The New York Times has finally developed an alternative “skimming” interface to the paper which enables readers to browse articles section-by-section, as they would with the newspaper spread on the kitchen table:
I’ve been an advocate of adapting the best of the old world to the new for some time. In every “old world” category, from media to e-commerce, there are users who prefer the offline experience. Zoomii, for instance, transforms Amazon.com into the world’s largest browseable bookstore.
But the New York Times effort takes one step forward, and two steps backwards. Attempting to appeal to laggards by building replicas will ultimately fail because online replicas make poor reproductions of printed media. The size, dimensions, resolution and characteristics of paper printed media simply cannot be translated into HTML. The Internet is a new medium which requires adaptation not imitation.
My suggestion to New York Times in building an alternative user interface online that works for offline user is to isolate the root causes of what works offline and see which of those can be adapted for use online. In other words, they need to decompose the bundle of features that users appreciate offline and then prioritize them in order to understand what will be gained or lost in translation. For comparison, they should also look at things users don’t enjoy and study both “online” and “offline” reader groups.
Here’s my hypothesized decomposition of what’s enjoyable about reading printed media:
Intangible Tangibles – the freshly delivered morning paper feels unique and personal. Consumed with coffee in the morning sun, the paper is a ritual for many where they absorb their regular dose of news before getting on with the day. Online media, by contrast, posts stories in real-time as they become available. Although they each come with a dated byline individually, there is no definitive edition for Saturday, February 14th 2009. I suspect this can be overwhelming for many offline users, who find themselves constantly refreshing NYTimes.com in the search for new stories.
Implications: if users want to receive the news in full edition, then the New York Times could start providing users the option to browse a personal edition of the newspaper. Some users may want the stories in it to exactly mimic the printed edition; others may want to wait until all stories about their beloved sports team have been filed. That said, the New York Times can’t replicate the sun or dimensions of the kitchen table.
Store and Share – fans of Web 2.0 liked to tout that it revolutionized media by making media social. That’s only partially true. It’s helped make media social but anonymous and faceless. The first social media began with the newspaper around the kitchen table, the magazine on your desk or open paper at the diner. Any printed media manager knows that readership of any printed media is many times circulation, so a question remains: how much of the value of printed media is in the ability to save and share it with others?
Implications: online sharing doesn’t allow offline users the same experience, although it can often be better. E-mailing a story is not the same as passing it across the kitchen table. To address these users, the NYT ought to look closely at its own “social” layer which in my experience does not allow users to readily save and share stories. Indeed, the NYT social layer is largely a waste of screen real estate. I’d suggest that the NYT experiment with the top space testing the relative attractiveness of social features, the crawl, supplemental “Did You Know?” content on each article, etc.
See What’s Important: seeing a newspaper engages the brain in a very different way than searching Google or NYTimes.com. The newspaper has sightlines, varied print sizes and column lengths. Articles are arranged in rough “order of importance” as deemed by the editors and placed in sections whose width varies day-by-day. Pictures and sidebars focus your attention to where it should be. Coverage differs in quality day-by-day: a lifestyle section is likely to be much more complete in a thick weekend addition than a thin weekday edition. Replicas like “Skim NYT” fail to capture any of these features. Each article is apportioned the same space, every section is present each day, etc.
Implications: reading the “skimmable” version of the NYT feels like an artificial replica. Rather than try to put every story on one page, the online editors ought to consider the approach taken by DayLife.com of highlighting what’s important and providing impactful visuals. I suggest that one of the most important cues that the Times can provide is giving us hints about story length so we know whether we’re clicking a 2000 word feature story or 300 word newsflash.
Prioritize: does anyone read the whole paper? or even skim the whole paper? We usually skim or read the sections we find important by picking them up out of the pile. This is probably because we know that reading everything will be less beneficial, even if we had the time, than focusing on a few key items. A benefit of printed media is that it allows this kind of focus, without making us feel guilty. We focus by throwing sections of the paper that we might be tempted to read, but know that we don’t want to, aside.
Implications: any good skimmer should have a way to “throw out” sections you don’t want to read. The NYT Skimmer should allow users to order sections based upon what they feel is important and remove those which are of no interest. A virtual section like “Frontpages” could show all stories on the frontpage of any section allowing for some future discovery, but the functionality would attempt to reproduce our ability to prioritize. Similarly, users could be allowed to “quick scan” all headlines in a section, then check a handful to read more on. If they checkboxed 5 stories, these could be tiled side-by-side with the first 200 words of each visible. If the user wanted to read each of these stories, they could quickly “Add to Playlist” to read each one successively while always having the option to skip to the next a la iTunes.
