Zeldman has been keeping the debate bubbling along as well, and it’s obviously of interest to many web designers who aren’t quite sure what to make of this whole data thing.

I’m a garden variety web designer who happens to think data-driven design is probably the future of web design, I’ve been thinking about it for the last couple of years, and hopefully I can address some the issues involved with a foot in each camp.

While some aspects of the debate have been disappointing, it’s also been very exciting in some respects to see designers thinking about the role data can play in design, because it seems to be largely a giant unknown at this point.

Who kicked this off?

In short, Doug Bowman, who’s many accomplishments in the web design world include crafting one of the first high-profile, standards-based layouts for Wired in 2002. Google hired him in 2006. Jason Fried of 37signals called this “their best acquisition to date”. In 2009, Bowman left Google citing irreconcilable differences between a ‘classically trained’ designer such as himself, and Google’s obsessive, data-driven culture. Bowman subsequently moved to Twitter.

Debate ensued, and just this Sunday The New York Times picked it up.

A polarized debate on the Internet? Surely you jest!

In the red corner we have the little guy - classicaly trained, famed web standards advocate and all-round nice guy Doug Bowman.

In the blue corner we have the corporate giant - the engineer-driven Internet behemoth that is Google, described rather uncharitably (to put it mildly!) by Joe Clark as being filled with “undersocialized, uncultured, pampered, arrogant faux-savants who have cultivated an arrested adolescence” in Google’s working culture.

The stage is set.

Now you might think if I’m stepping up to defend data-driven design, I’m going to bash Bowman for not getting it, and praise Google for their forward-thinking, data-driven culture.

I’m not.

Personally, I think the whole face-off between design and data is, frankly, stupid. It makes for a good conflict story, but it doesn’t reflect reality. It’s a poor way to frame the debate. Data and design should be friends, not enemies. In web design, people click or they don’t. They stay or they go. That’s good to know. But I’ll get to that later.

First, let’s look at Bowman and Google.

I totally understand Bowman’s position. If I were in his shoes, I would have done the same thing. And so have a number of others it appears - while there are a bunch of designers working at Google (contrary to popular belief), and were before Bowman’s time, there is something of a design brain-drain going on at Google too.

Not waving, drowning

Why are very talented designers having a hard time at Google?

First, lets be careful when we generalize about Google. Google is made up of many different teams of different backgrounds working under one big roof. What is true of one Google team or department might not be true for others, or the organisation on the whole. This is an organisation with, as of early 2009, 20,000 employees around the world. That’s a lot of people. That is certainly, to use Bowman’s analogy, a corporate ship of aircraft carrier proportions.

So it’s hard to say “Google this” or “Google that,” but we can look at the specific circumstances that Bowman apparently faced, and have surfaced elsewhere.

The Bowman Ultimatum

In Bowman’s case, he says he grew tired of debating miniscule details, and in one instance being asked to prove his case - with data - for the exact pixel width of a border. Who wouldn’t grow tired of that? It would be absolutely maddening. But is it the fault of a data-driven culture?

In my opinion, no. It’s the fault of a broken decision making culture.

The problem with testing 41 shades of blue isn’t the testing. If you can, why not? A couple of hours of an engineer’s time is a small price for the micro-improvement extrapolated across millions and millions of users. The problem is that two Google camps couldn’t make a decision and Marissa Mayer, the VP of user experience had to get involved. A VP had to be called in to adjudicate on a shade of colour. The problem isn’t the testing - testing actually is, in my opinion, quite a clever solution - the problem is that a Google VP is wasting her time on such a trivial thing because the other players couldn’t sort it out. What kind of culture is that?

Likewise Bowman’s time was being wasted fighting over utter minutiae. Again, what kind of a culture is that?

Google does this sort of thing because a micro-improvement is significant over Google’s enormous user base. But if it’s true of a micro-improvement, then consider just how much more significant a big improvement would be. Shouldn’t that be the primary concern?

Maybe it is, sometimes. But from Bowman’s experience, it certainly doesn’t sound like it is as often as it should be.

D is for Denial

Here’s the thing with design: any piece of design consists of hundreds of micro-decisions about what goes in, and most of all what is left out. What it’s not. To be asked to make your case for every micro-decision along the way would, I imagine, be a quick path to a padded cell.

But this has nothing to do with data. You can substitute ‘data’ for being asked to write up your reasoning from classic design principles (how is it informed by the golden ratio?), or having an executive committee weigh in with their thoughts. If you slow down the design process like this, where you’re scrutinizing every step you take from A to B, then you’re never going to get to B.

Relying on data in this case is just denial about not having the guts to get on with it.

Horse, meet cart

This is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. When you’re doing mass-market, high volume sites and products, it is fair enough that you want to optimize the hell out of your products. And Google does. When you’ve got the enormous traffic necessary to work out if miniscule changes have some minor, statistically significant effect, then sure, if you can do it quickly, why wouldn’t you? But that’s optimization that should happen at the very end of the design cycle. The cart goes after the horse.

Put it the other way ‘round and you have a broken setup. It doesn’t mean horses suck. It doesn’t mean carts suck. Carts are not the enemy of horses. Optimization is not the enemy of design. Get them in the right order and you have something really useful. Get them the wrong way around and you have something broken.

Google represents (surprise!) Google

It seems to me that there is some inference that Google’s problems with data-driven design are somehow relevant to you or I. However if Google is going to be used as the representative of ‘data-driven design’ then it’s worth taking a step back and asking whether they actually do represent data-driven design.

In my view, they don’t. Here’s why:

Google’s key interest is in being Google.

Saying Google is anti-design is wrong. Google has a very stringent, tightly defined ‘Googley’ aesthetic. You can read more about it in this interview BusinessWeek did with Irene Au, Google’s user experience director. Or you can just check out their web pages.

A Google product page wont be confused for a Microsoft page or an Apple page. To consider like for like, check out the home pages of Chrome vs IE vs Safari. To see how consistent Google’s product pages are, consider Picasa or Website Optimizer or Gmail . You may not like it, but that’s their brand. That’s Google being Google.

