I don’t use CNN.com on my phone, because it sucks. I’ve sort of given up on news sites in general, but that’s a different story. The real reason I don’t use CNN.com is that after every line or two, I have to click a ‘more’ link to go to the next line. It’s super awkward, it makes reading a story take forever and it’s the old way of looking at the pay-per-kilobyte mobile web.
Smartphones and unlimited data plans are getting super cheap–I won’t tell you how much I overpaid for the Blackjack over there about a year ago, but it arrived at the photoshoot in a hovercraft made out of golden baby seals. I understand however, it would get annoying if you just skim your news and don’t want to wait for the whole thing to load.
Somebody gets it right
There is one (two, actually) news source that solves this problem. The New York Times mobile site has a simple menu at the bottom of the page with an option to ‘set single page as default.‘ That’s all there is to it. The next time you load an article, at the bottom of the page you’ll see ‘multiple pages‘ so you can return to the old way. For the record, the Chicago Tribune mobile site and the accompanying ChicagoSports.com work the same way. Just give me the option. That’s all I ask.
One More Thing
How about when non-mobile sites make you click through fifty ‘more’ links to read an entire article? (Never mind that you’ve already done it once on this post.) I assume they do this as a way of artificially increasing clicks for advertising purposes, but I’ve read Top 10 lists that make you click ‘more’ after…every…entry. And, if you happen to be trying to read it on a mobile phone, you have to scroll past all the header/navigation/ads every time to get to the next entry.
Useability isn’t complicated
But it is hard. Remember the first time you used iTunes? It’s impossible to figure out how to get your damn Justin Timberlake album from your computer to your ipod, because it’s just so simple. I didn’t realize you could drag that crap to where you want it to go. It’s a matter of approaching a site with fresh eyes, which often means finding people that haven’t been involved in the project. I’m sure if I was designing the Times mobile site, and I never wanted to view a story as a single page, adding such a feature would be pretty down on the list. Somebody else would see it as a site’s biggest problem. If the Paper of Record, which is not exactly known for its cutting edge design, can make a great, useable site, I think we can too.
