Society of News Design

The competition was rigorous and the decisions difficult but the five World’s Best Designed are:

• CNN.com: World’s Best-Designed News Web Site
• CNN for iPad: World’s Best Designed News App
• The Globe and Mail: World’s Best-Designed News Web site
• The Guardian for iPhone: World’s Best-Design Mobile App
• NPR for iPad: World’s Best-Designed News App

Just about all of the winning news organizations designed incredible experiences across multiple platforms. Picking which organization on which platform might have been the most difficult part of the judging.

You can read more about the reasoning behind the awards here.

But the newscast and newspaper still end up looking the same for every customer — whether that news product is reaching several hundred or several million customers.

The promise of digital journalism is the possibility that every product is different, ‘designed’ specially for that user. Newscaster, the on-demand, user-driven video newscasts shown across a range of mobile and tablet devices must solve this problem to be successful. It is critical that the system derive a high degree of customization, but essential that the tool supply a highly-designed experience.

Jesse James Garrett explained how to design for a customizable user experience in the second week of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab.

“Rather than defining a singular experience, it’s about defining a rule set, parameters of a system by which customization happens. Lump of Clay vs a set of legos,” said Garrett. “Clay can create a complex, nuanced result but requires more skill. With Legos anyone can make anything right away. Lego set has rules by which pieces connect — scaffolding for users to simplify creation process. Shifts experience from delivery of a defined thing to delivering an embedded rule set.”

This concept of designing rules rather than shared, traditional visual experiences fits into Garrett’s much broader view of user experience design. He looks beyond the traditional roles of graphic artist and user experience designer to embrace higher level design thinking.

This framework allows the creation of sophisticated media design experiences — whether those experiences are singular, shared moments like those highly art directed digital stories produced by The Bold Italic or highly personalized and customized experiences like Flipboard offers to tablet users.

For a project like Newscaster to be a successful experience it will have to function successfully across Garett’s range of experience design. Creating a strategic experience framework that is similar for all users but with an incredibly flexible structure and skeleton that can adapt to the frictionless, content customization needed to fit news consumer’s needs and tastes.

Media companies primarily focus on manufacturing. This is not about the reporting, writing, editing and art direction. Rather is about how that information is distributed: broadcast news reports, radio shows, newspapers, magazines, websites and apps. Media companies rarely pushing their mediums. Instead they find templates, made by competitors or outsiders, and fill them with their branding and content. Newspaper designers mimic the work of other papers. Television graphics look interchangeable. And news apps look nearly identical.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s newspaper companies ‘discovered’ the value of designers. It took years, but newsrooms became comfortable with content designers determining the consumer experience. Most of these designers were focused on adding visual content layers. A few explored designing a better product experience — ‘redesigning’ the existing templates and styles. This kind of design greatly improved existing media products but lacked the transformative power of a simple, wooden prototype.

Because “first designs always suck,” according to Razkin, low fidelity prototypes are critical to exploring radical, new ideas. Media companies rarely, publicly explore radical or new ideas because they have trained themselves for a long, slow and expensive design process.

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp wanted to design a new tablet news experience it took more than a year, cost millions and ended up with the wrong combination of familiar: “this is scarcely better than a free a paper” and unusable: “Is this the future of news? The app crashed the first time I ran it,” [iTunes App Store reviews]. Instead innovative companies like Nintendo use simple tools to prototype complex actions. A block of wood stood in for the complex Wii Controller. Even though it had no fancy gyroscopes or mechanics, it helped the designers replicate a new gaming experience.

Media companies need to take similar chances. Sunday’s New York Times explored the challenges of digital medical records. Stressing the importance of standards and widespread adoption, doctors argued for the role of design in medical records, “What scares me is design details mandated from on high,” said Mary Kate Foley, vice president of the user experience at Athenahealth. “That’s going to prevent me from making my electronic health records more usable. It will hurt innovation.” But more than that they fear that poorly designed standards would cripple the experience, “Usability is going to be the single greatest impediment to physician acceptance,” says Dr. Edward H. Shortliffe, a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

Unfortunately the New York Times, one of the countries’s leading news organizations, has not done much better in its presentation of this story. On Sunday the article, prominently featured in the printed paper, could be found on the front page of the news site — but not easily.

Razkin, imagines his job as using ideas to transform organizations and change what people think through prototyping. His kind of prototyping creates new kinds of functionality or imagines new experiences. He uses design to inspire participation — something sorely needed by media companies.

The journalism industry is changing at highway speeds. It is obvious that technology changes have reshaped the media landscape but it is not clear what those changes will mean and what direction they are headed. Medill is exploring these changes in several ways, including how programming and human centered design can radically change news creation, consumption and distribute. Using new methods, tools and techniques Medill faculty and students are experimenting with new ways to better reach audiences. Before you miss your exit come see what looms on the horizon.

