“Great design is serious (not solemn),” says Paula Scher, a New York based partner at design firm Pentagram. She argues that you do your best work when you’re having fun, exploring and not pressured by expectations.

I find the key is finding somewhere in between: creative work needs a combination of space and freedom but also a clear problem to solve.

Need more Paula Scher? Hillman Curtis has a video discussing type as image that’s also worth watching.

As well as the need to find out what’s happening in the world, one other role of newspapers we see in user research on news consumption is the concept of reading a newspaper being a lifestyle decision, a weekend habit that’s a way for people to relax. In this browsing approach readers tend to dip in and and out of articles, digesting background information and opinion and aiming to feel connected to the larger world.

Media companies around the world have aggressively chased (and relatively successfully met) the first need by emphasising breaking news online and through 24/7 publishing schedules, chasing radio and TV as the first place people turn for coverage of news as it happens.

But how is the New York Times, probably the most famous newspaper in the world, meeting this relaxed browsing style?

Skimming

The New York Times have been actively testing solutions to this meet this casual browsing mode. Their Article Skimmer prototype aims to “provide an online approximation of the pleasure of reading the Sunday Times” print edition, encouraging users to skim through summaries, dipping in to read stories without leaving the page and then easily clicking back to the skimmer’s index to move on to the next story.

Section of the New York Times skimmer prototype

It’s a slick concept and I’ve often found myself using the skimmer rather than the cluttered nytimes.com homepage as it gives a narrower slice of content and an easier way to dive into sections of content without loading new pages.

That this alternate homepage is completely devoid of advertising also plays a part in its appeal.

The most recent update added a range of features and shortcuts, making it easier to navigate with the keyboard and adding mouse gestures to allow users to ‘throw’ the page up and down &emdash; a gesture all too familiar to those used to Apple’s iPhone interface &emdash; and also includes a choice of layout and colour schemes.

Yet despite the code wizardry behind the skimmer it’s still hobbled by the limitations of the web browser, particularly when it comes to the real hallmark of printed editorial design: typography.

Text wraps strangely and doesn’t fit in the layout, headlines are a fraction too bold, and on sections without images the page gets very dense with text. At heart it lacks the sense of human-edited construction and polish that’s clearly evident in the printed pages of the New York Times for the simple reason that the skimmer is entirely automated.

Bringing back the look of print

The new version 2.0 update to the Times Reader, a downloadable application allowing print subscribers to view content from the New York Times’ daily print edition, side-steps these problems by not using a web browser at all.

Built using Adobe’s AIR application platform and in collaboration with Adobe’s internal team, Times Reader takes giant leaps towards replicating the print experience for readers. From the familiar typeface to the column layouts, this really is the stuff that makes print people excited.

From the user’s perspective, the sections presented on the left are like liftouts of the paper. Stories aren’t repeated across multiple sections, the same as print. Unlike the website, stories on the “Front Page” section are the same stories as the print edition, fixed in time until the next day’s edition is published. Fresh content is piped into a “Latest News” panel across the top of the page, and has its own dedicated index in the navigation on the left.

There’s a clear heirarchy of stories across the page and strong use of imagery (though both change as you resize the window) and there’s an option to ‘zoom out’ and scan across multiple pages at once, replicating the skimming behaviour of flicking through pages of a print newspaper, and diving in to read articles of interest.

Times Reader 'Browse' mode

For those who want to print stories, the Times Reader also presents well-formatted page that’s almost better than newsprint, laying out the story in two columns (interestingly, much wider than those in the paper’s grid) and neatly presenting pullquotes and images.

Times Reader print layout

Importantly for the bean-counters at the Times it also rolls in standard advertising units and the ubiquitious Google text ads, making sure they can claw back some of the precious advertising income that comes from their website, though their web article pages contain more ad opportunities than Times Reader’s page layouts.

And there’s the dilemma.

Any new online format has to balance the needs of users with the demands of the advertisers who effectively underwrite the site, and right now most major media experiments lean towards one or the other.

It is certainly a great way to embrace your users and hold their hand through what is large number of changes to the site. And by using the voice and face of someone that the listeners and users all know, I can imagine that they won’t be receiving a large backlash to the redesign.

Update

The new NPR.org redesign

The new NPR.org redesign has been launched and is a vast improvement on the previous site. Plus, the NPR blog has a series of posts from the redesign team discussing the changes to processes, tools, and changes that do and do not affect users.

Will Alford, product design chief behind the redesign explains their thinking in this detailed summary of the redesign at Visual Editors (added emphasis is mine):

For years our industry has chased those elusive nonreaders. Our market research led us down a different path. What we’d have to do to win over those folks risked driving away our core readers.

We believe we can thrive by increasing the satisfaction of those who already engage with us regularly. To us, this meant we had to design a newspaper for people who like newspapers. If our strategy works, more of you will renew your subscriptions or purchase the paper more often or convert from single-copy customers to home subscribers.

It’s sad that something as simple as listening to your existing users seems so groundbreaking.

At the heart of any successful project is a solid understanding of your user. Sometimes they tell you things you want to hear, often it’s things you don’t like to hear–comments on the AJC’s own blog post about the changes are filled will negative feedback–but if your redesign ignore them in search on converting new readers, it’s at your peril.