One dimensional news

For months after finishing Today’s Guardian I hardly used it. I realised that it wasn’t just technical and design issues that were stopping me from reading a newspaper online; it was also an issue of time. I simply couldn’t find the time to read a newspaper every day.

Since then I’ve engineered a novel solution which has allowed me to read a good chunk of each day’s paper. I’ve called this “getting up earlier.”

As a result I’ve now had a few months of using my own interface (usually on an iPad) and, in general, I’m quite pleased. It is, as I hoped, simple and quick, and I don’t feel lost in it. The design largely satisfies the criteria I identified last year of Friction, Readability and Finishability. It’s not perfect — there are occasional glitches and even crashes — but I can happily use it every day.

A couple of the most specific annoyances are down to the Guardian’s API (which is, otherwise, a wonderful resource that I don’t want to take for granted). First, some of the content isn’t available through the API and my interface can only provide a link to read it on the Guardian’s site. Often this is too much Friction for me to bother with, so there are many articles (and all the letters) that I never read.

Second, I could never work out how to put the articles in order using the API. Although the API did add support to indicate which page of the print edition an article appears on, this data often seemed to be missing, and so wasn’t much use for my needs. So I’m still scraping this list of articles which often has a bunch of new or duplicate articles lumped together at the end of the main section. But these are essentially technical or political problems, rather than design issues.

The biggest design issue with Today’s Guardian is, I think, that it’s no fun.

I have created an efficient way to read the day’s newspaper on a screen. And it works for that. But it’s not pleasurable or especially delightful.

I think there are two big design flaws with online news, including Today’s Guardian, compared to the experience of reading news in print. The first is to do with the templated nature of websites and the second is about the one-article-per-page reading experience.

Most text-heavy websites, such as news sites and weblogs, are templated, read-only front-ends to databases. An article’s page may have a nice enough design, and feature relevant contextual information, but there’s rarely any evidence that a human has tried to make that particular article look good, or tailor the article’s layout according to its own requirements.

The news — data — has been squirted directly from a big computer through a pleasant-but-repetitive-template onto your screen. All articles are treated as broadly equal, with only peripheral changes such as titles, byline photos, etc.

Contrast this to a print newspaper. There will be ground rules — standard grids, typefaces, colours, advert sizes, etc. — but the human touch is still required and evident. Someone must work out how to fit articles on the pages, what size photos they should have, and how to make it all look good and read well. Unlike layout on templated web pages, someone has tried to make each article, and collection of articles, work as well as possible. You could say this comes from the medium’s constraints, the limited space available, compared to the unlimited space present online.

The templated automation of digital news is, in one way, a benefit. If you can pump text into a standard format there’s less need for designers to tailor and tweak every article. It cheapens and speeds up processes. But it does make for a bland and repetitive experience, particularly if you’re reading a whole newspaper’s worth of news, one article after the other.

It would be great if the design of news, within a single website, could vary more, and reflect the needs and character of each article. If each site had a larger variety of standard templates, this would create some variety. Done badly this could confuse users. With digital news the layout is not only presenting the text but also the interface. While in print the interface — turning sheets of paper — doesn’t change, no matter how different the design of articles gets. Varying the templates of digital articles too dramatically could create interest at the expense of usability. But still, I think there’s something worth exploring here.

A Guardian spread from 2005

The second design flaw that online news has is probably harder to tackle. It’s a result of the fundamental structure of the digital reading experience.

Paper newspapers have the benefit of size and resolution. They can, for example, devote a double-page spread to a single theme — a politician resigning or a regime falling — and can arrange several articles across the two pages. It’s easy to take the whole in at a glance. You can tell which article is the overview, which are the eyewitness reports, which provides background material. The layout — the arrangement of several complete articles — is two-dimensional. While we (usually) read through each individual article serially, from start to finish, one-dimensionally, the presentation of the articles is a series of two-dimensional views.

With digital content, we’re restricted to seeing a single article at a time. We have the reasonable convention of one article per page. And not only that, but a page can only display a small part of an article at a time. As we one-dimensionally read a single article we must scroll our little window down its length. But, more than that, in an application such as Today’s Guardian, or any site that relies on “next/previous” links, we view the entire collection of articles in one-dimension. We move from one article to the next with no overall view of how some of them fit together.

Print’s facility to collect different aspects and views of a single theme together on a double-page spread, or even across several, feels important for newspapers. It provides perspective, flow and pacing. But it’s entirely lost in the one-dimensional experience of reading digital news. The plod from one article to the next, to the next, to the next, coupled with the bland similarity of standard templates, creates a lack of variety of pace and structure. Again, digital news often feels like the content of a database squirted at our screens, rather than something a human has crafted.

I don’t know what possible solutions there could be to this but, again, it feels like an avenue worth exploring in order to recover some of the interest, and even delight, that is lost in the move from paper to digital.

Having been so critical, of both my own website and digital news in general, next time I’ll take a more positive look at the Guardian’s iPad edition.

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