Rethink
Digital Newspapper

06.2015・UI/UX Design Concept

DISCOVERY PHASE

The purpose of news is to report about the past, the present and the future, to convey somebody’s opinion concerning a current event, to show this event and to tell everybody about it

News must be neutral and unprejudiced as much as possible. It should be based on true facts, participants’ and experts’ opinions, but not on a journalist’s point of view.

A journalist should provide voices of all main participants of an event in his material. If there is a conflict, there are opposite opinions shown by the journalist, thus, he mustn’t support any of them.

The main problem of news — biased information passing, the result of which we can observe misstatement of news. It happens when people begin thinking up what is missing in given information and take somebody’s stand.

РThe solution of the problem — to provide the readers with direct quotes of participants, to synchronize messages in Twitter of both sides automatically and to show videos from a place of incident. As a matter of fact, it would be better to show not only journalists’ videos, but videos by eyewitnesses

The main problems of news
websites

Nowadays, there is one more problem: we have too much information and news which is needed to very specific kind of readers. I mean, if you want to read sports news, for example basketball one, you have to scroll through much unnecessary information. It is the problem of the boring monotonous presentation of information.

Articles are seemed to be very drab because they are given as continuous text. A day can be full of highly important news or, probably, nothing special happens this day. Depending on such a criterion, I believe that news should be given in different ways.

The answer — to give people an opportunity to read news that they prefer, as well as to vary news layouts by photo and video materials, quotes, screenshots from social networks and so on. Making different kinds of layouts on all occasions and highlighting main news are in our power

User Cases

Readers’ needs are to find out news, discover new facts, kill time, be aware of current events and somebody’s opinions in order to discuss them with friends

User behavior

In order to help readers to get necessary
information as quickly as possible, we should
know how he or she discovers where it is.
In this case, our aim is to track all the process
process from entering the website to closing
nytimes.com attentively and to make up
user scripts

How people read the news

70 % of people read news on the way to work with the help of electronic devices. Most of them haven’t enough time to read up news. That’s why, on the one hand, articles should be laconic or contain brief information with some interactive elements. On the other hand, there should be an effective mean
for rapid reading of news.

Most people follow the news all day. On an average day a user reads from
5 to 10 are serious news. And from 10-15 entertainment articles

EXPERIENCE STRATEGY PHASE

This stage implies resolving all the problems we have detected before:
we should find a solution of quick access to necessary information avoiding scrolling through unnecessary news.

Often people buy NYTimes at shops and read only one or two headings,
for instance sports and politics, and the rest of pages of a newspaper are thrown out.

Thus, we should solve the problem of news overabundance

The grids

The idea of the site is simple: a person chooses news he/she wants to read. According to his/her choice the main page will be formed.

As a matter of fact, some sections cannot be united with some others.
For example, we can’t see sports news and political news in one place, because they should have different ways of news presentation.

That’s why I united only such sections that can coexist with each other.
These united sections will create a news line. And those which can’t be united will create separate one below

It’s significant to give people one more opportunity in this case: the opportunity to choose the importance of the sections. Some people prefer reading local news to international one, other people — vise verse.

The kinds of newsnets (grids). A day can be full of news or there are days when nothing special happens, therefore, the news line should depend on such
a factor

All three kinds of newsnet belong to the first type of news.

The second type has a different structure. It hasn’t Busy Day, and news from here can be united into one long news line because they are similar in topic. Pictures are prevailing here.

It is hardly possible that the third type has Busy-Day-part because the structure of Slow Day is more appropriate for this type. The main features are: prevailing of large pics and using of endless scroll, especially in sports. But such a scroll
is not appropriate for the part Opinion and others… That’s why this section can’t be united with any other. They should be treated as separate ones

DESIGN PHASE

The stage of preparing is always the most time-consuming stage in all the process. Design implies not only how the product works, but how it looks like.
By all means, the aesthetic aspect shouldn’t upset the functional one

Reading experience

The most important thing in news websites is news itself. Using the acquired research experience I have created a news page you want to read

Video Section

The same idea is implied into structuring of the video section in the website. Videos are gathered into one news line according to chosen parts of news

New York Times redesign was done for study purposes only
and is not supposed to be implemented. The redesign contain ideas, which I would like New York Timess to take into consideration to make the news reading experience more rich, interactive and original