In place of a newsroom programmed, linear newscast Newscaster is an on-demand, user-driven video newscasts across a range of mobile and tablet devices (like the iPad) using an accessible, cross-device programming standard. The digital newscast would take full advantage of web-native technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript, but will be developed within the intent of being a mobile app, aiming to make news easier to consume while on the go…

…The application will allow users to add content to their own playlist and make news judgment decisions traditionally reserved for professional producers in a control room. Users can have any kind of news (weather, sports, crime, education, etc.), can play their own newscast at any time (rather than waiting for 10 p.m.) or choose from a variety of automatically generated newscasts that fit the time they have at hand (10, 15, 30 minute newscasts)…

Please read the rest of the entry and vote for Newscaster.

…The best part of the demo came when Mr. Lynch held an iPad up to a copy of a recent New York Times. For everyone who has seen Harry Potter and his magic newspaper, the implications are obvious. The above-the-fold photo of Hillary Clinton at a news conference on the front page springs to life in the form of a video image of the news conference she was speaking at. It’s technically impressive because the video appears to play correctly within the frame of the newspaper page even as the iPad moves about.

While the demo implies that tablet owners would have a newspaper to point at — definitely not a certainty — it raises exciting possibilities for all kinds of other media interactions. Like watching Jackson Pollack paint the canvas in front of you. Or re-living movie magic filmed on the street in front of you.

And as Augmented Reality merges with Wearable Computing the future for news delivered when needed and with geographical context seems bright.

Anecdotally, many journalists bemoan the fact that Google is a company steered by engineers, without media experience. To be fair, Google has hired some journalists, but in an even bigger statement, Google just launched a magazine.

Think Quarterly‘s (TQ) first issue is all about Data. There are twelve well-written articles. The magazine seems equal parts journalism and corporate communication.

The editor’s note asks readers to take time to reflect. “Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.”

TQ editor — Matt Brittin
Managing Director, UK & Ireland Operations, Google — is making an appeal to his readers, but to me I hope TQ is a Trojan Horse. Perhaps this publishing experiment will convince Google to take a breadth and ponder it’s role in media publishing.

While it seems clear that the Times and other news organizations will not be able to survive on digital advertising alone, it is unclear how much revenue will actually be generated by digital subscription policies. The pricing model ($0.99 USD for the first four week and $3.75 per week after) being offered to the Canadians is actually less than the cost of Sunday-only print home delivery.

Courtesy of the New York Times

The Times — and other news organizations like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and more — have already forced registration on readers, so casual readers who read fewer than the 20 free articles per month the Time‘s will allow may have already stopped using the site. It will be interesting to see who values the digital content enough to pay. Anecdotally, I know lots of younger (20-30 something) news consumers who describe stopping print subscriptions because the digital experience is more convenient. If they actually start paying I’ll know that argument is true. If not… the New York Times, and others, may have to start really worrying.

A report by Nat Worden of the Wall Street Journal confirmed this morning that Time Warner Cable Inc. and ESPN are preparing to offer one of their premier presentations, “Monday Night Football,” online behind a paywall to current TV subscribers. This is big news for any sports fan tired of squinting at streaming dots as they dance around their computer screen–which has been the standard online broadcast or “Gamecast” for football games.

Sure, we’ve had Slingbox–a handy  third-party gadget that sends whatever is playing on your home TV to your computer screen–for a while now. This, though, is something quite different. Time Warner and ESPN are blazing an entirely new trail for cable channels. For instance, will the content across the entire network be available, or just what’s on the docket in the viewer’s area? Will fans of teams across the country soon be able to see their favorite squad on their computer screen rather than pay copious amounts of cash for DIRECTV’s Sunday Ticket?

This is all part of a transition that began in the 1980s from broadcast to video delivery. As we move from receiving broadcast feeds to interacting with video the possibilities for journalism expand exponentially.

• Draft: An iPad sketch tool for prototyping and wireframing from 37 Signals [OS X only]
• Google Docs > Drawing: You can use these as an Omni Graffle competitor
• Coda Notes: Panic Software’s plugin lets you draw on live web pages, edit live text and send the page as an image to others [OS X only]
• Basecamp: From Chicago’s 37 Signals for project management — assign tasks, add milestones and share documents
• Campfire: A live chat for sharing files, messaging, etc…
• Versions: Helps compare files, keeps revisions and tracks changes [OS X only]
• Dropbox: Free tool for online storage — it includes version control
• Transmit User friendly FTP client, also from Panic Software [OS X only]
• Terminal The window into OS X’s unix core
• MAMP: Makes it easy to run a local web server [OS X only]
• TextMate: Flexible and powerful text editing tool [OS X only]
  • Zen Coding: A plugin for Text Mate that helps, quickly and cleanly, write HTML
• Coda: Interface development enviroment built by panic it allows for group editing, preview, code snippets and has built in reference materials
• ChartBeat: Live analytics for realtime user tracking
• InstaPaper: A tool for saving links on the go — the links can be read later on your PC, mobile device or tablet
• Readability: Bookmarklet that clears all the extras off the web pages you read
• Little Snapper: Save screenshots, annote and share them
• Patternry & Pattern Tap: A catalog of user interface design elements