The Usability of News Sites

As you can see, this is a series we’ll start here on XenoAbe Design. We’ll take a look at specific types of websites and a few usability issues as they relate to those websites.

News sites are some of the most visited websites on the internet today. They are where people go to find out about what’s going on in the world around them. Therefore, news sites store incredible amounts of information. This information needs to be well organized so that visitors can quickly access the particular bit of news they may be looking for. Actually, news sites need to follow similar rules to other sites, but there are some particular aspects of UX that are extraordinarily poignant for news sites. Let’s take a look at these and figure out what we can learn from them.

Findability

Findability is, of course, important for every site, but with the large amounts of information that news sites contain this is especially helpful. Users will quickly become frustrated in trying to find their information. Typically news is organized into categories such as Local, Sports, Weather, etc. Ideally, these would have subcategories for users to have even more increased findability more efficiently.

One thing I’ve seen some news sites do is have a top navigation but then have some more navigation lower on the home page or on the side. If a page is showing subnavigation of a higher hierarchical element of which the current page falls in then that is acceptable. However, when the page is just showing some extra links that should really fit into the top level navigation then it is either being redundant or just plain bad UX.

Searchability

Articles need an extremely high level of searchability. Users may be trying to find a particular article and you’ve failed them as a news outlet if they are unable to find an article that you have on your site. Tags and keywords should be an absolute must for every article on a news site.

Engage Visually and Textually

The thing about news sites is that they are really two-fold. It is synonymous to the difference between browsing and searching. One side is for users going to try and find something specific set of information. That’s where the first two rules come into play. The other is for users that go to a news site to see what new news that site can offer them. This is where engaging the visitor visually and textually invites the user to read the news and to come back for that news later when they are looking for more.

This is not necessarily for those users trying to find something specific, but those just browsing the news site. An interesting picture or headline will grab visitors attention. The more news a visitors actually reads then the more informed they are and, ideally, a better citizen due to their knowledge about the world around them. Grabbing their attention is part of the news business, but it’s also a usability issue if news sites are attempting to get visitors to use their website to read news they  might not otherwise.

News is to inform. If site users can’t find the news or don’t find it interesting then the site is leaving them uniformed and failing its purpose.

• What are your thoughts on these issues as they pertain to news sites?
• Any other specific usability issues you would like to see news sites pay more attention to?