Vox homepage should be the VoxDeck app

Melissa Bell at Vox wrote about "The home page is dead! We're building one anyway." The homepage is an important topic for news organizaions and most get it wrong in my opinion.

The home page has been obsolete for a long time. The primary way readers come to articles is by Google and social media. Less and less people start at the home page. But obsolete does not mean dead (see McLuhan). For example, you can still buy buggy whips. The home page is not dead, it still has a role to play. It should now be an app.

Most news organizations and in particular newspapers think of the home page as the front page of a newspaper. It is like they are building it for the archives so they can say "This is what happened on this day." These organizations keep trying to fight the last war better. So they get the user experience all wrong.

News sites are getting better because previously every click lead to a static article template page. The news is more than articles. Rich interactive stories and data presentations are common. The most popular story last year (2013) for The New York Times was interactive. So this "JavaScript Journalism" needs to be a consideration in the design.

News organizations produce huge amounts of content. Other sites can have nice navigation and whitespace galore because they are trying to present their limited amount of new content in the best possible way. The design considerations for news are different. 

People want to wade through news sites. So they return often. Sometimes they miss a day. There are topics that don't interest them. Think of a relative who starts reading the paper with the sports section and not the front page. This would speak to personalization. But people rarely want to personalize for themselves. They don't want to be programmers, they want it programmed for them.

Finally, people use many different devices and the experience should carry over from screen to screen. The cloud is not so much about storing data on remote serves as it is syncing the experience from device to device. This is a feature of nearly all popular apps like Dropbox, Evernote, email, etc. News needs to be offline first.



Home Page User Experience

This is what the User Experience should look like for news home page apps.

What is new for me? Show the new stories since my last visit. This does not mean hide the old stories, but highlight what is new since I visited three hours ago or since yesterday or last week. Don't waste my time with headlines I've already read. This is fairly simple to do.

Technical details:.Store in a cookie the timestamp of the last visit. Use a data-timestamp property for each article. Then use a short JavaScript routine to add a highlight class to each story that is new. In a prototype that I did, every story had a gray background except highlighted stories had a white background. Then sync this time stamp into a member's profile for syncing the experience across devices.

Show me the breadth of the news. Readers of newspaper sites are not told how many articles were published in the last 24 hours. In print, you know as soon as you pick up the paper. Show me lots of articles. Curate the order of the articles, not the ones I can see.

Show me that I'm up to date. With the paper you know when you finished reading every section. for many it is an important part of the news experience. So display a progress bar, or the like, showing how much of the news I've scanned and read. Give the experience of an accomplishment. 

Yesterday's news. Contrary to the Rolling Stones' song, people do want yesterday's paper. If readers are on vacation for a week or two, they want to be able to get caught up. Techmeme does this almost perfectly. Click on the date (which is not obvious) on the Techmeme page and roll back time to any previous home page. Every news site home page should have this feature.

Timelines and storylines. Stories do not stand alone. Perhaps I missed the first story in the series. Or I missed the news of the bill that passed or the death of a important figure in the story. Don't make me feel dumb because I didn't read a story ten weeks ago.

Next article, please. I've never understood why news sites make it so difficult to read the next article. With the paper my eyes just scan to the next headline. After I scroll down to the end of an article, please show me the next article. Let me keep scrolling. No need to click. Use the same gesture used to read the article to read the next article.

Read me later. Sometimes I get busy. Let me save an article to read later. Even on a different screen. Storing the unique id of a story is not a difficult technical challenge. It gives the news site another visit which I'm sure the business people will love.

The mosaic of news.  This all speaks to a layout of columns of articles like tweets in TweetDeck. For most newspapers there would be a column for each of the sections like Sports. If a reader frequently read a columnist or blogger, the personalization could add this as a new column. A list of articles could be filter by section, blog, author or any other metadata. Or even a search.

Most of the articles in a newspaper could be displayed on one page. Think of it as a single page web app for news. I called my concept app PostDeck. For Vox it could be VoxDeck. Other newspapers would be TimesDeck or TodayDeck. VoxDeck could even bring in a column from SB Nation and other Vox media.

Apps as news. Readers expect more than articles. Weather is a prime example. Columns don't have to be an index of articles. A column could be the weather app. Or breaking news app. Or twitter stream. Or election results. Or feedback. Or most frequently read. Or it could be a data driven story that has a long life.

Ads as news. Ads are broken on the web compared to print. I can clip an ad or coupon from the paper. I can turn back a page and re-read an ad. I know that every Sunday has my electronics flyer. Contrary to the common view, people want ads, not the intrusion. Put ads in a column, let people scroll through them. Make them searchable. Read them later. Make them social with comments. Challenge ad agencies to make ad apps for columns. Lots of room for innovation for the poor experience we get now. Just like in the paper make ads first class citizen with articles and apps.

