Personal Bytes

OSNews.com, a site that I visit daily in the quest for interesting articles about operating systems (and quarrels too!) has been recently subject to a facelift. Their previous layout had endured several years of usage but it has served us, readers, well.

I do believe, though, that the new layout suffers from a considerable lack of usability. I realized that upon trying to follow a thread of comments. Reading up to the fifth comment was the most I could do. Considering that, in the past, I would probably go through all of them (sometimes more than 100) this was quite awkward to me. I soon realized that it was not to the fact that the site was not appealing, but to the fact that it was not usable.

Let’s see why.

First, let’s take a look at this annotated snapshot of a comment from a OSNews article (click on the image for full size).

Ok, first let’s assert one important thing: OSNews lives out of its comments. The articles are seldom original and point to an external page, so the reason I visit OSNews is actually the insightful comments that pop over there. Therefore, the comment system must be your Holy Grail. You need to focus users on the comments. Having said that, let’s see what’s wrong with this image.

Now, what’s wrong? I’d start with that catchy header. I mean, it’s cool if you have precious info and you want to catch your reader’s eye to glance over it. Not being this situation, the header contains second-class information that’s usually irrelevant. The title of the comment is usually senseless, the date includes the timezone, a piece of information nobody cares about. Furthermore, it mixes up the reader, the time the comment was posted and the parent comment. These are three different informations and should be separated. But the worst thing of all is the fact that your eyes will immediately roll over it because it has a background color and you’ll immediately see that you’ve wasted precious microseconds after realizing the timezone of the website is UTC.

Second point is definitely the font text. Arial was not made for reading lengthy texts. Period. You may argue that Gmail, YouTube or Flickr use it extensively and they’re fine with it. Well, yes they are. Do you know why? Because YouTube and Flickr comments are not lengthy (at least compared to OSNews) and with Gmail you usually don’t read several emails at once. When you’re reading comments you’re rolling your eyes directly from one to another.

There’s a reason why there’s a distinction between sans-serif and serif fonts, and that reason being that serif fonts were made for reading while sans-serif fonts were supposed to be used for embellishing the titles and subtitles. While I don’t advocate using Times New Roman on the web (it’s an old font and people are sick of it) try reading a 100 paper thesis written in Arial and then come back to me.

And since we’re talking about text, making links out of the same color of the text is not a good idea. Even tech savvy users like those hitting OSNews will probably get annoyed by it.

Finally, glancing over the majority of the comments written on OSNews, it’s easy to realize that people don’t give a rats ass over the mugshot, the gravatar or the weirdo yellow man for all I care. Actually, on most articles you won’t even find a single person using it, except for Eugenia Loli-Queru (for which I have a great respect, by the way). Even Thom Holwerda, another editor, doesn’t have one. That must say something about its usefulness (or the lack thereof).

Now, since criticizing is easy I’m going to provide my own recommendation as well. Here’s how it looks like and I’ll provide the explanation afterwards.

First off, the score of the comment is given more prominent detail. The reason being that the wisdom of the crowds is usually good assessing the quality of the raw, and taking a fast look at the top left corner will help you deciding whether to read that comment or not.

Secondly, the comment author and his karma are still there, along with the date it was published. Obviously I omitted the day of the week and the timezone for being utterly irrelevant information, but I kept the karma. I gave it a more soft color because it’s definitely not the most important thing.

Thirdly, I changed the font. Although Lucida Grande is still sans-serif, it’s way easier to read than Arial. Second font option could be Microsoft’s Verdana or Tahoma due to some similarities. Also, I increased the font size so it doesn’t hurt your eyes (or force you to press Cmd/Ctrl + + each time you want to read a comment). Oh, and I also changed the links to a well known blue. Blue is not that relevant here though. What’s really important is making sure that your link color is different that the text color!

Finally, I ripped away the gravatar (there are plenty of social networks for stalking a user’s picture), I gave more detail to the parent comment, which is definitely interesting if you’re following a thread and I used a background color because, as I previously mentioned, comments are the most important asset of OSNews and, hence, should be highlighted. I also reduced the width of the box as we have more difficulty reading width-lengthy texts.

So, there you go. Let me know your thoughts.