Tradition kills usability
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Dan Willis is a Web consultant in Northern Virginia. He worked for Tribune companies from 1988 to 1998 and washingtonpost.com from 1998 through 2002. The printed newspaper is a valiant attempt to tell the story of everything important that has happened by press time. As the newspaper industry redirects its content to the Web, the very organizational structures that made the paper model effective are killing the usability of the Web model and limiting the potential of online journalism. When I first started working for washingtonpost.com several years ago, a senior manager tried to make a point by explaining the proper way to read the front page of the Wall Street Journal (the dead tree version). I learned that The Journal had raised the industry’s obscure content organization to unprecedented heights. While other newspapers spent the better part of the 20th century convincing America that getting a job is related to going to a yard sale (the Classifieds section) and that cartoons have something in common with gardening (the Style section), The Journal was teaching their readers that exclusive WSJ stories are in the first column and quirky news is always in the fourth column of the front page. The senior manager’s lesson for me was that online users would learn how to read our site just as he had learned how to read The Wall Street Journal. But unlike the print media where the same content and context are broadcast to all, the Web is primarily about a single user and the information that they choose to experience. "The user holds the mouse," writes Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, "and there is nothing you can do about it." Tied too tightly to the conventions of print, most large scale U.S. online newspaper operations are stranded between the past and the future. These organizations put a great deal of energy and creativity into developing wonderful content that expands the boundaries of traditional journalism, then they trap that trailblazing content in conventions that were created to solve print newspaper challenges. Chicagotribune.com’s entertainment section, Metromix, contains robust content that takes great advantage of real-time database functionality. But a user on the Tribune’s home page will struggle finding Metromix’s dating area. Their only chance for success is to choose Entertainment from the global navigation tabs (the tabs are News, Sports, Entertainment, Business, Homes, Jobs, Cars, and Place Ads). They’ll only find frustration if they look to the left rail for help. It contains:
 Chicagotribune’s left rail is just similar enough to the global navigation tabs to make user interpretation difficult. Users are forced to reconcile the links in the rail and the global navigation tabs, but in his book "Don’t Make Me Think!" usability expert Steve Krug writes: "The point is, when we’re using the Web every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand. The distractions may be slight but they add up, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to throw us." SFGate, the home for the San Francisco Chronicle, has a nifty little Web tool in its winery search, but the user has to consider the difference between Wine (the link in Entertainment) and Wine Country (the link in Regional). Actually, there is no difference; they both go to the same place. The user could follow a tiny link under the Chronicle banner, but it’s one of a list of nine links that go to a potpourri of levels in the navigational structure. The user will also have the chance to be misled by other potential homes for a winery search including Living, Resources, Chronicle Services, and Personal Shopper. While the Chicago Tribune’s challenge is largely about squeezing non-traditional content into traditional conceptual boxes, Chronicle users are forced to navigate through the cognitive confusion that comes from mixing newspaper labels (News and Features, Living, Sports) and new labels (Resources, Personal Shopper). The structure described by washingtonpost.com’s navigation is similarly conflicted. News, Entertainment, and Jobs global navigation tabs are mixed in with new Web categories OnPolitics, Live Online, Camera Works, and Marketplace. If I sent you an e-mail describing a washingtonpost.com feature I had seen called "The Real and the Ideal," and I told you that four photographers with four visions had created one cumulative portrait of Washington, D.C., you may have gotten lost following links into the site’s Visitors Guide or their Style section. Or you may have reasoned that if D.C. schools and government content were in the Metro section, then this feature should be too. Or you may have rolled the dice and tried clicking on Camera Works figuring that the section must have something to do with photographers. In fact, the feature is in the Metro section of Camera Works. Said another way, the non-traditional feature is in a traditionally labeled area of a non-traditional section. When print conventions get in the way online, the users most likely to look for new kinds of content become the least likely to find it. Users seeking non-traditional content are less likely to find it if it’s hidden inside traditional newspaper categories. At the same time, users who embrace a dogmatic connection to print conventions are less likely to be seeking content that expands past those conventions. Camera Works produces some of the most forward-thinking visual journalism on the Web, but its value is obscured and functionality limited by washingtonpost.com’s overall structural problems. When print conventions get in the way online, the