Data-driven design isn’t slave to any aesthetic. But Google is, as is any company trying to further their brand. Google isn’t setting out to represent data-drive design, they’re setting out to pursue their brand and corporate philosophy. To the extent data helps them further that brand, that’s great for them. But we shouldn’t take it much further than that.

It may be interesting to discuss the rights and wrongs of the strategy of a multinational corporation, but let’s not pretend that such a discussion has great relevance for how your average garden variety designer like you or me goes about their work.

Why the broken culture of a 20,000 employee, multi-national company represent anything other than the problems of a 20,000 employee, multi-national company, I’m not sure.

Don’t get me wrong - we, the designers, do and will use data to drive our designs. A/B and multivariate testing will become commonplace, like Content Management Systems and web standards. But Google, as a company, doesn’t have much to do with it.

So let’s not confuse the excesses of one company with a whole notion of data-driven design.

Obey your master

Here’s the heart of the problem: Google doesn’t actually get data-driven design.

(Data-driven design, for what it’s worth, is usually testing different design treatments concurrently with different segments of web traffic, measuring which treatment performs best, and picking the winner. Rinse, wash and repeat. You may know it as A/B, multivariate or bucket testing.)

Google gets end-stage optimization, to a fault it seems. But there’s so much more to data-driven design.

Data serves its master. In Google’s case, as we’ve discussed, the master is being ‘Googley.’

However, being purely data-driven means saying to hell with the overriding philosophy; all you care about is performance. That’s not what Google’s about. That’s why Bowman et al were so stifled.

Consider their product pages, linked above. How do they compare with, say, the 37signals product pages? Or even, say, Dropbox’s ultra-minimal approach?

I’d wager that it wouldn’t be that hard to find pages that convert at a higher rate than Google’s product pages. (Conversion rate is, by the way, the holy grail of data-driven design).

To be truly data-driven is to explore those options - to do radical redesigns and see what happens. Big improvements require big changes.

And that’s the thing: being data-driven allows you to take these risks. Being data-driven is the safety net that allows you to make the big acrobatic leap and if you happen to miss the bar, you don’t land flat on your face. You can climb right back up and try again. That is a wonderful thing!

It should open the door to all sorts of creativity and design risk taking. All the kinds of daring, bold design I bet Bowman wishes he could have done.

That’s what has been, for me at least, another frustrating aspect of this debate. Google, with their enormous amount of traffic, variety of products, and copious talent, could be home to the most extraordinary, exciting design explorations and the hard-nosed, data-backed research of what actually does work. That’s true data-driven design - it’s taking real risks for real rewards. It’s not either/or. You don’t have to choose between design exploration and data. They go hand in hand.

Instead, Google is focused on being ‘Googley’ and is stuck - in some cases at least - with an apparently dysfunctional decision-making culture that gets fixated on the trivial at the expense of the big picture.

Back to Doug Bowman. Was this potential design nirvana I’ve outlined his expectation? I don’t think so - I imagine he did see the potential for Google to go from where they are now to somewhere with a different, better design sensibility. But when you spend three years having every single step you take scrutinized, and after a couple of years you look up from your feet, and find you’ve barely walked half way down the street on a very long journey to where you want to go, of course you’re going to wonder if you’re time couldn’t be better spent elsewhere. If disappointment is the gap between expectation and reality, then I can certainly understand the disappointment!

Twitter, data and you

So Bowman moved to Twitter.

When it comes to Twitter, the future is largely unwritten. That makes it infinitely more exciting to a designer leading the design effort.

Is Twitter the antithesis of data-driven design? Apparently not. In the Times piece Bowman says “Using data is fundamental to what we do [at Twitter] ,” but they take it with a grain of salt. And fair enough.

The truth is data is fundamental to what all web designers do.

From screen resolution to browser popularity, there are a bunch of a data points that web designers already take into account when creating something.

And in the not-too-distant future there will be a lot more. A/B and multivariate testing will become routine.

With that in mind, I do have one nit to pick with Doug Bowman. He finished his piece on leaving Google by saying “But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

Web design, in my view, should live or die by the sword of data.

I’ll tell you why: every bit of ‘data’ isn’t an abstract thing. It’s a person like you or me trying to do something, and succeeding or failing.

On the web, you can measure what people do. You can measure what they click, how long they stay for, if they scroll, how many pages they view, if they ‘bounce’, if they return, and so on. You can ask if they were successful or not. For perhaps the first time in history we can accurately measure all interactions with a piece of design.

If it can be measured, it can be improved. And each of those improvements represents helping someone do something a little more successfully.

That’s a measure web design should live or die by.

To be fair to Bowman, I assume he means “But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of [Google’s warped, excessive reliance on] data [in the absense of being able to get things done].” Which I can understand.

But still the point is worth making. Web design data is just counting human interactions. That’s all it is. But it matters. A lot.

The future is what we make it

It wasn’t that long ago that databases and content management systems were the domain of engineers only. Now even the simplest of blogs use them, and almost all web designers implement them.

Measuring and testing design performance wont remain the domain of engineer-heavy tech companies either (or marketers for that matter, who actually do much more of this than we do as designers, to our shame), and soon enough it will go mainstream.

I said much the same thing two years ago - I believed it then, and I believe it even more so now. More and more signs are pointing in that direction, from web designers, developers, I/As and more.

Some people have tried to hold it back, but in 2009 data-driven design is in the air.  Small companies like 37signals have finally started dipping their toes into the testing pool, and it turns out the water is fine.

There’s so much more to say on the topic, so I’m knuckling down to write more about it in the coming months to publish later in the year. It is, in my opinion, the future of web design. I’ll be talking about it at Web Directions South in Sydney later this year, and I’ll give this blog a proper burial and start blogging more about data-driven design later this year as well.

In the mean time, if you’re a designer and are intrigued about data and design, here are some resources you might find interesting:
- Follow KISSmetrics on Twitter for plenty of design, analytics and testing link goodness.
- Read the Marketing Experiments blog to see data-driven design in action.
- Dive in yourself right now and do a test with Google Website Optimizer (I didn’t say every Google team didn’t get it!). It’s easy and they provide a boatload of resources to get you started. Ironic? Maybe.

