Judging a Book By Its Cover — New Design for Outriders Dispatches
Dispatches are our regular updates sent in by correspondents located in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Middle East. We believe in the power of context needed to understand the news that make the headlines. One could say that our dispatches aim at building an informed relationship between the readers and the world.
The way you present information often determines how it is perceived, which is why Outriders really cares about both the content and the design of the news it delivers. We have recently changed the way dispatches look and we’d like to tell you why.
Tags
Our main approach to dispatches was to emphasize the context of the information they communicate. With this in mind we started to list certain names, historical events and situations and expand them into contextual tags stored in our database. Think of it as our small Wikipedia. We now use it for all the dispatches.
Time, Space and the Episodes
What we did next, was to think about how should all the dispatches coming from world’s different regions be outline on the page. We have decided that the site’s layout will guide our readers through the concept of dispatches.
That is why the first screen describes what the dispatches are. What follows is a timeline which organises them from the most recent to the oldest ones. Thanks to the timeline, one can also clearly see that the dispatches are published regularly. Next (below) comes a map featuring all the regions from which the dispatches are coming from. This function enables a user to focus on the dispatches coming from one given region if that is what they are after.
Another way in which a reader can engage with all the dispatches is to browse them by a topic. We wanted the dispatches to look like different episodes of a series — once you enter a certain topic you can dive deeper into the next episodes to grasp the full story.
The last screen contains of a section devoted to our authors along with a Twitter feed where they often share short updates or other relevant information.
Enhancing Findability
We used to treat dispatches as articles — we simply listed them. It didn’t really serve our purpose since with the amount of dispatches published — 3 per week at the moment — finding a specific topic you are interested in became hard very quickly. What we have decided to change, was to approach dispatches as if they were a map that one can explore in many ways — by focusing on a given region or a given topic.
Content is King
Another thing that changed is a design of a single page devoted to a dispatch. It used to be divided in half where one half consisted of the text and the other of a picture replaced by an expanded tag once a hyperlink got activated. However, because it is the content that matters, our task was to design the layout of a single article in a way that would make it easy to digest. That is why we have decided on a single text column accompanied by just one picture illustrating the topic. This simplified the view of a single dispatch optimises the reading experience.
True Colors
Last but not least we also changed the main color of the dispatches — from yellow to the green one which is our main branding colour and which we use throughout the entire Outriders platform.
Hope you will all enjoy these changes.
If you have any comments or questions — let me know!
