How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online
A new way of reading The New York Times online turns the traditional web-browsing experience on its side. The prototype, which they’re calling Article Skimmer until someone comes up with a better name, presents the latest news in a horizontal grid that looks and feels radically different from the vertically oriented nytimes.com homepage. Check out the video above for a quick tour, or better yet, give it a whirl yourself.
I spoke yesterday with the creator of Article Skimmer, Andre Behrens, a software developer at the Times who specializes in Javascript. “The motivation was the expose more content and to expose more depth,” Behrens said. “The volume of content we produce is just tremendous, and it’s difficult to unearth those little gems that don’t necessarily make the front of the website.”
In a blog post on Friday, Behrens compared Article Skimmer to the experience of “spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch.” That struck me as an apt comparison that speaks to a frequent criticism of reading the news online, which is a lack of serendipity. In the grid layout of Article Skimmer, each story is given more-or-less equal billing, and it seems more likely that you’d stumble across a story deep inside the Times. Or as Behrens said in our interview, “My goal in doing this was to get more people to read the science section.”
Article Skimmer is based on the Times’ RSS feeds, and Behrens said the programming was “fairly easy, pleasant, and straightforward.” He chose a grid to “ruthlessly rigorize” the material. “I consider it, for me at least, the most efficient way of displaying the information,” Behrens said. “That you can work it with your eyes more than with your mouse.”
Behrens, who also recently developed Times Widgets, said he began Article Skimmer “as a little ditty that I was building in my spare time.” Future iterations could include a way to read articles “within the Skimmer experience,” which would make browsing the Times even more seamless. But for now, the newspaper is making available the prototype for comments and will “grow it to scale” if reaction is positive, according to Stacy Green, a spokeswoman for the Times. And, of course, Article Skimmer still needs a better name.
A couple thoughts:
– If it’s built on RSS, that would mean it would be easy to open source this and use it as a sort of visual RSS reader. It’d be like a more visually pleasing (and less power-user-friendly) Google Reader.
– I wonder how advertising would fit into this. I see five current ad slots on the front page of nytimes.com (plus other inhouse ads that could be converted into ad slots). It’s harder to think of ads in this self-consciously clean layout. Just as a lot of publishers are wary of full-text RSS feeds, fearing they reduce ad impressions, I could see a similar worry here.
Don’t you think it looks a lot like Times Reader, only less attractive?
http://is.gd/k0ag
I was just saying that yesterday — although I actually like it more than Times Reader, which I think is a mishmash of good print ideas with not-as-good web ones. I have trouble imagining who, exactly, Times Reader is for. Whereas Article Skimmer has a sort of Bauhaus/formalist feel that makes me want to speak French.
The most valuable part of Times Reader is that you can download the whole thing and take it with you to non-WiFi locations. Other than that, I prefer the Times website.
I just think the number of people who regularly want to read the Times (a) on a laptop but (b) in a place with no Internet access is pretty small. Commuters on Amtrak are just about the only ones who come to mind — you certainly don’t want to be whipping open your laptop on the subway or even on Metro North/PATH/LIRR. Maybe on planes, but wouldn’t you rather just pick up a print copy?
The ‘new’ interface is a great move for the Times. It does distinctly reminds me of http://newser.com and I think corrects one of the major flaws of current online newspaper design: the lack of pictures.
Any print designer will tell you: the eye goes picture → hed → cutline → deck. Why, when we’ve eliminated news hole problems online, have we mostly dropped the most important, eye catching, part of the story!?
Thanks for the comment, Joey. I did ask Behrens about that, at your suggestion, and he said Newser wasn’t an inspiration. “I mean, there were no conscious efforts on my part” to emulate other grid designs, he said. In any event, they do seem to take a similar philosophical approach. —Zach
If I gave every Web developer whose experimental UI for news I thumbed my nose at, I’d be a much poorer man than I already am.
Which is to say, thanks for including my opinion, but I’m difficult to please.
Nicholas Cook, from the NYT crew, saw my complaints and asked for my suggestions. You can find that bit of conversation here: http://bit.ly/u0eCG
“…every Web developer whose experimental UI for news I thumbed my nose at A DOLLAR” of course is what I meant to say. And I’m now that guy making a second comment to repair the error in the first one. [sigh]