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Usability? LATimes.com Replates - Again
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2420 Reads
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 LATimes.com has taken on a new cargo of blogs, content and a few gadgets, but seems married to the old mess of a home page design. The focus in this redesign - and we can only assume there will be more - is on the voice of the site rather than its usability.
Web editor Joel Sappell notes the addition of a new Entertainment section.
It includes web-only features like The Focus Group - ("A pastor, a rapper, two teens and a soccer mom weigh in on this weekend's movies"), two entertainment "blogs" (one of which even allows moderated comments) and a CD sales ranking that mentions top hits like Barry (shudder) Manilow's "Greatest Songs of the Fifties" ...
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Oddly, the section points away to listings at CalendarLive rather than including search tools proper - which, along with an eye-punishing kitchen-sink design sensibility (e.g., shovel everything possible onto the homepage and bylines in Entertainment are gray-on-gray) - seems to carry on LATimes.com's long-standing visual message: "Our users are passive browsers, not active seekers of information."
This can be the only explanation for the mishmash of font styles and colors, the avoidance of a clean, simply categorized CSS rollover navigation (which the Weekly did very nicely) in favor of left-nav buttons that still - nearly a year after the last redesign - read as a nasty hash of nearly 50 barely-categorized links that you have to scroll to even begin to assess;
And for the fact that everything most useful about the site that could drive active, repeat visits is still hidden below the fold or one or more needless clicks away - meaning every single search tool for , commonly-sought information (listings, classifieds, weather, movies, etc.) with the exception of site search.
Well, at least the site map link is near the top.
To their credit, they've added some good usability tools: the buttons for print, email and change-font-size are located top-right on every story page.
The button for RSS feeds is at least visible above the fold, and they've added buttons for podcasts, email newsletters, RSS and the WAP/PDA edition under the helpful banner, "latimes.com on the Move." Though - again - these could have been links to cut down on server load.
But the company's continued disdain for the simple usability needs of L.A. residents - who would likely take more advantage of the valuable CalendarLive listings, movie listings and other database material on a daily basis if only they didn't have to dig so damn deep - may just continue to cost them more regular, active users.
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 11:11 PM
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