Satisfy active readers. I don't follow baseball. As an active reader, let me customize the columns so I get hockey news but turn off baseball. Others might want all the stats of a live game as an app. Let me drag and drop the order of the columns. Let active readers customize and then feature their customization in promoting this news app. 


Long live the news home page app

Home pages for news sites have a lot of life left in them. They just should be considered as news apps and we'll see a renaissance for news home pages. 

"They Became What They Beheld" by Edmund Carpenter or Marshall McLuhan?

One of my favorite books is They Became What They Beheld (1970) by Edmund Carpenter and photographed by Ken Heyman. The origin has been a bit of a mystery.

In the note above the copyright of the book it states:

The text owes much to Marshall McLuhan who, in fact, co-authored an earlier version. We are indebted to the authors quoted and their publishers, and to Harper's Bazaar in which some portions of the material appeared.

The obituary for Edmund Carpenter in The New York Times on July 7, 2011, included this paragraph:

His collaborations with McLuhan included numerous jointly written articles and the anthology “Explorations in Communication” (1960). The article “Fashion Is Language,” which appeared under McLuhan’s name in a special McLuhan issue of Harper’s Bazaar in 1968, was actually written by Mr. Carpenter after McLuhan went into the hospital for brain surgery. It was published in book form, in 1970, under Mr. Carpenter’s name, with the title “They Became What They Beheld.”

There is a footnote in McLuhan is Space: A Cultural Geography (2003) by Richard Cavell which states:

Edmund Carpenter suggest that he was the author of the Haper's article, though when it appeared in an altered version as part of Carpenter's They Became What They Beheld (1970), Carpenter credits McLuhan's input into the volume. See Carpenter's Remembering Explorations,' Canadian Notes and Queries 46 (Spring 1992): 3-15; reprinted in a slightly different form in Theall's Virtual Marshall McLuhan.

So I went to "The Not-So-Silent Sea," Appendix B of Virtual Marshall McLuhan where Edmund Carpenter wrote:

Harper's Bazaar commissioned Marshall to write a special McLuhan issue. He was about to undergo surgery. The fee was large & needed. Not a word had been written, not a photograph assembled. On Friday, the publisher warned me: if an acceptable manuscript wan't in his hands by 9 a.m. Monday, the contract was cancelled. It arrived on time and appeared under Marshall's name. Three years later it appeared as a book, They Became What They Beheld, under my name.

Out of curiosity I will probably buy the April 1968 issue of Harper's Bazaar from ebay. But given the above information, it is pretty clear to me that Edmund Carpenter deserves the credit for both works.

I think of these two works and Understanding Media as collaborative efforts of two brilliant men and very close friends. In the former, Carpenter completed the work, in the later, McLuhan completed the work. Collaboration is difficult in print and authorship is not always an easy definition.  

In my opinion, They Became What They Beheld deserves the same respect as any McLuhan book. Highly recommended.

Why is technology important?

Dave Winer posted one answer to "Why is technology important?". It is an important question. Technology is a human artifact like media, innovations, language, processes, tools, clothing and any other "extensions of the physical human body - or the mind." So I will answer the question: "Why are artifacts important?" Artifacts are important because they impact our culture, our way of life. They have four effects: enhance, obsolesces, retrieves and reverses as described in McLuhan's Laws of Media. For example, automobiles enhance our privacy and travel, obsolesces horse and buggy, retrieves quests and reverses into traffic jams. You may have a different perception which is another reason why it is important to study technology and other artifacts. You can use this model to study any artifact and thus our culture.

New New Media

New book from author of Digital McLuhan. New new way to promote the textbook. Is a textbook new new media? javascript:void(0)

User Experience Design and McLuhan

In looking to explain User Experience Design I started thinking about McLuhan's statement that "The Medium is the Message." He was explaining, for example, that the car was not just about the car but the entire "environment" that it took to support the car: gas stations, oil companies, rubber plantations, auto unions, etc. In looking at a picture of a car you don't see the entire environment. The message is bigger than the product itself; it is the environment the product requires. User Experience Design is about looking at this entire environment when creating a new artifact. In fact creating a new product may including creating a substantial part of the supporting environment. The user does not use the new product or technology in a vacuum but within a larger context. For example, a picture of an iPod does not show you iTunes, the iTunes store or the Apple Store with the Genius Bar. Good design looks at the entire environment. Because McLuhan's Laws of Media apply within this environment, a good designer would benefit from studying them. Simply, User Experience Design has made a discipline out of the "The Message" of a new product.