Until next time. Thanks for reading!

Luke Stevens

Some of these ideas are already being used and some are yet to develop, but they are all certainly a long way from the mainstream, which is where I firmly believe they should be.

This essay could also be called “Why multivariate testing is the future of content and commerce driven design on the web”, but that is a far less interesting title!

Before I get to the first point, let me tackle one obvious objection, stemming from the title of this piece - that web sites don’t generate design ideas, so they aren’t going to ‘design’ themselves anytime soon. True, ideas and aesthetics need to come from humans—designers, ideally, in the professional context—but what I envisage is a system where those ideas are essentially fed into the ‘machine’, tested, evaluated, and either incorporated into the site or dispensed with. The system is, of course, only as good as the ideas fed into it, but if the software behind the web site is responsible for the testing, evaluating and implementing these ideas, the web site could be thought of as ‘designing itself’.

Allow me to elaborate on the three ideas that I see taking the web design profession another big step forward:

1. Understanding web analytics: Designers, meet data

The web design community has, by and large, successfully adopted a standard approach to building web sites over the past 5+ years.

Styles continue to come in to and out of fashion at breakneck speed, aesthetics and functionality continue to evolve and improve - design on the web as a visual and functional pursuit seems to be quite healthy.

We can build sites on solid foundations that look good. But we are largely ignorant of how they perform.

For some sites, it may not matter. They may perform well enough in spite of their design, they may perform well enough by sticking closely to a largely pre-determined, familiar structure (webblogs, for instance), or the web site may be a creative or personal expression of some kind where quantifiable performance is irrelevant.

For many businesses and organisations however, from publishers to retailers to service providers, performance matters. Major or minor changes to their web sites may have a dramatic effect on their bottom line. Changes may be in structure, copy or design, and there is a strong desire to measure and understand the effect of these changes on the performance of the site. Thus the mini-industry of web analytics was born to measure, report and analyse the performance of these web sites based on certain metrics.

Hopefully it wont be long before designers are equipped to play a similar role to the clients and organisations we serve.

Marketing has known about measuring performance for a long, long time - they talk about conversions, segmenting, cost per action, and that’s just on the web. Measuring the performance of mail-outs, for instance, long pre-dates the web. Many designers no doubt have a passing familiarity with some of these concepts, but this passing familiarity needs to, and I think will, evolve into an intimate understanding of their role in the performance of the sites they design.

Take e-commerce for instance. In e-commerce, it’s easy to see macro effects on site performance - performance is defined by how much money the site makes. Sales go up, sales go down, or sales stay the same. Profitability like wise. But what designs perform best in this environment? What sort of pages, what sort of elements? Do we not have an obligation to know?

This is what web analytics can tell us, once we have the data, and that is why designers of most persuasions must embrace web analytics.

Some tools have emerged to aid us. We have seen heat maps and click maps which are mildly interesting when analysing a page, and those silly session-recording tools have popped up recently which are, in my opinion, of near zero value, however we need much, much more.

The current state of web analytics

...is not a topic I’m really qualified to give a detailed analysis of, but as an outsider I’ll happily give my current impression of where things stand!

The web analytics industry is (with some exceptions) to my mind is roughly where the content management industry was before the (formerly) little players showed up and started eating away at their market from the bottom up.

Once you needed $100k and a team of engineers to successfully publish your content online, now you can get an enormous amount done with some extraordinary, low cost tools that designers and other users wield with excellent results.

Currently, the players in the web analytics market are generally the big players. Hopefully, in the coming years we will see similar bottom-up innovation in the web analytics sphere that makes friendly tools available to the legions of designers and web professionals out there in the trenches, who toil away each day at the coal face of the web. (Pushing pixels - it’s tough work!)

In fact, we may not have to wait years at all, thanks to the data nerds at Google. 

It’s not about statistics

Google Analytics is called Google Analytics for a reason.

Web stats packages are a dime a dozen - notice how many come free with your web hosting account? Mere global quantities or users, pages, or dare I say it, ‘hits’ give you a rough idea about the popularity of your web site and overall trends, but how do they help you make better design decisions?

This is where web analytics comes in. For the sake of this essay I’ll define web analytics fairly broadly as the analysis of raw data that helps stake holders make informed decisions about their web sites (including measurable marketing campaigns driving traffic to the site), but the subset I’m particularly concerned about is the resulting metrics that helps designers make better day-to-day design decisions.

The key thing to note is it’s not the mere reporting of numbers that counts, it’s the analysis of that data and the resulting metrics of performance (your KPI’s and what not) that matters.

Currently, the analysis of those numbers is largely left up to marketing teams who understand user segmenting, landing page conversion rates and so on, or the number crunchers who are tasked with providing reports to management.

In many cases this is entirely appropriate - marketing teams need to be able to monitor the performance of their campaigns, and sometimes deep, detailed analysis requires a real head for numbers (and Excel functions).

However, very relevant data from bounce rates to click through rates are often simply far too removed from the hands of the designer.

Google Analytics has done a lot to change this, especially with its fantastic, mid-2007 update, which made tracking bounce rates, conversion goals, and if you’re really tricky, click-through rates (tag your links, people!) readily available, however there is still a long way to go for several reasons.

Firstly, not enough designers have enough experience monitoring the performance of their designs in hard numbers to accurately predict if changes will positively or negatively affect an existing site. That is, whether what they are being paid to do will actually be a step backwards or a step forwards. That’s a worry, don’t you think?

Perhaps it is unfair to ask designers to be able to gaze into their crystal balls of web site performance as, secondly, there aren’t enough readily-available tools to help them with this task of designing to improve performance, and I’ll discuss this further in the third section. There is one obvious exception however, again freely available from our data overlords at GOOG, which I will get to shortly.

Thirdly, web analytics is generally not a part of the designer-client relationship. A design is finished, a site is built or redesigned, a final amount of money changes hands, the end.

2. Designing for performance: Measure, test, improve

The second idea I want to look at is how one goes about designing for performance.

As a designer, there comes a point where you have what seem to be equally good design ideas. Or ideas that you think are good, but it turns out are ultimately bad. Sometimes catastrophically so. Conversely some ideas which may be dismissed for whatever reason, by management, by the choice of the design team, by your own skepticism, may turn out to be quite beneficial.

