How Guam is Getting Their News
What does Guam’s primary local news channel’s website look like? Is the website, by design, making the news more difficult to read?
Guam’s primary local news site is called Kuam News, and it looks like this.
The design feels very 2003, but it’s also functionally problematic. Multiple pages have links to themselves, and others have links to empty pages. Redundancy makes the site less intuitive to navigate.
Usability Redesign
Let’s wireframe some new designs for the above pages.
Now, let’s look at how these pages would be connected, and break down the tradeoffs for each design.
Visual Redesign
Play with an interactive redesign of the homepage here!
Brief Explanation of Design Choices
I’ve improved readability by using reducing cluttered information on the homepage. Also, on the old site, it’s easy to find small text clumped together. On the new site, I’ve increased the size of the text and added more spaces. I’ve employed a grid on the right-hand side to keep the display organized. The color palate is now black, white, and cyan (instead of blue, gold, silver, and black). Users can navigate the redesigned page easily by scrolling on the page or clicking on the menu, which is similar to navigating the old page.
How the interface responds to different screen sizes
For desktop-size windows, the interface looks how it does in the high-fidelity redesign.
For tablet-size screens (think of a landscape iPad), the following changes. The three columns become two evenly spaced columns.
For screens smaller than a landscape-oriented iPad, the following changes. The social media buttons and search button collapse into the expandable menu. Content in Coca Cola column is displayed first (in a similar format) while taking up almost all of the width of the screen and showing their full height. After that, the items from the second and third columns are shown in one column, ordered how they are in the tablet-sized display.
Any element of the page not mentioned remains the same with respect to the desktop-size screen.
Conclusions
The current news site presents users with an abundance of redundant information, making the site more difficult to navigate. A simple redesign removes this issue, while giving an outdated design a refresh.