NEWSPAPER SITES IGNORE USER EXPERIENCES

By: Karim Mostafa Jakob Nielsen Says More Research Is Needed





Newspaper Web sites have a lot to learn about "user experience," says Jakob Nielsen, whose biweekly column on Web design has attracted a devoted worldwide following. Nielsen and his partners in the Nielsen Norman Group visited New York this week as part of their World tour to promote strong Web design that also keeps the user in mind.



"I'm very disappointed in newspaper Web sites since they are not functioning as online services," Nielsen said. "Their search engines are miserable and I don't think they have a clue about usability."



Russell Parkhouse, an interactive designer at Qwest Interactive and a conference attendee, agreed, saying he doesn't trust keyword searches on news sites because they don't return what he asks for.



"People are being treated like sheep on the Web today," Nielsen said. "What's relevant is the feeling of control." He finds that users say to themselves, "I just want to go to the things I want." Easier said than done on many sites.



Navigation is the first thing newspaper Web sites need to conduct field studies on, Nielsen believes. The New York Times' recent homepage redesign shows that newspaper Web sites are getting better, Nielsen said. But overall, newspapers aren't funding enough user research, he said.

Nielsen argues that improving usability by at least 50% on e-commerce sites has improved sales by as much as 400%. News sites too can reach profitability with better usability and business models that recognize the economic value of content.


"Subscriptions get a bad rap," said Brenda Laurel, a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group. Like others, she believes offering free content was the biggest mistake, creating among users an expectation of entitlement. "Content can't be separated from an economic frame," she said.



Acknowledging that online advertising doesn't completely pay the bills, Laurel proposes micro-payments for pageviews. She suggests that an infrastructure be built which would allow sites to start charging consumers for a pageview after a certain amount of time has elapsed. Thus, consumers wouldn't be charged for browsing, but would be charged small amounts when they stayed with content they liked.



Users should also be recognized as important content creators for Web sites. According to Laurel, they should be allowed to create new content and rework content provided on the site. She cites cars.com, the auto vertical powered by newspaper-owned Classified Ventures, as a good example of a strong community based on request marketing, allowing users who own the same car to share their experiences, for example.



In the wireless arena, Laurel said that creating content for handheld devices is a different design process, and that repurposing Web content doesn't work. As single-media providers have diversified, the automated solutions have been ineffective, she said.



"If you are a person creating content, you have to prepare it in ways that it can live in all different forms," Laurel said. She thinks its necessary to rethink the whole process of content design. "Acknowledge that it takes a separate design process to get headlines to work on wireless."



But while new mediums are being embraced, Donald Norman, co-founder of Silicon Valley-based Nielsen Norman and an expert on human-centered design, suggests newspapers keep in mind what they do best. For him that means editors picking interesting stories he might otherwise have never seen.






Karim Mostafa (kmostafa@editorandpublisher.com) is associate editor for E&P Online.







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