Ten Reasons WashingtonPost.com is Poorly Designed

For too long, I’ve begrudgingly accepted online inconvenience, relying on Google and bookmarks to find what I was looking for. I’ve rationalized about the size and complexity of the job, assuming it would get better soon. I was wrong. I feel compelled to say it:

Washingtonpost.com is a poorly designed website.

Here’s ten reasons, in no particular order.

1. Popunder Advertising
Often when you load the homepage, an Economist or another advertisement will pop up, unless you’ve got a blocker running. It’s annoying and violates online best practices.

2. Bloated Code
The home page is over 600 kb in size, and contains multiple javascript and flash elements.

3. The Menubar
Although I noticed they recently enlarged it, I find the hover-over topical menubar ugly and hard to use.

4. Sprawling, Deep Navigation Structure
Website design convention says you should keep everything within just a few clicks of the home page. Although it may be all technically be within the 4 click minimum, I’ve certainly wasted more than that hunting for an article or feature.

5. Non-intuitive Organization
Looking for D.C. area news? Just click on “Metro”. Except, if the story you’re looking for was published in an “Extra” section, you’ll need to hover over the “Local” button, click on “The Extras” (you better be a regular reader, as there’s nothing to explain what an “Extra” is), then click on your county. There you’ll find some local news, except any local news published in the metro section, or in the front page section, or the real estate section, or online discussions on local topics, etc, etc.

Interested in finding local columnist Marc Fisher’s blog? Unless you can remember his URL (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/), there are several options. If you are lucky, it’s one of the days the powers that be have chosen to post it on their homepage. If not, you can hover over “Local” and click on “Metro.” There will be a link to his blog there, except they only link to individual posts, so you’ll have to know it’s a blog. Another option? Hover over opinion, click on “columns&blogs.” Again, if you are luck they are “featuring” him, but chances are you will have to scroll down to a forest of huge pull-down menus, select “Metro & Education” then select Marc Fisher: Raw Fisher (you better know that’s the name of his blog). Did you count the clicks?

6. Feature Mania
Sponsored blogroll, mywashingtonpost.com, post points, slate, cityguide, traffic center, jobs, cars, real estate, school report cards, personalized alerts, day in photos, documentary video, etc, etc. WashingtonPost.com is a website for ever person at every point in their life, and each and every page contains hundreds of links to every other section reminding you of this fact.

7. Hidden Comments
Want to comment on a story? Sure, you are welcome to. Except the only people who will read it are the tiny percentage that will scroll below a “read more” box (sponsored by inform(tm)!) and click on the tiny text that says “view all comments.” By inviting comments before readers can see what others have left, they discourage the kind of conversations among readers that usually happen on blogs.

8. Express? Express Who?
They might be a wholly-owned subsidiary with a dedicated readership and original content, but the only way you’d find the Express website (or any other partner website, for that matter) is by scrolling all the way to the bottom of the homepage and clicking on “Express.” Again, you better be a local, because there’s nothing to tell you what it is.

9. The Most Viewed Mystery
Want to find a list of the “most viewed” articles? If you’re lucky, you’ll notice the tiny list (five articles only) on the side of some articles, or perhaps the tiny text box well below the fold on the homepage linking to a “20 most emailed list.” If you’re really lucky, you find this top 35 most viewed Metro articles list. What’s missing? An easy-to-find most popular page like the New York Times has.

10. Inconsistent Page Layout
The structure of the site’s various sections varies widely, and boxes containing features appear and reappear mysteriously. Even the layout of the ever-important main page varies day-to-day. Print journalists know the importance of perdictable layout to help readers find what they’re looking for - why this hasn’t translated into web design is a mystery to me.

What irks you? Or maybe you are one of the people that helped them win the “People’s Choice” Webby for best newspaper website in 2007?

Seeing More

If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen images like the one above before and chalked it up to a neat photoshop effect. However, a lot more than that separates Trey Ratcliff’s take on the Capitol Columns at the National Arboretum from my attempts. The image was produced through a process called High Dynamic Range Imaging. Originally created as a technique to create realistic objects in computer graphics, the technique essentially creates images containing more visual information than a standard, single-exposure photo. The result contains more detail in the dark and bright areas, more like how we actually see. Wikipedia explains how it works this way:

Information stored in high dynamic range images usually corresponds to the physical values of luminance or radiance that can be observed in the real world. This is different from traditional digital images, which represent colors that should appear on a monitor or a paper print. Therefore, HDR image formats are often called “scene-referred”, in contrast to traditional digital images, which are “device-referred” or “output-referred”.

This article explains some of the concepts in more detail. HDR photographs can be taken from real life by digitally combining several photos taken at different exposure settings, and the resulting photo will contain details from the lightest and darkest portions of the pictures as well as more color. The technique seems to becoming increasingly popular, and a recent tutorial published by Popular Science explains the software needed to create the eye-popping images is freely available. I also noticed a couple HDR photos have popped up as DCist photos of the day this spring.

I stumbled across the technique looking for photos of Ballston, of all places. A local resident and Flickr user sduffy had uploaded the photo to the right and several other particularly well done images.

District resident Jon Ross has created several images of D.C., including this view up 15th Street:

Another D.C. Flickr user experimenting with HDR is sunyata, who has created a set of some of his favorites. His style is a bit more subtle, as seen in this version of the fountain at Meridian Hill Park:

What’s your favorite HDR image?

