Interactions - July/August 2009

There are three
interrelated causes

pers. It isn’t just the glut and the “I can’t see the wood for the trees” problem; it is the link to nowhere problem. I click on a link and it takes me to nothing interesting, usually just a few lines of some banal story from several years ago.

As a child I used to love getting lost in the Hampton Court Maze, squealing with excitement when I hit another dead end and then running back to where I started, hopeful the next turn would lead me a little closer to the prize. Somehow a link to nowhere does not hold the same fascination. No wonder I don’t venture too far off my well-worn paths, especially when reading from my phone.

Is it possible to take the best of what we have in newsprint and create a good digital news-reading experience? Here are some basics I would like to work on:

1. Information collection and presentation. Let’s actively design better technologies for production and presentation of the news by citizen and professional journalists and editors. Can we provide better tools for the collection and management of information gathered on the ground? Can we improve the representation of information— graphics, fonts, layouts—to enable more effective skimming? Can we offer better guidelines for the coupling of different media types (text, image, video) and avoid gratuitous visuals? Let’s improve navigation of well-filtered and segmented content online.

2. Information architecture design.

Let’s think about how to do a better job of recommending “related” stories. Many search engines reveal items that are

generally popular—that are highly ranked. Certainly we should design better filters, but we should also design better automatic information sniffers and surfacers that seek out stories of interest. Can we design better relational models so we can surface relationships between stories that are actually meaningful instead of the “also see” hyperlink that takes me to a story from five years ago that somehow got linked to the current one? Can we do a better job of making explicit the relationship between events at the local, national, and global levels? Can we design better tools for following story developments over time—even those stories that have non-sensational endings? Let’s stop aggregating and dumping stuff onto a page because it is easy to do so, and start filtering and designing for more effective and enjoyable readership. I suspect our computational recommendation models are missing the point; they just aren’t as good as a human being. Great journalists, editors, and documentarians are capable of making links, extracting lessons at various levels of abstraction, and at spinning a yarn out of a selection of stories. Let’s get our imaginations flowing and think about how stories are told and interlinked, and aim for that level of quality—not just what is easily engineered.

3. Design for time-appropriate reading, and for use and reuse. Can we design a better way to earmark content than the current, simplistic URL bookmarking? What are better ways to support different temporalities of information and different consumption paces? Can we design ways