Jumping Fox » redesign

CNN redesigns

Eric Auld — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:06:14 +0000

Read a deconstruction of the relaunched CNN site. The new site sports new index pages, story pages and a strong focus on ‘popularity’ with the News Pulse section.

Talking re-design

Eric Auld — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 07:48:52 +0000

Designers Prem Krishnamurthy and Rob Giampietro talk about their online design of Tablet Magazine, and the different places they found inspiration to shape the design. Interestingly, during the audio slide show, you get a quick look at the intial three directions they took.

A great introduction

Eric Auld — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:49:45 +0000

Khoi Vinh has linked to a great redesign walkthrough of the new NPR.org site. It is a beautiful piece of video that proves that even somthing like an introduction to a redesign can have a nice narrated story.

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.

How Times Media Group approached their redesign

Simon Wright — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:32:45 +0000

BBH Labs’ talks to Times Media Group about their redesign of The Times in 2007. Their prototyping with “Project Victoria” is a great approach to testing out new systems if you can afford it.

Listen to your users

Simon Wright — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:09:56 +0000

Among a slew of newspaper redesigns that are utilising more magazine-driven layouts popping with colour and graphics, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has launched a new design that uses more solid columns of text and smaller photos than most.

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.