Itchy Hands

The Star Online site critique

When The Star launched the redesign of their website last year, I drafted a blog entry about what I thought of the website, but never posted it. Recently, I decided to go dig up that old post and polished it up, and so now I present to you my vicious, spiteful critique of “The Star Online”:http://www.thestar.com.my website.

For this critique, I will assume that the website’s main objective is to communicate news because, well, it’s an online newspaper. I am also aware of the fact that newspapers earn their income mainly from advertising and I will be touching on adverts quite a bit. Last of all, I will be comparing The Star Online to some other online newspaper type sites, just because I can. Oh, and I was just kidding about being vicious and spiteful.

h3. Layout

Layout-wise, The Star Online is pretty conventional. It sports the tried and tested fixed-width, 2-column layout for most of its pages, and a little variation on section frontpages. While it is a layout that users can get used to easily, it doesn’t do a very good job of displaying news.

When the site first loads, the only news that users see are the cover story of the day and a column of World Updates. Err… why World Updates? I would think users are more interested in other local headlines or top stories. Surrounding these two columns of news are no less than four advertisements of various sizes.

You know, it’s funny because I don’t think The Star puts advertisements on the front page of its print version, but has loads of blinking ads and other banners on the online version’s homepage. Compare that to the homepages of some other online news sites that I think have great layouts.

Most of these sites are much more subtle with their advertisement placements, choosing to limit them or to place them away from the main content. BBC News doesn’t even have any adverts at all.

The Star Online has a width of 770 pixels. I think that they would be able to display more columns of news if they increased the width to something wider than 900 pixels. I don’t have any hard numbers for Malaysia, but I think that it’s safe to say that the majority of us have a 1024 by 768 pixel monitor resolution, so a wider layout should be no problem to at least 80% of The Star Online’s users.

h3. Design

Design-wise, The Star Online has got to be one of the blandest online newspapers that I’ve ever seen. I wonder if they really have a _designer_, because the site looks like something that someone from the IT department threw together overnight. Compare the design to the simple and subtle design of “The Times Online”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk, or the stylish “nymag.com”:http://www.nymag.com (I like the choice of fonts) or the bold, stand out colours of “News.com”:http://news.com.com. Heck, even the “New Straits Times”:http://www.nst.com.my site looks better. Another thing about the first three outstanding examples are how they present the top stories of the day at a glance to the user above the fold. Observe also that distraction from advertisements are minimised by thoughtful placement.

Now we come to the thing that I hate the most about The Star Online – the navigation. The navigation is quite confusing because it is split into the six tabs on top and another bar below the banner advertisement. Clicking the navigation tabs opens the page in a new window _which is a really bad usability mistake_. Just look at usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s list of “Top Ten _New_ Mistakes of Web Design”:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html, points #1 and #2.

p(caption). The Star Online: navigation is split by advertisement banner

Opening pages in new windows catches users off guard and breaks the Back button, meaning that users can’t click the Back button to get them back to where they came from. My mom gets totally confused when new windows pops up, and the majority of users online are like my mom.

However, implementation of opening new windows is also inconsistent. For example, if you click the Property tab at the top of the page, a new window opens, but if you click the Property link at the bottom, the page loads in the same browser window. The site is peppered with these surprise links and you’ll never know which link will open in a new window.

Now, the navigation bar. It’s got the cool dropdown and flyout menus, but unfortunately the whole navigation bar disappears if Javascript is off. Another inconsistency I don’t like is how clicking on Archives and More doesn’t work, unlike the other links. For the two links, you need to click the sub-item on the dropdown menu for it to work.

h3. Branding

Another big issue with The Star Online for me is regarding their (lack of consistent) branding. First, they must have one of the smallest website logos that I’ve ever seen on any website. It’s not really attractive and fails to draw the eye to itself. Here are some actual size comparison between The Star Online and some other popular websites.

The Star Online logo is the worse of the lot above, and even the logo for mStar, The Star Online’s Malay language companion, looks much better. The Star Online logo has too many colours and frilly bits, and it’s not consistent with The Star’s corporate colours. As much as possible, the logo should look like The Star’s own logo for consistency. Logos should be clear, simple and recognisable. Here’s a “tutorial on creating a good logo”:http://www.fizbang.com/1-3-06.php that all designers should bookmark.

It’s bad enough that they’ve got that tiny logo, but immediately below it is a big flashing banner advert that totally distracts attention away from the logo. If I was scanning through a dozen web pages quickly and I see this screen (below), chances are, I would think that was a restaurant or recipe site.

p(caption). Is this a business site or cooking site?

h3. Beyond skin deep

A good, well-thought site design will make the user experience a much more pleasant one, and help in the goal of communicating news. To do this, the webmasters need to redesign the layout to present more news, more efficiently. They also need to address the inconsistencies in navigation across the site and employ a decent designer to make the site more readable and visually appealing.

Also, all modern websites should employ table-less, semantic, XHTML and CSS based designs. The benefits of employing XHTML and CSS are beyond the scope of this article, but if you are curious, Doug Bowman of “Stopdesign”:http://www.stopdesign.com has an excellent article on how “throwing tables out the window”:http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/throwing_tables/ can have a substantial benefit for large, high traffic sites, a category that “The Star Online”:http://www.thestar.com.my falls in.

Running a big website like The Star Online is no mean feat. By my count the site has around 10 major sections. It takes lots and lots of hard work to make sure that articles are published on time and I take my hat off to the webmasters who do that day in and out. However, that’s no excuse to do a shitty job on the site design. The Star is the leader for English newspapers in Malaysia, but it’s website still has some ways to go.

Updated 20 Feb to include recommendations on XHTML and CSS

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.