Wouldn’t it be good if there was a way you could suspend final judgement and test these ideas out?

You could ‘experiment’ by making the changes live and site wide, crossing your fingers, hoping for the best and seeing what happens, but this is both risky and ineffective. Bad Things could happen, and if you make multiple changes you have no idea what exactly caused problems (or improved performance) and thus no easy way of undoing those changes without reverting back entirely to what you had before, hoping that the damage wasn’t permanent, that performance recovers to where it was, and that you don’t lose too much face in the process!

Perhaps that is not the most ideal way to go.

We could experiment in a more meaningful way by implementing one change, showing it only to a discreet group of our audience, and measuring what changes, if any, it has on the performance of the site for those users vs our unchanged ‘control’ group. This is called A/B testing and it is a slow and steady way of making improvements. It requires patience to record results over time and discipline to keep the experiment clean - if more variables enter the equation, the results from your testing can quickly become meaningless.

Better, but still not great.

What if we had multiple elements we wanted to test, and we wanted to see how they worked in combination, as opposed to in isolation in A/B testing. Enter multivariate testing (MVT). With MVT you can test combinations of multiple elements all at once, letting them fight it out until a winning combination emerges. It does require a certain amount of traffic to derive meaningful results, but it is an exceptionally powerful way to test design changes and combinations of changes in order to optimize the performance of a design.

It also fundamentally changes the designer’s relationship to the finished product.

No longer is the design something set in stone until a redesign occurs somewhere down the track, nor is it tweaked in an ad-hoc way as needs change. It is an organic, ongoing experiment that is constantly being optimized for the performance of a given metric (or metrics), and is dependent only on the supply of ideas to improve the performance of the design.

What does it look like in practice?

In some cases, Google’s free Website Optimizer (alluded to earlier) will fit the bill perfectly for MVT testing. Google says its “free multivariate testing application helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images).”

Note that they are pitching to the marketing folks, and this is reflected in the way Google Website Optimizer works - it’s very much oriented around a given test page to goal page conversion, which is fine for that context, but designers really need something broader.

3. Automating performance based design - a necessary feature in the future content management toolkit

Here’s where the content management guys come in.

When it comes to the web, designers have become quite technically skilled over the years, and technical tools such as Content Management Systems (CMS’s) have made it possible to achieve individually what previously took a dedicated team of specialists.

As the CMS market continues to mature, I hope that designers will start asking for ways to integrate web analytics into their sites.

Why? If we want to do the most effective form of testing - multivariate testing - we need to set up experiments within our own templating system, and the CMS is the logical place to do that. The backend software is the perfect environment to serve up these multiple variations and track what happens. What’s the click through rate like for front page news stories? What’s the most effective form of navigation for a given situation? How many article clicks come from that fancy footer you designed? Do images - and what kind of images - increase or decrease conversion rates?

Remember, its not just stats we are after - it is key performance metrics and the ability to test our designs that we want.

I would love to see all kinds of content management systems in the future come packaged with the ability to create the testing environment required for ongoing MVT testing, and a dashboard that tracked the ‘vitals’ of a web site’s health in terms of key metrics, in a similar way to doctors and nursing staff monitoring a patient’s vitals in a hospital setting. Maybe without the sporadic beeping, though.

It’s certainly not just about design, either. The effectiveness of web site copy writing, from navigation terms to article content, also plays a crucial (though sadly often overlooked) role. Are you using the most effective headings, leads or trigger words, for example? Through them into the MVT mixer and see what comes out!

In the future, rather than rushing to implement a design idea that looked good on paper, or conversely agonising over a controversial option, I envisage design changes being fed into the backend software of a site, where they are added to the ongoing optimization experiment that is the design of the site, and the software will tell us what is most effective. It will do so because it can deal with far more variables far more accurately than our spongy grey matter ever could. It will of course be set up to serve us, and the most effective combinations will perhaps be automatically added to the site for all users, new ideas will continue to be fed in when they arrive, and the experiment and optimization will continue in an ongoing fashion.

Some experiments may be so common that the software could almost perform them itself, particularly little things like the number of content items or links in any given element (ten news items or five?), and then work out what positive performance outcomes appeared from these variables in combination with other elements being tested live on site.

It’s really the ability for software to determine what combinations of elements perform best that holds such a great deal of potential for designers, as it would be otherwise nigh-on impossible to do it manually - what text variation with what picture variation, for instance? Why debate it - throw it into the system and have the users tell you what they prefer.

It is worth keeping in mind the obvious however - if you start with a dud idea, no amount of optimization is going to turn it into a good one.

Nevertheless, when you consider the power of this evidence based approach to design founded on multivariate testing, and compare it to the ‘cross your fingers and hope for the best’ method that often is employed, it should send a shiver down your spine.

We just need the tools!

Finally...

Maybe the marketing guys (or other designers!) will laugh, and say “You are just discovering this now?“ but better late than never eh?

I’m also sure there are a number of big web sites that have been doing this for some time, but there were (and still are) big publishing systems before MovableType came along and endeared itself to designers everywhere back in the day.

The point is that understanding web analytics - not just what we can do now, but what is possible with further software development in the area - is crucial to the increasing professionalism of the modern web designer, and indeed the industry on the whole. Not only can a deep understanding of web analytics act as a competitive advantage far more than arguing for, say, the vagaries of accessibility ever could as far as a client is concerned, it also paves the way for the sharing of the results of experiments that would allow best practices to emerge not just from anecdotal evidence but careful observation and reporting of findings across the globe.

Consider online news design for instance, a topic that has been covered on this site before, and imagine all news sites as giant, ongoing science experiments that published their results - it might be wishful thinking, but it illustrates the incredible value that could be unlocked and unleashed, fed back into the machine so to speak, and further improved upon.

If the ideas I outlined at the start of this essay are adopted - they are (i) the need for designers to understand web analytics, (ii) the practice of designing for performance using web analytics and (iii) the automation of web analytics in the design process - then it should be a win for all involved.

