USAToday.com Embraces Blog Design

March 1, 2007

Jeff Jarvis got a heads up about the USAToday.com redesign (hat tip to Khoi) and I'm loving the way it looks. Rather, I'm loving the information architecture.

One of my favorite features of blog design is the ability to have a long scroll of articles on the front page, with interior pages using more categorization and hierarchy. As you can see to the right, USA Today's homepage has a long scroll of the most recent articles down the right side of the page. They also have incorporated a lot of other bloggy features (comments and tags, most notably), which is interesting but I'm skeptical about the quality of comments coming in (assuming they're not moderated).

While the NY Times is my preferred news source, the design is still based on the look and feel of a broadsheet. The amount of information and five main columns is just too much to digest for me. Clearly there is a lot of information that needs to be presented, but I don't think giving it to us all at once is the answer.

Jarvis touches on the subject in a more general way, saying, "In fact, since most visitors to most news sites I know don’t even go to the home page in a day, I think the next frontier of design will be about exploding home pages and sites in a looser network of distributed content." Exactly. Since there will inevitably be a homepage for every media company, don't make assumptions about what people want to see. Give us the biggest news in one area, and a stream of the most recent news and stories in the other.

More: USA Today's Announcement

Update (3/5/07): The new USAToday.com is live.

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