On the BBC News redesign

The BBC’s news site — the UK’s ninth most popular internet destination [1], and according to Alexa, the 2nd or 4th most popular news site in the world, depending on how you read things [2] — has rolled out a redesign over the last few hours. It’s a lighter, leaner evolution of the previous design, and it reflects the recent changes to the BBC homepage. I’m going to focus on three aspects of the redesign — no doubt others will comment on other aspects of the new style.

More whitespace

At last, the BBC News site has been allowed to breathe. The previous design always felt a little cramped — not excessively so, but this change is the most noticeable. The layout itself is wider, and spacing between elements is more relaxed, making individual headlines easier to pick out, and almost certainly improving usability for long or partially sighted users.

The converse of this, however, is that it almost looks too relaxed. The frantic business of the New York Times website, for example, lends an air of authority, and a very urban feel to an urban news source. Does the BBC News redesign reflect a conscious decision to release the site from its urban form? The redesigned home page, in particular — with its marine blue link colours, grey rather than black text, and pale grey background — has an almost coastal feel.

Less bold

The previous design used bold text widely; now, standard weights seem to be the norm. Unfortunately, this means that certain areas of the home page seem considerably less easy to navigate at speed than their predecessors.

The distinction between category, section heading and headline is lost, making (I suspect) missed clicks more likely. For a page intended to be a gateway, this represents a regression from the previous design. While it was cramped, the use of bold type aided quick target-finding and navigation.

Less efficient

I use the term ‘efficient’ in a crude sense — and it shouldn’t be taken as a universal criticism. Screens are bigger now than they were five years ago [3], and the increase in whitespace is generally to be welcomed. However, the black BBC brand bar across the top of each page is not. It seems unnecessary — the BBC branding is present in the red BBC News bar below, and there’s little in the way of functionality offered beyond the search box, which I feel could happily occupy the right hand side of the lower red bar. Even the love-it-or-loathe-it analogue clock seems to have been dropped. Disband the black bar, please, and give us our vertical space back, I say.

Parting thoughts

A well-executed redesign on the whole, but irritatingly imperfect. It’ll be interesting to see how the BBC react to comment, though — Ben Gallop, the Sport website editor, explains that it’s not a one-time swap:

There won’t be a single moment where we snip the ribbon and unveil the new site. Instead we are about to embark on a long-term project, where we will make changes in an ‘iterative’ fashion, introducing individual improvements at a sensible rate, rather than in one big hit.

It looks like the back end is still running off their amusingly Heath Robinson content management system, but the news that embedded video is on its way is a sign that the process is going to go more than skin-deep. I doubt if we’ll see a paradigm shift, but improvements — however small — to a many-times-a-day site can only be a good thing.

1. Hitwise UK — Top 20 Websites — February, 2008
2. Alexa’s rankings are far from perfect; these figures are from their Top Sites: News ranking.
3. iPhones excepted, of course — and there’s a suggestion that it doesn’t work very well.