The users win, as they are the ones ultimately determining the best combination of elements through ongoing multivariate testing, businesses and clients win because they can steadily improve the effectiveness of their web site in measurable ways with the guidance and skill of a savvy designer, and designers wins because, when every site is an ongoing experiment, we can build up over time a mental (testable!) library of winning combinations, a design sense that is the combination of both creative intuition and empirical data, and we can take the lessons of each one of these experiments to our next project.

After I wrote the article "Breaking the rules in news design" I became aware of the similarity in design of Scandinavian news sites (check them out below!) thanks to the commenters, and I wondered what other trends may be apparent across sites in different parts of the world, if any.

So I took a bunch of screenshots (29), gathered some (rough) stats and posted them all below. The list of sites is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of contemporary news design, merely a sample of what is currently out there in late 2006.

There were a few interesting findings. The Scandinavian sites really are in a different league as far as size and content goes. Compared to more 'traditional' front pages, their front pages run to ~7000-9000px vs ~2300px, they have ~500 links vs 2-300, and around 50 feature images (!) vs <10 on other sites. For the other sites, Google News had the only liquid layout. Australia's two primary media outlets share a very similar design (probably due to Peter Ottery's hand in both). Indonesia's Kompas gets a dishonourable mention for using frames to run fixed ads at the top and bottom of the window!

Anyway, check them out, make sure you see the Scandinavian sites, and let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Clicking on an image takes you to the site.

US/Canada

CNN (US)
Size: 990 x 2203
Links: 257
Images: 9

New York Times (US)
Size: 974 x 3082
Links: 395
Images: 9

Washington Post (US)
Size: 975 x 3162
Links: 322
Images: 8

USA TODAY (US)
Size: 788 x 2271
Links: 122
Images: 18

Los Angles Times (US)
Size: 988 x 2230
Links: 240
Images: 16

CBC (Canada)
Size: 938 x 1891
Links: 283
Images: 13

Sport

ESPN (US)
Size: 993 x 2587
Links: 549
Images: 7

Sports Illustrated (US)
Size: 772 x 1773
Links: 314
Images: 13

New Media

Google News
Size: (liquid, min. 627) x 6292
Links: 351
Images: 26

Yahoo News
Size: 756 x 3682
Links: 746 (NB. many hidden)
Images: 7

Newsvine
Size: 932 x 2266
Links: 279
Images: 1 + 27 avatars

Digg
Size: 945 x 2454
Links: 291
Images: 0

International

International Herald Tribune
Size: 955 x 1791
Links: 154
Images: 8

Reuters
Size: 992 x 2243
Links: 207
Images: 9

UK

BBC News
Size: 760 x 1421
Links: 168
Images: 13

The Sun
Size: 1004 x 1582
Links: 323
Images: 14

The Times (UK)
Size: 916 x 2330
Links: 166
Images: 11

Guardian Unlimited
Size: 704 x 3828
Links: 255
Images: 5

Australia

Sydney Morning Herald
Size: 992 x 3115
Links: 473
Images: 21

News.com.au
Size: 998 x 2843
Links: 386
Images: 20

Norway/Sweden

Aftenposten
Size: 956 x 7395
Links: 528
Images: 41

Dagbladet
Size: 974 x 6835
Links: 507
Images: 50

VG Nett
Size: 990 x 9303
Links: 607
Images: 54

Expressen
Size: 989 x 9747
Links: 393
Images: 48

China

China Daily
Size: 989 x 5039
Links: 393
Images: 34

Beijing Today
Size: 1005 x 4949
Links: 697
Images: 7

Various

Le Monde (France)
Size: 1002 x 2977
Links: 263
Images: 10

Kompas (Indonesia)
Size: 1001 x 2015
Links: 158
Images: 11

Al Jazeera (Middle East)
Size: 868 x 1608
Links: 100
Images: 12

News design is a tricky art, primarily because it runs head first into one of the oldest limitations of the web: packing maximum content into limited real estate. Designers also have to deal with advertising committments, internal politics, a constantly evolving site and a fast paced publishing environment. Aesthetics is often eshewed for functionalism, and the mighty blue link dominates just about every front page.

However after a quick tour across some of the world's leading news sites, what do you make of the current state of online news design? Post your thoughts in the comments below!

In many ways churches are the traditional home of ‘social networking’.

Of course, they have a spiritual role far greater than making friends and meeting people, but if you ask someone why they keep coming back to a particular church, their answer will often be “The people!”.

The relationships formed through churches and church gatherings are generally powerful and long lasting. 

The online phenomena of social networking has really taken off over the last couple of years, with a tremendous amount of hype, cash, and me-tooism flying around in equal proportions. Many people now consider the market over-saturated, while others believe the phenomena is here to stay and still has a considerable way to go, which is a view the author shares.

Where is the church in all of this? Stuck somewhere in 1998.

There are a handful of sites standing out from the crowd, doing their best to keep up with, and in some cases stay ahead of web trends. These are, however, usually the exception to the rule.

The social networking phenomenon is something the church, particularly in the official sense, should not stand by and watch pass by.

Why?

Churchgoers generally share at least two things in common - geographic proximity and their faith. Based on those two things they connect in all sorts of ways, across church related gatherings, events, organisations, schools, work places, colleges/seminaries, not to mention baptisms, weddings, funerals and more.

They grow up together, form families, have kids, move away, move back, and generally enjoy quite a high number of loose friendships formed over a long period of time across many different social groups.

It’s time to take this online.

Enter Social Networking

Social networking has proven hugely popular because of the way it reflects and complements the nature of these sorts of relationships.

When it comes to members of the church, there is an enormous amount of potential for improving people’s lives by complementing their traditional relationships with the benefits of online social networks.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way you could stay in touch online, keep abreast of what’s happening in their lives, send them a quick message, share digital media (such as photos), see who their friends are, and do it all in one place?

That’s what social networking is about.

This thinking should be new to just about nobody who has been paying minimal attention to web trends over the last couple of years. I hate to think about how much proverbial ink has been spilt over MySpace alone, for instance.

However, the time is almost ripe for niche social networking sites to make a major impact in the lives of churchgoers. Goodness knows just about every other niche has been covered.

