ThroughTheLens

I was having a conversation with someone in the industry the other day and the conversation wandered over to the question of whether young people read the newspaper nowadays.  I personally belong to the group that also do not regularly read newspapers (Straits Times, basically, since they have the monopoly), instead getting my news online. And as the conversation went on, I realised that I didn’t find Straits Time Interactive that user friendly.  After quite a bit of thought and analysis, I have come to the conclusion that Straits Times Interactive is

1. Crippled by its rigid day by day approach towards news - the way the content management system works, seems to be unable to pull up more than just the current day news
2. Bad layout, information hierarchy, and typography.

What issues to I have with Straits Times Interactive?

1. Its rotating banner is clunky to use - it will keep rotating unless I click on the “Pause” button.  Instead, it should stop rotating the moment i start to use the “Left” “Right” scroll buttons. If you intend to put text for people to read, then the banner should *not* auto-rotate.  It is very very irritating.
2. I can’t figure what the difference is between “Top Stories” (the banner stories) and “Latest Stories” (the stories on the right of the banner).  They should just merge the 2 and not confuse people.
3. Next, there is this huge junk that I have to skip through, because they are generally a waste of time because they are typically irrelevant, and takes too many steps to even get there.  The blogs for instance, uses a javascript popup command, which messes up my “open in new tab” function that I’m very fond of
   1. Razor TV
   2. Blogs
   3. ST Forum
   4. Stomp Most Popular
4. Finally, the rest of the news is right at the bottom.

Layout for Straits Times Interactive

Now, the problem with Straits Times Interactive goes a bit deeper than that.

1. Its “Rest of the news” sections do not encourage browsing.  If you looked closely at the “Rest of the news” section, the “Show More” is hidden in the frame of the box, rather than right after the last news item.  And, clicking on them (at least currently, when I’m doing it) leads to an “Error” page.
   

   Zoomed in picture of "Rest of News"

2. Clicking on any news item in this section, brings you to a full page article. Notice the navigation on the right side that is supposed to bring up other articles?  It does not give me any indication how current these articles are, and does not allow me to drill deeper if I wanted to read through more articles on Tech and Science. As mentioned in the beginning, it appears that Straits Times is not able to pull up articles that are not of current day, hence not allowing me to browse through 7 days of  “Tech & Science”.
   
3. If you decide to then click on any of the section headers such as “Singapore” or “SE Asia” or “Tech & Science” on the top navigation, you will end up with a page like this the one below.
   What happened to the news items on the right side?  It has disappeared.  And if you looked at the typography and information hierarchy design of the news items on the main content section, you’ll find that it is really quite junk.  Why is there no “More” links at the end of each article summary?  Why is the article “Facebook fun goes mobile” (the only item on the right column) without any summary text?  Again, why is there no ability for me to pull out older articles?
   

Compare all the complexity against a site that I visit almost daily - Digg.

1. Digg allows me to read through pages and pages of news with title and summary.  Those news items that catch my eye, I’ll open it up in a new tab and read it later.
2. The chronological paging structure of digg (most recent on top) allows me to catch up on news if i have been away for a few days, by scrolling through pages starting from page 1, until I hit the page that contains articles that I remember reading

An overview of the digg homepage

Now, the fact that I find Digg much more sticky and user friendly to use, in terms of getting the latest news compared to Straits Times Interactive is a rather alarming sign that our local publications are not able or not interested to serve the needs of the web generation.  There is so much that Straits Times Interactive can do to improve on its current site - but until then, it will keep losing visitors and visitor goodwill.