NewsOK.com
Problem
At first glance we weren’t entirely sure how much we could help NewsOK, the website of The Oklahoman. They had a great creative director in Scott Horton with a great staff and the site looked good. It was clear that The Oklahoman understood the potential of the web and wanted to actively exploit the opportunity to engage with a younger audience online and extend a news brand rather than a newspaper. We felt that their main challenge was that users were being overwhelmed on the homepage with too many choices. There simply wasn’t enough visual navigation to get through the options. Users were being asked to work too hard to get to the news. We felt the hierarchy had to be more obvious. The other issue was the synergy of online and print, the way in which content was referenced from print was inconsistent and hard to find. The team were also concerned about whether they should revert to The Oklahoman brand from NewsOK.
Process
The first thing we did was to help convince them that dropping NewsOK would be a mistake. Our research showed it was an established brand in its own right and was well enough associated with The Oklahoman already. We argued that the semi-detached nature of NewsOK was a good thing for a younger audience who identified newspapers as old fashioned: and it didn’t matter to older users, who knew it was the website of The Oklahoman.
We next undertook a Garcia Interactive process called visual segmentation. This involves taking a screen shot of an entire home page and assigning a color block for each function (i.e. red for news, blue for interactivity, green for multimedia etc). What this test showed starkly for NewsOK’s homepage was that the site was structurally chaotic. For instance, it was hard to browse multimedia because it was found in five different places on the home page. This device really showed where the organizational problems of the homepage lay. It helped us all see what we needed to do to make the site easier to navigate, and to get it more in line with how users approached their information search.
Outcome
Scott and his team took our recommendations and implemented a new design. The monthly US users were running at about 635,000 in September before the launch. They are now at over 700,000 and rising. We think they will go higher as users discover the new design.
Lesson
Having large volumes of content makes it harder to keep your pages simple. It’s great to have a lot of choices but the more choices and the less hierarchy you offer, the less able your users are to find anything at all. If users cannot see what they want because you give them too many choices, you are letting your content down. If the choice of content is vast the navigation must be simple and instinctive.
A good looking site that is already doing well can still benefit from a rethink.