NYTimes.com has undergone cosmetic and under-the-hood changes, its largest in seven long years. It now has a look and feel on par with its print counterpart. The Times’ director for digital design said that the new change was aimed at preserving the brand’s identity.
Most noticeably, the site now has an abundance of white space, which many designers have welcomed as a positive change. Black headlines now run across the page, replacing the earlier bluish hue. The black and white tone offers a cleaner look and allows more comfortable reading. Designers have also commented on how the new color scheme now makes news alerts jump out.
The long sidebar is gone, though the earlier format of three columns of text remains. The text is centered to create an impression of larger font and more gravitas. On top of every article is a ribbon that leads readers to related stories. An improvement is the one-click pull-down menu which now houses the sidebar and toolbar to navigate across sections. Page breaks have been eschewed in favor of continuous scrolling, which has also been hailed as a positive move. Little else has changed as far as cosmetics is concerned.
The New York Times said that its latest redesign is aimed at transforming the experience on mobile devices and has been developed keeping readers in mind. More people get their daily dose of news off NYTimes.com than its print publication – that is 1.6 million viewers each day versus 731,000 in daily circulation.
The site’s back-end now has a new analytics program that will generate more data and provide valuable information to NYT about its users. A tag management system will now tag every piece of information for further analysis.
However, the design is not responsive; users accessing the newspaper on their mobile devices will still be directed to mobile.nytimes.com. The lack of a responsive design has been called out by designers, who feel the Times should try and implement this change in their next redesign.