Nowadays many newspapers from all over the world offer information online. Especially major papers like the "Sueddeutsche Zeitung" or the "New York Times" as well as periodicals like "Spiegel" provide up-to-date information updated as quickly as news channels on TV. For many people these web pages are an important source of information. Thus layout and even more important usability of these pages have become a major concern of their designers to guarantee the competitiveness.
Due to the growing online reading community publishers had to decide on the basic design of the web interface of the newspaper. Basically three approaches to the task had to be considered. The first one is based on the idea of adopting the design of the newspaper as seen in the printed form. All of the textual content is displayed on one single web page. The second approach is to give a links of plain headlines, which lead to the concerning articles. The third approach extends the second one by adding short summaries to the headlines.
With the aim of gathering statistical data on the task Ryan Baker, Michael Bernard, and Shannon Riley ran an experiment testing the usability of the three approaches (Usability News: "Reading Online News: A Comparison of Three Presentation Formats" (04.02.2002)). The experiment consisted of a quantitative measurement on the one hand and an evaluating part on the other hand.
In the measurement part each participant had to search for specific information within each of the three conditions while the time has been measured. For details on the experiment please refer to the "Usability News" web page. Surprisingly there was no statistical difference across the three different search conditions. Thus the data of the evaluation part is of greater interest for the design.
The participants were instructed to value the three approaches concerning different criteria. The first criterion was, whether information was to be found easily. In contrast to the statistical data the personal feeling of the participants was, that the approach of giving links together with summaries was the way ,in which information was found most easily.
The further three criteria "Arrangement Promotes Comprehension", "Satisfied with Site", and "Looks Professional" all showed significant differences across the three conditions, wherein the approach of links with summaries always got the highest ratings followed by the plain links.
The last criterion was "Site Preference" (participants ranking site as their first choice). Here nearly four quarters chose the links with summaries as their preferred design. But an interesting result within this criterion is, that the first approach of displaying all articles on one web pages had twice as many votes as the second approach of using plain links. A reason - and one of today's design problem - might be the age of the participants. Although the average was 26 years of age, the scale reached up to 46 years of age. Thus the reason for the relatively high result for the first approach might be, that for people, who have been used to the printed newspapers over years, the linked pages simply are inconvenient, although these people might accept the second or the third approach as more comprehensive. This is an attitude that will probably descend in the future, because younger generations are more and more used to reading online, and thus used to reading linked texts.
Consistent with the result of the experiment most major newspapers have adopted the concept of using links with summaries. This concept is found on the starting page of the web site as well as on sites further down the hierarchy. Most online newspapers moreover provide a "related articles" table at the end of an article, which follows the design of links with summaries as well.
Another important characteristic of major online newspapers is, that there are no deep hierarchic structures. As a result there are no tree links to click oneself through to a certain article. This design prevents the user from "getting lost" in the tree. Instead of a tree like design the structure of a printed newspaper is resembled. This means, that there are certain (consistent) topics like "Economy", "Technology", or "Weather", but internally there is no deeper structure, but a list of topics. This simple design is expanded by the "related articles" feature mentioned before.