February 2012
1 post
January 2012
5 posts
8 tags
Some Chaps & Chapettes from the Times it behooves...
Derek Willis is a web developer at the New York Times and writes about ‘investigative and computer assisted reporting’ on this awesome blog.
Tyson Evans is a self described ‘developer, designer, journalist’ on the Times’ interactive news desk. All his info available on this appealingly simple homepage. Note here his volunteerism at the Society for News Design, which...
4 tags
Working the BuzzFeed contact sheet
Tonight I’m working the BuzzFeed Team page for designers and analysts to chat to for the project.
Some amazing people at that publication at the moment including:
Greg Leuch - Senior Designer at BuzzFeed: Radically well-branded across seemingly infinite platforms (and here and here and here) as @gleuch, perhaps best-known for Shaved Bieber but an all-round viral heavyweight.
Mark...
4 tags
The Guardian's typeface family
Not hyper-pertinent but an interesting aside and definitely something to follow-up later on in the research, The Guardian’s much-discussed 2005 switch to Berliner format and accompanying redesign of the paper’s look included a new typeface family called Guardian Egyptian, in which all text in the paper is set.
Guardian Egyptian was created by graphic designer and typographer Paul...
6 tags
Dear Guardian iPad team,
I’ve just sent the Guardian iPad team a brief email including a request for contact info for who best to talk to about design on guardian.co.uk, design (Mark Porter?) on the the new Guardian iPad app (which is lovely, incidentally) and analytics packages on both of these.
Copied below are the two questions I asked specifically about analytics packages:
- What analytics package does...
1 tag
Navigating the news site: the impact of page... →
Refereed paper presented to the Journalism Education Conference, Griffith University, 29 November – 2 December 2005 Ms Margaret Van Heekeren School of Communication Charles Sturt University, Bathurst
A number of criticisms on this paper to follow. Among them: - Eye tracking doesn’t say anything about reader behaviour. That’s what clicks are for.
- The paper doesn’t deal...
November 2011
8 posts
Method
A group of sample news sites will be selected to represent a range of size and profitability but who cater to the same or similar readerships. National Dailies in the UK would be a suitable group, though perhaps reluctant to hand over statistics, especially for comparative work.* Alternately, a patch covered by amateurs, national papers and magazines as well as by a spectrum of Social media...
My testable statement (needs precision)
Certain design criteria on news websites are reliable indicators of how readers interact with content. -Content, as measured through interpreted web analytics.
Example: pages with higher ratios of text to white space seeing higher B%
Example: homepages with high numbers of stories in grid format seeing relatively high ToP - esp if length of p is relatively long. Though this maybe tempered with...
My Question
What effect does the design of online news sites have on reader behaviour?
- ‘reader’ as defined by unique visitor as defined by Alexa.com, Google Analytics, server-side analytics or other web analytics platform.
A sample group of 50-100 (too many? too few?) online news publications will be chosen for analysis of two basic kinds:
Design analyses:: Tagging the homepage and story...
Relevant design attributes
For the purposes of comparing
Grid-based design
Mag/artisan-based design
Horizontal navigation
Vertical navigation
Tabbed content areas
Comments (n/y - if yes, Commented in its own tag)
SocMed buttons/links (n/y - if yes, list each in its own tab)
RGB colour (if more than 1 colour & white in use, tag Multicolour)
Ratio: text to graphics to white space area measurements
People I need to contact
Newspaper people for access to analytics -The more the merrier (and essential here). -Getting all the UK nationals to let me look at bits of their web stats would be amazing but isn’t all that likely, regardless of my being able to present that data in a way that wouldn’t divulge individual publications’ stats. For them, we rely on Alexa and try very hard to get luck with one or...
Relevant metrics
Four metrics will be looked at and weighed against analyses of page design.*/**
Bounce% - “A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages.” - Avinash Kaushik, self-described ‘author, digital marketing evangelist - Google co-founder’, suggests B% is one of the most useful...