best we can hope for is that users find their way by learning how sites are structured. But research suggests that users don’t develop mental models of individual Web sites: They don’t learn and we can’t teach them. After watching 50 people use a wide variety of Web sites, User Interface Engineering reported: "In software applications, users form mental models of the product – how it works and where the functionality is located … But none of our users did this. When they got lost, they went forward from where they were, navigating ‘in the moment’ … We didn’t see any evidence that users ever attempted to understand the layout of the site. Users apparently don’t think about site structure at all." Economist Herbert Simon coined this kind of behavior "satisficing." People don’t take the time to select the best option; rather they choose the first reasonable option. In the San Francisco Chronicle example, Living, Resources, Chronicle Services, or Personal Shopper are just as reasonable as Entertainment or Regional as a potential home for a winery search. Just because users don’t learn the structure of Web sites doesn’t mean that skillful labeling of navigation isn’t important. Steve Krug outlines three functions of navigation that should be especially important to online newspapers:
The New York Times has made tough choices in the structuring of its newspaper Web site. They use just a few well delineated major categories: News, Opinion, Features, Services, Member Center, and Newspaper. Although the overlap of Services and Member Center has a bit too much potential for confusion, the simplicity of the top categories allows the subcategories to "reveal content" for the Newspaper category. With this sound organizational foundation, The Times has a better chance to come up with real solutions for its remaining structural challenges. (Tradition still gets in the way at lower levels of the hierarchy. For example, the reasons to put Health in News, but Arts in Features seem arbitrary.) Crutchfield.com is a site nearly as robust as a large newspaper site, but one that clearly puts the satisfaction of user goals above the servicing of traditional semantics. The global navigation defines the site nicely with just three main categories: Shop for Home Products, Shop for Car Products, More Ways to Shop. The site uses directly worded subcategories that have little room for misinterpretation: Portable Audio & Video, Installation, Shop by Brand. This simplicity allows the site to get away with some fairly sophisticated mixing of content. For example, the Shop for Car Products category combines shopping categories and user tools (an interactive car audio installation guide, for example). 
The site puts so much visual strength behind the main categories that links like Site Map, e-mail Deals, and Your Account all exist comfortably outside the logic (both organizational and visual) of the main hierarchy. RollingStone.com also uses clearly delineated categories that seem to be aligned with user goals:
Other than the nebulous Services, each category is unique and simple. Together, the categories describe the site well and they help steer user expectations. In the context of the other categories, even a usually loose term like Community becomes well defined. The beauty of the site is its intertwining of traditional and non-traditional content (which is only possible because of RollingStone.com’s solid organizational foundation). Content from this week’s print issue mingles with user supplied content, Web functionality (online radio and shopping, for example), archival content, and free music downloads. Rather than clustering each piece of content based on subject (a bottom-up approach), the site is organized around specific user experiences (a top-down approach). A subtle perk of this approach is that as the site continues to evolve, the structure will be much more flexible than if its existence was based on fitting every piece of content into the right box. Recommendations for online newspapers1. Be exclusive rather than inclusive Amorphous categories like Style were created for reasons that don’t make sense online. If you find yourself trying to find a home for miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else, take another look at your other categories. You may find that you’re trying to describe the entire world, but can only provide quality content in selected areas. Embrace the kinds of content you can do well and release weaker types of content. If you have no choice but to try to describe the whole world, make the kinds of hard decisions The New York Times has made and keep it simple. Articles on The Times are either News, Opinion, or Features. There is no Living, Lifestyle, Recreation, or Entertainment categories at the top level. The Times’ labels might not be appropriate for your site, but the sacrifices required to match their level of simplicity is. 2. Take advantage of #1 
3. Organize from the top down "The two most important rules about site structure," suggests Jakob Nielsen, "Are to have one and to make it reflect the users’ view of the site and its information or services." Content, whether it’s traditional print content or non-traditional Web content, should flow together in a seamless experience. RollingStone.com uses labels from its print background when appropriate and abandons them as soon as they aren’t. The foundation of their site structure is based on user goals rather than semantics. It’s simple and well-delineated. This allows them to worry less about where content came from and more about how it relates to other content. Related links
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