10 Things I Like About The ABC News (Australia) Website Redesign

June 28, 2007

I stumbled upon the recently redesigned Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website today after somehow being teleported to their story about purple fluorescent frogs discovered in Suriname.

I had never seen the site before the redesign, but what I did see inspired me to write down some thoughts. I would love to see some screenshots of the old UI for comparison.

The site provides a nice write up outlining the new features in all of their web 2.0 glory.

Screenshots of the homepage and new features pages

10 Things I Like About The Redesign (in no particular order):

Interactions are plentiful, snappy, and they work. There are numerous content widgets that hide and reveal media players, preference dialogs, and story teases. They are all sharp and responsive with no annoying latency.
The color scheme is mild, and they’ve broken it up a bit by using a background texture in the left column (on the homepage).
The homepage is chock full of content, but they manage to make it look uncluttered. Elements have room to breathe and nothing is packed too tight.
The left column on the homepage contains almost 70 links across 13 topical sections and 2 promotional sections. And that’s just in the left column! Even if I didn’t come here looking for anything specific, it’s likely I’ll see something that catches my attention or interest, resulting in more time spent on the site.
Every story headline, no matter where it appears, allows me to add it to “My Stories”. In this way I can rapidly customize my news experience, cherry picking stories of interest into a basket for later reading, or to bookmark indefinitely. The feature makes good use of ajax, quietly adding each story without a page refresh, allowing me to stay focused on where I am on the page. A similar feature allows me to build up a library of “My Tags”, which can then be drilled in to for quick access to my specific interest areas.
The site employs a footer-based sitemap on all secondary pages similar to what you find on Digg, Flickr, and YouTube. I may never need these links, but they cost nothing to provide, and give me more choices when I get to the bottom of a story.
There are main sections for video, audio, and photos. I can tailor my experience based on how many of my senses I am willing to dedicate at any given time.
The audio and video sections allow me to put stories of interest into a playlist and play them consecutively. I could conceivably line up my own customized 30 minute radio or tv news program. This rocks!
The site is continuously suggesting more content to me by way of its “Hot Tags”, “Popular Searches”, and “Also of Interest” components.
The search feature is excellent, providing me with numerous ways to filter search results- something I’m very likely to need while sifting through such a large collection of content.

A Few Nice To Haves:

There are RSS feeds for each of the main navigation items (and quite a few other feeds as well). I would like to see an easy to find RSS icon on each of those section’s main pages- currently you have to go to an “RSS Feeds” page to get the feed urls.
The My Stories block will presumably grow very large over time. I would like to be able to view these items in the main content area, and possibly organize them in some way by date, tag, topic, etc. I might also like to be able to limit a search to only My Stories, which currently isn’t an option.
I had trouble figuring out how to add an arbitrary tag to My Tags- browsing the tag library was a tedious way to complete the task. If I search for a term and that term is an available tag, I should be able to add it to My Tags from the search results page.
The only UGC comes in the form of photos submitted by readers- there’s no ability to comment on or discuss anything. A section labeled “blogs” looks like a blog, but the only feedback mechanism is via private email. They’ve thumbed their proverbial nose at the entire notion of social networking- perhaps the moderation of such content would be prohibitive.

Screenshot of the photo archives page