Churches are not exactly known for their lightening fast innovation nor their desire to be on the bleeding edge of technology, but the length of time between mainstream adoption and deployment by churches is getting shorter, especially when it fits a clear need - take the reasonably widespread adoption of podcasting for example.

We are now at a point where there is enormous potential for well designed, geocentric services to bridge the gap not only between people’s online ‘social’ activities (blogging, photo sharing, messaging), but between individuals, churches, groups and organisations that all connect in one way or another offline. It’s the facebook (mashable profile) phenomena for churches.

So… MySpace for churches?

No! Please no. We need to think harder. That’s not to say we need to reinvent the wheel - Facebook has done brilliantly exploiting this idea for niche communities and bringing them together, but I’m pretty sure the teen market has their bases covered.

While me-too social network sites are becoming legion, there are innovative things happening - take SixApart’s Vox for instance (see the TechCrunch write-up for more), and with some much activity going on there is bound to be more innovation occurring due to competition alone.

What is needed to really kick start widespread adoption is robust, flexible, cheap or open source software.

The blogging phenomena has Wordpress, Textism, ExpressionEngine, etc. Forum software has phpBB, vB, iPB, punBB, etc. Both have mature, powerful, free and low cost software to do the job. The social networking sphere has a number of scripts around, but so far most seem mediocre at best.

Thankfully the interest in not just social networking, but web apps in general should mean we will see considerable development effort in this area over the coming months.

Official buy-in and an end to community-phobia

Most of the interesting, innovative church projects have been driven by passionate individuals operating outside of official church structures. Due to ignorance, lack of funds, politics and sadly, lack of interest, the church has often been slow to embrace these initiatives.

Official buy-in, while not essential, does however offer several benefits. Effective and direct communication channels, funding, resources, trust and official endorsement are all attractive things to have.

However in this age of low cost start-ups, and the inherent self perpetuation of a successful social networking site, it is by no means essential, and a great deal of politics and bureaucracy can be avoided by going it alone.

This is just as well, because online communities are often a scary thing for old school church leadership.

Indeed, in some cases, simple online forums are something to be concerned about, even though the overall web presence is well established. This community-phobia will have to change if the next generation of online communities are going to be encouraged and allowed to thrive, and not counter-productively thwarted from within.

This will require considerable vision and leadership from those in a position to advocate for change.

What are we waiting for?

Despite the hype, the technology has yet to mature in the same way it has for blogs, forums and wikis, but the next 12 months should see accelerated development and competition in this area.

We need to look beyond the spectacle of MySpace and strive for simplicity and friendliness above all to keep the barrier of entry low and the software as accessible as possible.

We need to work against the phobia of online communities that exists in traditional leadership through both education and familiarisation through participation. Getting people involved is the best way for them to ‘get it’, and the sooner they get on board the wider the social networking net can be cast, with institutions, organisations, and of course more members joining in.

There is an enormous opportunity for good by bringing people together by creating, continuing, complimenting and improving relationships between church members online.

Social Networking is here to stay, and the church should embrace it.

Image from istockphoto.com

For instance, how long should a home page be? Exactly how much content should be squeezed onto a home page?

How about five gigantic ad spaces, 567 links, 71 images and… the entire day’s tv guide?

That’s how those crazy Norwegians at the news site Aftenposten.no do it, with their home page weighing in at a whopping 957 x 7833px. That’s right, almost eight thousand pixels in length, or more than 10 screen-lengths for a user browsing at 1024 x 768. By way of comparison, CNN.com weighs in at a paltry 2265px, and the New York Times at 3235px.

With the move to ~1000px wide designs well and truly underway, there’s only one way for designers to go, and that’s down.

But how do you keep it interesting? Pile on the pictures, that’s how!

Photos ahoy!

Aftenposten.no is all about pictures, and lots of them. On the home page there’s over 50 story photos alone, including their video highlights (especially if you spoke Norwegian!). They’re not all tiny thumbnails either. CNN’s US edition, by way of contrast has one lead photo, and a mere 7 tiny thumbnails.

When other sites leave you lost in a sea of tiny blue links, Aftenposten.no’s home page keeps you engaged almost all the way down, changing up their story hierarchy several times down the page. Just when you would expect things to trail off, they hit you with a two column wide picture and a headline to match. Then they do it two more times. Who says they can’t?

Beyond the home page

So their home page is different. Its long and content heavy. But what about their article pages?

For one, as of writing, the lead Aftenposten article has a 625 x 419px photo front and centre. Its not something you’re likely to miss.

In many ways feature photography has been a casualty of online news. Sure, there is potential to run slideshows and photography features, but there is nothing that really compares to the photos you see in a print publication, with their detail, physical size and visual prominence.

Aftenposten.no makes up for it in both the quantity and size of photography they run. It does give the site more of a tabloid feel, but so what? Is tabloid vs broadsheet even relevant in the online world?

Every page is a home page

Quite literally in Aftenposten.no’s case. At the end of every article you get a mini home page with the feature content, photos and all.

I think it’s brilliant.

It encapsulates one of the important lessons of designing content rich web sites - every page is a home page.

Think about it. Users can enter the site via search engines, RSS feeds, links from blogs, emails from friends, bookmarks, browser auto-complete and more.

If the total number of users entering the site via article pages is greater (or close to) those entering via the home page, which is the greater design concern? The article pages. They will get a heck of a lot more page views, in any case. Of course they are both important, but how often is the humble content page given the same sort of scrutiny as the traditionally all important home page?

It amazes me how often big news sites leave their users with nothing more than a mere handful of links to other stories--if that--when they could offer so much more. Its a silly rule that says you can only put a few small links right where users have finished reading, and thankfully Aftenposten.no does away with it.

You call that an ad?

Advertising should be a standard size, right? For most sites yes, but when you sell a lot of advertising to a particular market, you can make your own rules, and that’s exactly what Aftenposten.no appears to have done.

Advertising on Aftenposten.no is, in keeping with many other aspects of the site, big. In fact it is huge. At the end of an article (and the mini home page) they run 948 x 400px billboards. Why not? I bet they make a fair chunk of change from them too.

