Sure it's not aesthetically amazing, but it works. A simple news list unencumbered by heavy imagery or even ads. This is no where near the crappiest page design.
I'd say it comes pretty close to "crappiest page design" considering the size of NBC. Here are some of the problems:
- Two search boxes which look completely different but (possibly?) do the same thing
- Text sizing is all over the place
- Inconsistent capitalisation ("category. tags" and "Read. Posts", "jay leno" and "Jay Leno")
- Inconsistent punctuation (does the section heading "Most. Recent Posts" make any sense at all?)
- Only some of the story descriptions work (in some cases the text is wrapped inside CDATA sections and all that is displayed is an ellipsis in place of the description)
- Corny background gradient cuts off before the end of the page
- Tags are completely abused (they have "Jimmy Fallon", "jimmyfallon", "Late Night" and "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon")
- The "Most. Recent Posts" section has exactly the same content as the body of the page
Any self-respecting corporation should be able to do better than that.
1. Readability: Both headings and excertp text have the same colour. This creates uncertainty about what is what. Same applies to the various other page elements like the tag cloud.
2. Readability: Contrast ratios. This is for many a subjective matter, but displays are very capable of displaying black text on a white background. If you want to decrease glare, you should make the text lighter (#333 is popular) but not the background darker. Tis decreases readability on many devices, especially with LCD displays.
3. Readability: White space and liune height. On the left, there's a overly generous amount of white space. This is not bad, but it fails horribly when in the right column the white space is not considered at all. This gives the page a messy, chaotic look.
4. Readbility: CAPITALS. This has already been discussed above, but I'd like to recap. Captials are considered shouting in online written text. Capitals decrease readability by making all characters similar in size, therefor creating less visual anchors for the reader to attach to. This leads to losing the thread of the sentence. This, by the way, is also why there are special titling and/or all-capital fonts included in typefaces.
5. Readability: Dots in titles. That's not how you write 'READ. POSTS'.
6. Visual consistency: Page elements seem to have no, or very little relationship to each other. Normally this is conveyed through colour, contrast, size and shape. Many parts of this page fail in at least 3 of these, severly degrading the usability of the site as an interactive application.
7. Usability: There is almost no visual feedback for the interactivity besides the hand-cursor. This is bad for usability.
8. Usability: Aggresive social media sahring pop-up. The very sensitive pop-up menu makes using the other links hard.
My conclusion must be that this page was designed by either a programmer or a print designer. I lean towards programmer because of the colour scheme.
So, no, it does not 'work'. It's quite possibly the worst newslisting I've seen, and I thought Reddit was bad.
Well I'd say the same thing about Notch's 0x10c -- that there are many games on the Internet, why is this one newsworthy? -- but I think in both cases it comes down to the reputation of the person providing it. In the one case it is a promising idea from someone who has the resources to make great ideas happen; in the other it is a pile of utter crap from someone who had the resources to do much, much better.
No, see, the question is precisely "why the hell is an emulated programmable 16bit CPU newsworthy?"
Hey, I know an MMO with an emulated programmable 32bit CPU; it's called Browser Quest, and was recently released by Mozilla; you can access its console by pressing Shift-Ctrl-J; it even comes with a high-level scripting language. With the JS implementation of Notch's 16-bit CPU you can even quickly paste Notch's CPU into BrowserQuest, so that you can write with his opcodes!
To the extent that it's not a feature but a game mechanic I would say it's interesting enough for one HN post in the top 10. That's what it was recently, and all was good. Today implementations of the opcodes take up four of these posts, for apparently no other reason than "Notch is a pretty cool guy with the ability to make this happen."
And that's my point. It's the ability to make it happen, not the thing in itself, which makes it newsworthy.
What kind of productive discussion can be made about it?
The existence of something exciting, like 0x10c, generates discussion about possibilities. The existence of something infuriating, like the Path scandal, generates discussion towards solutions.
This site is bad but mundanely bad. It is apparent from comment thread that the only comment people can muster up is "oh look, I can't believe NBC would suck this much". This is largely of interest to no one.
I guess that's fair enough. I'm mostly here to see interesting discussions in the comment threads and you're right, we can't have much of an interesting discussion on this one.
