I agree, and I'll add that Andy's proposed reduction of the front page to a simple series of articles (as in the search interface) is a terrible idea.
He does not understand the value of a long-time reader's experience with parsing text-dense front pages, where headlines give way to subheds, and where reporters' bylines are visible. The whole point of the front page is to tell me what's important at a glance, and they really do a great job at that. It's clear that the editorial team puts a lot of thought into curating the "top half" of the front page, and the "series of articles" approach throws that out.
Andy turned NYT into a Wordpress blog. :|
I'll give him credit for the work though, but I personally think NYT is an exception. But go ahead, every other news website, you have Cart Blanche.
cc: Khoi Vinh