Conclusion

There’s a lot more that could be said about a big site like Aftenposten.no, such as their video strategy and sister sites, but the bottom line is this: A lot of designers talk about breaking the rules, but how often is it done in a traditionally conservative area such as online news design? It might not be the prettiest site ever, and Aftenposten.no’s design certainly isn’t for all news sites, but it pushes the boundaries in ways many other news sites could only dream of.

I wasn’t impressed.

Accessibility is, in my opinion, generally a vague idea driven more by good intentions than quantifiable outcomes in the web design community, which is a shame given it is based on such an important need - the need of those with disabilities or impairments to use technology that we take for granted every day.

That technology is of course the web for our purposes, and the usual accessibility concerns are to do with visually impaired users accessing the web sites we build. (I realise there are a number of groups with different accessibility concerns, but for the sake of this article I’ll stick to the visually impaired.)

Dealing with an impairment or disability is a strange thing. Imagine if you have trouble getting to, or finding your way around a supermarket to buy basic groceries. Or paying your bills. Or staying in touch with friends. Or finding others in a similar situation to you. The accessible web can and does play a huge role in everyone’s life to make these things easier, especially for those that really struggle with them.

Its unfortunate then to see that potential squandered through ignorance, incompetence, or both. I’m not talking about how accessible your design portfolio or blog is with its skip links and beautiful mark-up - I’m talking about your local bank’s web site, or online grocery shop, which tend to be uniformly dreadful.

But I digress. What really boils my blood is seeing someone making a sales pitch where they wilfully mislead the well meaning but otherwise-ignorant about web accessibility.

The snake oil salesmen I watched had perfected his pitch. It went something like this:

• I’ve ran your web site through a number of mark-up validation tools, and found 247 errors, which means your web site isn’t as accessible as it could be.
• [Big government organisation] got sued because their web site wasn’t accessible, and I’m sure you could be a big target if someone went after you.
• When search engines look at your site, and they hit one of these errors, they just stop and don’t go any further. This hurts your search engine placement.
• By fixing these validation errors your site will become accessible.

There was a technical argument (certain tools which adhere to authoritative guidelines found x errors), a financial argument (you could get sued), a business argument (search engine placement will suffer) and a moral argument (it helps people in need).

Pretty good pitch eh? Well it would be, if it wasn’t total baloney. Or a flat out lie - imagine if Google did stop indexing your page because you had a missing alt tag!

Surely this site that was tested must have been a huge mess of tables, spacer gifs, and other nonsense right? Wrong - it was well marked up transitional xhtml using CSS for layout and styling, with content first in the source.

What was the major failing of the site then? Who knows! Missing alt tags probably.

Ok so his pitch was bollocks. Sure, he’s not the first person to try and make a sale by fudging the truth (or flat out lying). But what is the real crime here?

The real crime is that his pitch almost worked. If I (or anyone else with half a clue) wasn’t there to shoot it down later, the organisation being pitched to may have invested a lot of time and money into “fixing” accessibility, and that would be that. Accessibility would be a non-issue for the life of the site. Alt tags would have been added to images, w3c validators would give the page the thumbs up, and everyone would have been happy.

Well, everyone except people who, say, used screen readers, because not once were they even mentioned. I asked very obvious, leading questions to see if the salesman would twig to the fact that there was more to accessibility than a machine validating mark-up, or if validation was just a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The result? He looked at me in a completely perplexed, confused way, as though I’d asked him to tell me the circumference of the moon right then and there, or something equally bizarre!

The big con is not just that valid code isn’t necessarily accessible code, which should be news to just about no one with at least a passing interest in these things. Its that average organisations only have so much capital to spend on things like accessibility, and if they use it on a certain project that does nothing in real terms for visually impaired users (or others), its gone, and those users lose the one opportunity they had for a more useful, more enjoyable, less frustrating web site. I think that is pretty unfortunate.

There is a broader point here too - to what extent is your average web professional, you know, you and me, guilty of the same thing? If we talk the talk, we have to be able to walk the walk, otherwise people with important needs miss out. Food for thought.

Thankfully the salesmen I watched certainly wasn’t your average web professional, and his pitch didn’t work, but the accessibility snake oil salesmen are out there alright!

Your friend says you should check out a web site called Ma.gnolia because its like bookmarking (which you only use begrudgingly from time to time), but, like, so much better. Of course he doesn’t mention the bizarro mid-word full stop in the name and URL, but you find the web site nevertheless.

You’re greeted with the Ma.gnolia front page. You are mystified. Baffled even. You scroll down. Huh?!

I think we have a new victim of mini-home page syndrome.

Social bookmarking may be old hat to the hardened web nerd, but outside the sphere of geekdom there must be an enormous amount of web users for whom these services would enhance their browsing experience. That’s the point of them, after all. Whether they will actual be able to use them or not is another thing entirely.

Del.icio.us got the web geeks onboard (case in point - “firewall leak tester” is currently the 10th most popular link). It didn’t matter that the barrier of entry was high (which it was), once enough people were talking about how useful it was, enough users (who were generally very technically literate) signed up and the project took off.

But del.icio.us already exists. If you want to compete, you need to be better and/or different. A great way Ma.gnolia could have been both is simply by being friendlier.

The Ma.gnolia front page however tells you absolutly nothing about what the service actually does. Ironically, just like Flock, there’s a fantastic page with the details a new users need, but those detail aren’t on the front page.

Instead, the front page consists of a clever sentence, an unlabelled screen shot widget thingy, a buried search box, and a highlighted, unexplained ‘Featured Linker’ and ‘Hot Group’. Sure, the “learn more” link is there, but personally I think a “learn more” link is only useful when the user feels confident they are actually going to learn something more. Confidence matters, after all. After their experience with the Ma.gnolia home page, one wonders how likely this would be.

The really perplexing thing is the amount of talent behind the design of the site. Maybe this is how the envisaged it, maybe its not. Lets say the rest of the site is fantastic though and the service is mind-bendingly good. If a new user hits the front page though, how will they ever know?

Update: The Ma.gnolia guys have started a discussion about their front page, in part due to this article. Nice one guys, and if any readers want to go over and add their 2c, by all means feel free!

