Content is Queen?

No, I’m not into content strategy all of a sudden. It’s just that from a human-computer interaction point of view, user experience is really important. And that means that the experience of browsing content is of paramount importance.

Now, not all content is equal; news organisations should pay more attention than others, for example. Surprisingly enough, lately I’ve come across many news organisations that fail to successfully deliver content in a usable way. I mean, look at this:

Actual content at a news org website covering one sixth of the browser window.

The actual content covers one sixth (approximately, I didn’t count pixels) of the window! The article is this narrow column at the left hand-side of the page. The rest of the screen doesn’t matter to me, and I didn’t ask for it. Widgets, ads, and all these irrelevant things that were supposedly caused by Flash ads are still here, unblockable though, as they’ve been implemented in JavaScript. Where’s my news story? Why do I have to scroll so much?

I see this type of design more and more at news websites; no offense to the one I got the screenshot from—does it actually happen increasingly or is it just me? Let me know what you think! 😉