FT’s New Design Focused on the Familiar and the Future
Important Details: A month ago, FT.com launched a redesign that was in the works for a year. Its redesign, and two other recent reformatting introductions, point to a maturation of online news presentations.
“It’s the most radical redesign we’ve done within the last six years,” Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, told Outsell. “This is the design foundation for five years plus.” Foundation is an important word here, as the FT’s public presentation is based on a rebuilt publishing platform. The key to the new platform: flexibility.
That flexibility is key to the strategy underlying the re-design itself. The goal, according to Grimshaw: “We have to bring the brands close together. It’s not about the individual channels, or a print/online divide. It’s about the multi-channel future. Print will be there in some form. Online won’t be the end-all and be-all. Mobile is coming.”
Following from that belief, FT is making the Financial Times brand and feel ascendant. On its home page, and increasingly through the FT.com site as it rolls out the redesign site-wide over the next several months, we see the familiar FT brand, the familar faintly pink background, the familiar skyline (what US publishers call a skybox), all borrowed from print. The idea is to build on that foundation, make it ubiquitous, and allow the FT customer to move from platform to platform, with a consistent experience, as they wish.
The home page redesign itself is a departure from many recent news redesigns we’ve seen. They “try to show you everything,” says Grimshaw. “We decided that was a dead-end experience for us,” as FT focuses, much in line with its newspaper roots, on providing selectivity for its readers. Less is more is the guiding principle, with the FT’s top 10 content pieces — whether news stories, blog posts or videos — arranged top to bottom on the page. Video pieces, with a small in-line player, may make up two or three of the top 10 items of the news moment, but there’s no standalone video player on the page. Grimshaw says that the one-month old design has received a 84% thumbs up (“good” or “very good”) in surveying, with individual free-form feedback valuably channelled back to the site’s development team for review.
CanWest also recently launched a redesign of its 10 city-based Canadian sites, including The Gazette in Montreal, with the theme of Be a “Know It All.” Features of the redesign include new design and simplified navigation, increased focus on locally relevant news and information, a wider format, allowing readers to see more news without extensive scrolling, more interactivity with increasing reader commenting opportunites and integration with Facebook and MySpace; and more rich media.
At the New York Times, a new feature offering extensive, external links to relevant content has been launched. Times Extra places contextual links under its main stories on the home page, once the feature is enabled (and can be turned off, with a toggle). The feature, powered by BlogRunner, provides content even from such direct rivals as the Wall Street Journal and picks up relevant niche blog content.
Implications: These redesign and reformatting developments point to how early on we are in the process of finding the best digital news presentation. Times Extra indicates a wider truth that no single news outlet is any longer enough; it’s a big, digital news world out there — an incredible boon for readers globally. At the Times, with its good volume of staff-produced trusted content, the bet is that engagement will increase if the Times also points to other useful content. The simple idea: More time spent on the Times site, and more advertising sold. (The Times leads US news sites, with 40 minutes per month per visitor.) That’s a smart bet, as the Times — as WashingtonPost.com before it has done — tries to recreate itself online, as it was in print, to be a center of the reader’s day.
The FT’s bet takes into account another facet of human nature — wanting the editors of a trusted source to tell them what’s most important through the day and to simplify their lives in doing so. That plays against a “more is more” philosophy we see on many site home pages. The jury is out on those philosophies, but one fact is clear. The analytics under the news business are getting better and better. Sites possess the ability to watch how readers are using the site, where they are coming from and where they are going to; the question is how well they use the data and how quickly they make changes to respond to the learnings. Learning and time to market are the keys going forward.