Generally, web stats tend to focus on the big picture and overall trends - most popular pages, main entry points, number of visits, that kind of thing. The context here is overall site performance.

But what about individual pages? How are people interacting with your design? What links are people clicking? How is your carefully designed navigation actually being used, if at all?

In this context, stats overlays can be really useful. Overlays show what percentage of users clicked a link on a specific page in the context of the page itself. The more complex your site, the more important it is to see how that precious screen real estate is being used.

Want a real world example? On a larger site I worked on, we had a left hand column of well organised navigation links. Every now and again this section would be the subject of heated debate. Would it be confusing to add more links here? Can we take some out?

After checking out the stats overlays, it turned out hardly anyone used them at all, despite them being such a conventional thing to have in a design. So they went. That’s what you need to know - good stats cut through all those assumptions and get to the meat of the issue - is anyone actually using them?

Stats overlays used to be the domain of high end web stats applications. However now there are a few products that offer them for free. I’m going to give a quick overview of two of them - Crazy Egg and MapSurface.

These certainly aren’t the only tools to offer these features. Google Analytics (free, but you need to request an invitation) for instance offers this feature, however it hasn’t worked out of the box for me on my dynamic sites. ClickTracks also offers a free version of their stats software called ClickTracks Appetizer (though you’d never tell from their site).

But back to Crazy Egg and MapSurface.

Crazy Egg ads have been appearing everywhere in design circles. Their product, however, is still “Coming soon”, and has been for months. I registered my interest ages ago but have never heard anything. Devlounge wrote up a preview earlier this month, and unfortunately it sounds quite limited. It doesn’t appear to collect stats on a continuous basis - you have to create ‘sessions’ which last for 14 days or 100,000 clicks. Presumably their business model will involve a ‘pro’ version that allows continuous tracking and more advanced features.

Thing is, you can already get continuous, javascript based stats tracking with an overlay feature already. Glenn Jones has been plugging away at his MapSurface app for a while now, and its well worth trying out. Andy Budd wrote up a review back in February.

MapSurface doesn’t have the fancy heatmap overlay, but it does everything else. It has the normal overlay of course, plus visit, referrer, searches and outgoing link tracking, which makes it one handy widget. Plus with a simple key press you can activate it on any page of your site at any time.

Why wait for Crazy Egg when you can sign up for MapSurface now? If you don’t like it, just take out the line of javascript, and you’re done.

If hosted services aren’t your thing, Glenn has posted a downloadable version of his original AJAX link tracker too (there’s also a php/mysql version).

These tools do have their limits. The biggest objection is that these kinds of stats don’t tell you why a user clicked a certain link. What were they looking for? Did they find it? Its possible to have a scenario where you have a lot of users clicking on a link only to be disappointed with page they wind up at. High click thru rates aren’t the same as successful click thrus.

Also, with MapSurface at least, you have to activate it on every page. To browse your site with stats visible at all times, I highly recommend checking out ClickTracks Appetizer or one of their paid products, especially if you run a content-rich site.

To conclude, being able to read a report of what’s popular is one thing, being able to see how people are interacting with your site on a page-by-page basis is quite another. Statistics overlay are a novel way to see this information, and you can either wait for Crazy Egg, or check it out right now with MapSurface.

If you have a stats app (hosted or not) you are particularly fond of, feel free to post about it in the comments!

Jacob Nielsen, the outspoken, usability “guru” was quite the controversial figure in the late 90’s, and to some extent in the early 00’s. Espousing his usability truths as absolute gospel, Nielsen was lambasted and admired in roughly equal parts by a wide spectrum of web professionals. The most controversial aspect of Jacob’s writing was, to my mind, the extent he wished to inform the practise of design from a position well outside the design profession itself, and lets just say the results weren’t pretty.

To refresh your memory you may be familiar with his 1999 book “Designing Web Usability”, or his 2001 effort “Homepage Usability”. You may also recall his (in)famous Alterbox piece “Flash: 99% Bad” published in 2000.

Bad memories coming back?

Sorry.

Thankfully, its now 2006 and the web, designers, and the usability movement have generally moved on.

I believe designers and other web professionals still need a source of usability research and opinion to inform their decisions, however. While we as designers do our best to monitor trends, learn from experience and generally stay informed, there is still a place for usability research that single designers or design teams couldn’t carry out on their own.

Enter Jared Spool and his UIE team. (Its a shame the first thing that hits you is the decidedly bland design of their homepage - guys, hire a designer! - but don’t let that put you off.) I feel that Jared and his UIE team have done some of the best work regarding web usability to date. The UIE Brain Sparks blog, for instance, is a source of lots of interesting ideas and tidbits that will help you design better web sites.

You can also forget about all those bad vibes you might have got from Jacob, the UIE guys and gals seem a world away in that regard.

The biggest contribution of the UIE team, to my mind, is their work in coming up with a conceptual framework for how users navigate content rich sites and making it very easy to understand. It’s called “Designing for scent” and their report of the same name (US$30.99) explains the concept in full. (I have no relationship with the UIE team, but some research is worth paying for!).

When you’ve worked on sites with thousands of pages, several major entrance points, and many different sub-sections, having a guiding philosophy regarding usability is absolutely invaluable.

I personally learnt a lot from the report regarding ‘scent’, and it continues to inform my work today. Some of the early examples in the report are quite dated, but fortunately the lessons learned are still extremely relevant, and should form the basis of sound web design principles for some time to come. Check out the blurb towards the end of this page for what to expect from the report.

So what separates Jared and his UIE team from the usability “gurus” of yore?

Well, for one thing, they come across as friendly, helpful, insightful, down-to-earth people, not experts preaching from the pulpit.

They set out to answer questions designers have about what works best. They don’t assert their opinion as gospel or insist on a my-way-or-the-highway approach to usability.

Instead, they provide a research driven, easy to understand conceptual framework for designing big web sites, including some fundamental tools that any designer worth their salt should have in their toolbox.

Sounds like something of interest to you? If so then you might like to keep an eye on their blog (rss) or check out their publications.

I’ve certainly found them helpful, and hopefully you do too!