NBC'S NBC.COM HEADLINES STEP TOWARDS REVIVING INTEREST ON NBC IN SHOUTING ON INTERNET
April 5, 2012 10:10 AM
Tags: NBC, Shouting, Internet, Website
NBC's "NBC.com" - the highly acclaimed website with impressive ratings and critical acclaim which is totally not a marketing and propaganda vehicle for its television episodes - today made its iconic debut on design news sites like Hacker News for its influential sponsorship of shouting headlines which grab...
20 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadI am willing to bet not a lot of people use NBC Sports as their source of online sports news consumption.
EDIT: Actually it is public, as zedr pointed out.
"News & Sports" -> "NBC Entertainment News"
- Two search boxes which look completely different but (possibly?) do the same thing - Text sizing is all over the place - Inconsistent capitalisation ("category. tags" and "Read. Posts", "jay leno" and "Jay Leno") - Inconsistent punctuation (does the section heading "Most. Recent Posts" make any sense at all?) - Only some of the story descriptions work (in some cases the text is wrapped inside CDATA sections and all that is displayed is an ellipsis in place of the description) - Corny background gradient cuts off before the end of the page - Tags are completely abused (they have "Jimmy Fallon", "jimmyfallon", "Late Night" and "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon") - The "Most. Recent Posts" section has exactly the same content as the body of the page
Any self-respecting corporation should be able to do better than that.
No it does not. It fails on the following points:
1. Readability: Both headings and excertp text have the same colour. This creates uncertainty about what is what. Same applies to the various other page elements like the tag cloud.
2. Readability: Contrast ratios. This is for many a subjective matter, but displays are very capable of displaying black text on a white background. If you want to decrease glare, you should make the text lighter (#333 is popular) but not the background darker. Tis decreases readability on many devices, especially with LCD displays.
3. Readability: White space and liune height. On the left, there's a overly generous amount of white space. This is not bad, but it fails horribly when in the right column the white space is not considered at all. This gives the page a messy, chaotic look.
4. Readbility: CAPITALS. This has already been discussed above, but I'd like to recap. Captials are considered shouting in online written text. Capitals decrease readability by making all characters similar in size, therefor creating less visual anchors for the reader to attach to. This leads to losing the thread of the sentence. This, by the way, is also why there are special titling and/or all-capital fonts included in typefaces.
5. Readability: Dots in titles. That's not how you write 'READ. POSTS'.
6. Visual consistency: Page elements seem to have no, or very little relationship to each other. Normally this is conveyed through colour, contrast, size and shape. Many parts of this page fail in at least 3 of these, severly degrading the usability of the site as an interactive application.
7. Usability: There is almost no visual feedback for the interactivity besides the hand-cursor. This is bad for usability.
8. Usability: Aggresive social media sahring pop-up. The very sensitive pop-up menu makes using the other links hard.
My conclusion must be that this page was designed by either a programmer or a print designer. I lean towards programmer because of the colour scheme.
So, no, it does not 'work'. It's quite possibly the worst newslisting I've seen, and I thought Reddit was bad.
That headline font is barely legible at that size and forces headlines to be much longer than they need to be.
Now think about how many crappy websites there are.
Terrible comparison.
Hey, I know an MMO with an emulated programmable 32bit CPU; it's called Browser Quest, and was recently released by Mozilla; you can access its console by pressing Shift-Ctrl-J; it even comes with a high-level scripting language. With the JS implementation of Notch's 16-bit CPU you can even quickly paste Notch's CPU into BrowserQuest, so that you can write with his opcodes!
To the extent that it's not a feature but a game mechanic I would say it's interesting enough for one HN post in the top 10. That's what it was recently, and all was good. Today implementations of the opcodes take up four of these posts, for apparently no other reason than "Notch is a pretty cool guy with the ability to make this happen."
And that's my point. It's the ability to make it happen, not the thing in itself, which makes it newsworthy.
The existence of something exciting, like 0x10c, generates discussion about possibilities. The existence of something infuriating, like the Path scandal, generates discussion towards solutions.
This site is bad but mundanely bad. It is apparent from comment thread that the only comment people can muster up is "oh look, I can't believe NBC would suck this much". This is largely of interest to no one.
But I must say..this was interesting! I didn't know corporate companies could sink so 'low'...
April 5, 2012 10:10 AM
Tags: NBC, Shouting, Internet, Website
NBC's "NBC.com" - the highly acclaimed website with impressive ratings and critical acclaim which is totally not a marketing and propaganda vehicle for its television episodes - today made its iconic debut on design news sites like Hacker News for its influential sponsorship of shouting headlines which grab...
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