MSNBC has gone “big” with their redesign. I’m a little late to comment, but I don’t frequent msnbc.com as much as I used to when I worked at NYDailyNews.com. And yes, in their new design, everything is certainly bigger: the headlines, the photos, the galleries, the videos and last, but not least, the pages. The new design capitalizes aggressively on the infinite vertical space which is the Internet’s blessing and curse. Gone is the focus on click-throughs, the staple of the aughts web economy. This new design, which is entirely focused on the interior pages—there have been only cosmetic changes to the homepage—practically eliminates all of the little tricks news sites use to gain pageviews: no pagination and galleries, video, discussion, etc., are all embedded in the articles.
This doesn’t mean, however, that all annoyances have been eliminated. The ads that were removed from the right rail to give the page a less cluttered feel now appear as a horizontal strip in the articles, cutting off the text mid-article. There’s a lot of scrolling, unless you use their right-oriented tiny icon navigation system, which should come with a manual to remember what they do. What’s more is the designers anticipate people will scroll up to discover a hidden dashboard of headlines. This is something new—as in, I’ve never seen that before—but I am not convinced it will be very popular. I’ve heard of below the fold, but above above the fold? I would be very curious to see that heat map.
Overall, I have a to say the design is a bit radical. Not because of its “big”-ness, but because of its departure from the pageview economy.
