Future Media

Guardian network home re-design misses the point

Last week's Design Week (23 May 2007) Vox Pop [paid sub may be required] asked: Mark Porter has defended The Guardian's decision to put functionality over aesthetic considerations when the paper relaunched its homepage last week. Did it deserve a more sympathetic response to its redesign? Some moderately enlightening responses were published from Denise Wilton (moo.com), Ryan Shelton (BD4D), Rick Lippiett (Glass) and Michael Dorrian (Start Creative).

I should first note that Guardian creative director Mark Porter deserves credit for being one of the few established British editorial designers to pro-actively embrace online interaction design. He can also talk about his work more cogently than some of his peers in the online news industry.

As Porter has found, unlike other areas of design, everyone is a critic when considering the Web. Yet the quality of our discussion of this areas of interaction design is less developed -- even in the design media. For instance, it is crude to to juxtapose functionality and aesthetics. This imposes on the Web a print-derived model of evaluating design. Although graphic design has influenced Web design -- as I discussed in my contribution to Rick Poynor's 'Communicate' book -- they can't be evaluated in the same way. In fact, good aesthetics can improve functionality, or at least usability, which Denise Wilton champions in her Vox Pop. And functionality also has an aesthetic, which profoundly influences user experience -- but there is little mainstream discussion of, for instance, the design of the forms that we interact with all over the Web.

In the case of the Guardian, the real problem is that the wrong functionality is being addressed. As we embrace new news models around syndication, Weblogging, story rating tools and customisable portal pages, newspaper home pages become increasingly unimportant. But the new design challenges are increasingly important -- and we need them to be engaged with by more of our talented, established designers.

Published in Design Week magazine (UK) letters as The Guardian homepage is OK, but an irrelevance, 30 May 2007 [paid sub may be required]

Post-submission

Jeff Jarvis, in this week's Media Guardian, makes a similar point in his column 'Home pages, such a quaint old-fashioned notion ...': "I think this aesthetic confluence [of the home page design of major newspapers] demands that we reconsider – or explode – not just the home page but our conception of the web page and even of the website", he writes.

We should see BBC innovation in a broader context

"The BBC’s desperate attempt to lead the new media revolution has been fraught with controversy, delays and huge costs. How did it all go wrong?" writes Bobbie Johnson in a recent Media Guardian cover story (Situation critical Media Guardian, May 14, 2007). [See the article with comments on his own Weblog.]

Johnson is right to flag up the BBC's delays in developing and launching the iPlayer. But rather than reflecting badly on the BBC, with its myriad stakeholders in government and beyond, we might note that compared to the rest of the UK media industry the Corporation has demonstrated the will to innovate and to lead in new media. That concepts such as the iPlayer are more quickly, if quirkily, cloned by others broadcasters demonstrates the value of setting the bar high.

Another under-appreciated characteristic of the BBC is the enthusiasm of its new media staff. At events I have programmed over the last decade they have been among the most enthusiastic about learning and debating, and presenting their own work to their peers. This kind of spirit is invaluable in any organisation, and their evangelism has benefited the new media sector more generally.

The BBC has also played another role in facilitating development beyond its own people. A project in which I was involved, the Innovation Labs, has allowed independent design and technology companies to spend time on media-related research and development. The goals are the BBC's, but there are benefits for all parties involved -- including license fee payers.

Published as a letter in Media Guardian, May 21, 2007 under the heading Enthusiasm at the BBC [free sub may be required required]. On the same page Emily Bell took up the cudgels again with a piece entitled BBC new media innovation stops at the website door (Media Guardian, May 21, 2007).