Why slate magazine

Slate Magazine. The Americas. Strategy Design. Design Delivery. A tailored design and delivery approach maximize a challenging budget to capture and amplify the vibrant culture of an award-winning digital magazine.

Need more information? Think Create Make. The first and most obvious is the use of two home pages which is often confusing to users.

The initial home page contains an abbreviated list of the main feature stories and a small subtle link to a fuller table of contents. Following this link leads the user to a larger home page that cannot be seen on a single screen due to its very spacious layout. In fact, it requires screens to see the full list and some of the main stories are not visible in the first window.

The table of contents uses several "cute" headlines to link to stories example: "Varnish Remover" is the link to the analysis of campaign commercials. On the Web, cute links normally don't work since users rarely take the time to download stuff they don't know what is. In print, playful headlines work because the reader can easily glance around the magazine to see what the story is about.

On the Web, every click carries a penalty and removes the user from the context of the previous page, so link anchors must be exceedingly intuitive. In most articles, the author's byline has been made a link to a short lines bio at the end of the article. This type of author bio is left over from legacy magazines and a poor use of the power of the Web: instead, the short bio could have been left in the article as information for users with little interest in the writers and the link should have taken those users who do care about writers to a longer bio with photo of the author and links to other stories by the same author.

Interestingly, the only appropriate biography is the one provided by a New York Times columnist who is a contributor to the Microsoft-evilness debate and the bio lives on his personal website. Presumably, the reason for giving all pages the title Slate is to reinforce the notion of a unified magazine as opposed to a collection of stories, but the nature of the Web is to treat pages as the unit of navigation: there are no staples on the net.

The link anchors in the table of contents are all the same color, no matter whether the user has visited the destination article or not. Non-standard link colors are always bad as further discussed in my column on the top ten mistakes of web design , but using the same color for visited and unvisited links makes it impossible for readers to see at a glance what articles they have not seen before.

A final usability problem is so grotesque as to be almost absurd: the use of actual page numbers in the navigation bar. Each web page ends with a navigation bar with 23 numbers that take the user to other articles.

Oh sure, I really feel like reading article 13 next! Even worse, because different issues have a different number of articles, the same article number does not always refer to the same part of the magazine.

For example, letters to the editor was number 21 in the first issue and number 20 in the second issue. What a waste of the navigation bar; it should have been used to teach users the structure of the hyperspace and provide real navigation shortcuts. The Committee of Correspondence continues to show promise without actually delivering: the week on tax cuts rehashed very familiar arguments and the week on missile defenses was boring. One can only stay "promising" for so long, so I am starting to believe that Slate 's debate format is the wrong one.

I think there might be more value in HotWired 's "brain tennis" format where two debaters alternate contributions. Having only two contributors makes it easier for the reader to follow the debate and probably encourages better writing. I can't believe it; this is the second time this year I have praised HotWired. Of course, their fonts and colors suck and the threads UI is an experience in confusion. There, I feel better already. I originally had links to 4 other reviews here, but they have all vanished from the Web.

Linkrot , sigh. Jakob Nielsen , Ph. Donald A. Norman former VP of research at Apple Computer. Nielsen established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.

He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use. The latest articles about interface usability, website design, and UX research from the Nielsen Norman Group. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter to get notified about future articles.

Using Content Frames in the Design Process. Content Strategy vs. Content Tactics. Share this article:. Share this article: Twitter LinkedIn Email. About the Author Jakob Nielsen , Ph.

Layout or Content? Login Walls 3 minute video. Using Content Frames in the Design Process 3 minute video.