Wired.com

Anne Bowser Online News Review

I chose to review the website Wired News, [] because I thought it would be interesting to review a non-traditional news site with a clearly defined audience. I evaluated the website’s Audience Appeal, Layout, and Consistency.

The audience of [|http://www.wired.com] is similar to the audience of Wired Magazine. This audience will expect the latest technology news, reviews, and opinion pieces in multiple mediums. This audience will also expect some content from Wired Magazine and some content exclusive to the website.

The website does an excellent job providing exclusive online articles (recognizable by the date they were posted) and opinion pieces. These pieces are provided in multiple mediums with a heavy focus on blogs and videos. A link to the Magazine can be found in the Navigation Bar, but that is the only way to access magazine content from the homepage (in contrast, the homepage offers four places to subscribe). I suggest raising the number of entry points to the magazine content to three.

Sites that successfully direct user attention will use techniques like color, ordering and animation to make elements stand out and avoid a cluttered interface.

Although the Wired logo at the top of the homepage is relatively small, the logo is easily recognizable and the two animated advertisements flanking the logo draw the user’s gaze to the top of the screen. After viewing the logo, the user’s attention returns to the features before canvassing the rest of the website. This sequence successfully directs the user’s attention. The logo, features and adds form columns of three different widths on the homepage. The alignment could be improved by giving all three columns equal widths. I also recommend moving the navigation bar from below the features to below the Wired logo. This would fit more closely with a user’s mental model of how a news site is structured (although it could be argued that if a user typically views the features first the site exhibits successful User Interface Design).

Cognitive Psychology can help designers understand their users. Designers should exploit a user’s prior knowledge, conform to user expectations, and allow users to recognize an element instead of forcing them to recall it from their memory. These can all be achieved with the help of design consistency.

In achieving consistency the Wired website has mixed success. The options on the navigation bar remain the same, although the location of the navigation bar changes from the homepage to secondary pages (please see my earlier suggestion of moving the navigation bar to below the Wired logo on the homepage). The functionality of the options on the navigation bar is also inconsistent. Hovering over three options displays additional menus, hovering over one option displays an advertisement, and hovering over the remaining three options fails to display anything. If complete standardization is illogical, a user should be able to see some content (for example, a sample video under the “video” tab) for every option on the navigation bar. Fonts, including capitalization, and colors help with consistency. For almost every page that I accessed, the content that I chose to view was framed in the left two-thirds of my browser window with advertisements and links on the right third. This consistency was appreciated.

Sources “Demystifying Usability: What is Design?” [] “Getting to Know Users and their Tasks.” [] “Understanding Users.” [|http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~frk/frank/da/hci/Understanding%20users.pdf]