To B1 Or Not To B1
Usability is about giving users good experiences. It applies to products you may buy, web pages you may visit or indeed why not newspapers. Unfortunately the latest redesign of the Montreal Gazette seems to miss out from many points of view.
Let’s forget for the moment about the articles that cannot be read without taking the newspaper apart. There’s one simple test that any newspaper should be able to satisfy. That’s an easy way to find any article. You would think it’s easy. Just put a page number on each page. That’s probably as old as newspapers themselves. If the newspaper splits into sections then perhaps a combination of a letter and a number is even more understandable. Well for some reason, the Gazette designers have decided they can do better. Rather than calling the second section in the newspaper Section B, it’s called Extra A. So in the menu at the front anything appearing on that second section front page is listed as appearing on Extra A. It’s not B1 presumably since they don’t show that anywhere. However the pages behind it are labeled B2, B3 and so on.
They’ve also applied the same principle to Page Not H9 (which is Gardens Special Section), Page Not I1 (which is Take 5) and Page Not J1 (which is Books). I can’t understand why they haven’t applied the same principle to every section of the newspaper .. indeed to every page of the newspaper. However my opinion probably doesn’t count. I’m only a reader.
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Send an email. You’d be surprised how much they listen to readers’ opinions:
Assistant Managing Editor Catherine Wallace (responsible for the Saturday Extra section): cwallace@thegazette.canwest.com
Design Director Nuri Ducassi: nducassi@thegazette.canwest.com
Editor-in-Chief Andrew Phillips: aphillips@thegazette.canwest.com
Thanks, Concerned Citizen. Some of my concerns on Usability have already appeared in the Letters to the Editor section of the paper in comments from others. This redesign repeats user difficulties created in a previous redesign 5 years ago. I did email them at that time and some changes were made. However I believe this redesign shows again that they are product-driven rather than customer-centric.
They should be doing user-tests watching people reading the paper and trying to see how they can make it a good user-experience for the maximum number of people. Often it’s attention to small details that’s required but with their user in mind as the number one priority. My previous round of contacts showed that wasn’t the thinking before.