cnn_review

12th Feb 2010 I am reviewing the CNN online news website ([]). I will be reviewing this website with respect to one of our readings dealing with ‘[|First principles of Interaction Design]’.

The first impression of this site is that of a good organized website. The banner and the main navigation bar are is prominent. The main menu put forth’s all the available and explorable topics. The main page consists of all the latest news and highlights and gives the user a scope of things at the first glance. The idea of having an overview of every menu topic on the first page is very insightful. One thing that goes against the grain of the section name itself, ‘HOT TOPICS’ is it’s placement at the bottom of the page, where users mostly won’t find it unless looking for it.

For the large part the website is consistent with its design, the category name always appears along with the website name on the banner so the users never loses track of which section they are viewing. The last two tabs ‘Money and Sports’ go to different CNN websites, and they are identified with an arrow next to them which is not a good representation of the fact. Users won’t know what it means unless they click on it. Once redirected to those sites, the way back to the main website is not very obvious. The easiest way is to use the browser ‘Back’ button.

CNN has very clear explorable options for the user. While viewing any story the user can see category it belongs to. There is always a way to go back to the homepage or the category main page. One thing that can be improved upon is to show the list of other top stories that were available of the homepage/category main page, on each story page. This way the user doesn’t always need to go back to either of the main pages to read the other top stories. Due to the relatively large font size used for the stories, they are very readable even for users with weak eye sight.

According to the ‘first principle of interaction design’ letting the users know about the system status all the time is very important. While searching for something in this website, the system first throws a blank screen with no processing information before it displays the search results. This probably doesn’t matter most of the time since the time taken to search is very low, but it might when due to some network reasons the processing takes longer than usual. On the other hand the search results are very intuitive, telling the user the number of results, video as well as text. It also gives context of each item.

All and all it’s a good website and I am impressed with all its functionalities and hope my suggestions are helpful.

Swetha Reddy University of Maryland Sreddy(at)umd(dot)edu