More:
> Popular Science: High-Dynamic-Range Photography: A Guide
> “The Future of Digital Imaging - High Dynamic Range Photography”
> Flickr HDR pool

The British ‘ePlanning’ Invasion

There were a few items that came out of the American Planning Association Conference in Philadelphia I attended I wanted to note here. Not the least of which was the art of Isaiah Zagar I stumbled across in an alley, and the recently saved Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens. I couldn’t helped but be reminded of Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, although the two projects are not without important differences. I’ve included some other photos from my trip below.

One of the most intriguing presentations I attended at the conference was by a British company, Limehouse Software, peddling an integrated software package for planners. Basically, their software allows the planning department to easily draft documents internally, post them online for public comment or publishing, and interface with more robust software packages as needed, all using open source formats. Their tools are behind an effort by Providence, Rhode Island that has posted the entire draft master plan to the web for public comment. (Contrast that to D.C., where community leaders were given just a few short weeks to digest an enormous master plan document before the city council voted on it.)

While I’m usually leery of integrated single-vendor solutions to complex information management problems (having personally experienced the clunky nature of many proprietary CMSs), I found the presentation by their chief information officer lucid and exciting, demonstrating a real understanding of the importance of open formats and usability. After summarizing the software’s features, he described the usual observed benefits:
1. Improved “customer” experience (his word)
2. Improved transparency
3. Growth of interaction typically by 6-60% in one year, including involving “ordinary citizens not involved in the planning process before.”

It seems clear to me that if these outcomes weren’t enough, building a broader understanding and consequently political constituency for planning can only be positive in the long term. While my recent column on the topic of Web 2.0 applications in planning received some positive interest, currently even an innovative planning agencies face an imposing gauntlet of various systems and tools. Companies like Limehouse are presenting for the first time turn-key solutions making technical sophistication realistic.

I was curious to discover the company is based in the UK, not otherwise known as a hotbed of Web 2.0 startups. It turns out the “ePlanning revolution” got started after in 2001, Tony Blair set the goal of moving all government services online by 2005. Significantly, the initiative pledged 25 million pounds to fund “pathfinders” projects, and the national government has launched a nationwide planning portal designed to interact with local governments, even including a “national planning application register” of all applications nationwide. In response to the interest and funds, a variety of British companies have sprung up selling ePlanning tools. Limehouse has moved aggressively to expand into the U.S. market, since January 2006 opening offices in Miami, Chicago, and Irvine, California, and signing contracts with cities as varied as Fort Worth, Texas, Providence, Rhode Island, and Buffalo, New York. Let’s hope the Brits’ technology injects some badly needed transparency and vitality into our often sluggish and flawed planning policies.

> LimeHouse Software
> eGov Monitor: “Planning Portal – Enabling Transformational Government
> BBC: “Online Planning System Goes Live”
> UK Planning Portal
> See also my previous post”How Can Planners Use the Web?“

Urban Planning and Web 2.0

I thought I would note I’ve posted an article about potential applications of Web 2.0 technologies in the field of urban planning to the Planetizen blog:

Planetizen: How Can Planners Use the Web?

I’ll keep a running list of my posts to Planetizen in the column on the left.

Wanted: Photos of Google’s Book Digitization Project

I’ve engaged in some speculation before about the size and character of Google’s effort to digitize the nearly 5 million volumes in the University of Michigan library as part of their plan to digitize the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library. I’ve also long intended to post this request.

I’m looking for photos of the process at work at any of these libraries. I will protect the privacy of any submitted photos to the fullest extent I am able. Please email them to rob.goodspeed at gmail.com

Mapping Development in College Park

Today at Rethink College Park we launched an interactive Google Map of all the various development projects we have written about so far on that website. It also serves as a graphical index to the site, since each point is linked to a page containing all our posts on the project.

While it’s not as robust as some of the sophisticated GIS systems used by more forward thinking governmental agencies (see the City of Alexandria’s development viewer), since we developed it in a few days at no cost, I’m pretty happy.

> Rethink College Park Development Map

Flickr Puts Pictures on the Map

I think Flickr’s launch of geotagging for photos is the most exciting development in social software since the launch of Friendster way back in 2002. If you are not familiar with the site, Flickr is basically a conventional photo-sharing website like Webshots or Snapfish rolled together with a social networking site like Friendster or Myspace. The service has become very popular because users can share photos with friends and family, search for photos by keyword, or create or join groups with ease. Last week Flickr launched a feature where users can mark where a photo was taken simply by finding that spot on an easy-to-navigate map, and dragging a thumbnail of the photo to the correct spot on the map. Flickr then launched a public map allowing all users to navigate every geotagged photo, or create searches with filters for photos taken by certain people, groups, or with certain descriptions.

What’s the big deal? According to the company blog, Flickr currently stores 228 billion user photos, and that number increases by about a million a day on busy days. Since the geotagging tool launched on August 28th about 3.7 million photos have been indexed. It seems only a matter of time before GPS-enabled cameras and cameraphones become widespread, greatly accelerating the pool of geotagged photos on Flickr or other services, and reducing the inevitable amount of human error. You can see where this is heading: billions of photos of every part of earth searchable by an infinite number of variables including date, keyword, or photographer. Looking for a photo of a landmark with a Creative Commons license? No problem. Want to navigate photos of a news event like a war or crisis by the day they were taken? Enter a few keystrokes. Hoping to keep track of or share geographic scientific data? Drag and drop your images, and choose who to share with. What other uses of geotagging am I missing?