Usability Spotlight: Today’s Guardian comes with a fresh user interface design Part – 2

How do users use the Guardian’s interface design?

For Phil Gyford, this meant creating a website with a unique interface design that features nothing more than a page that starts with the leading article from the daily newspaper. The date features at the very top of the page. The main navigation options are clicking right and left (for next and previous article respectively) thus meaning that users have no option but to read articles in the order presented. Users can however jump between sections (namely the main section, sport, g2, and film & music) right from what the developer has tentatively called the “sparkline/scrubber” at the top of the interface design. This same area of the interface design also indicates in red the current page as well as article length for users to be aware of where they stand in reading the daily edition.

Further considerations of this interface design

The choice in interface design works with the developer’s intention to improve the readability of the news content as there is no other clutter (in the form of links to all sorts of other articles, adverts etc.) around the article, which means that users can fully focus on one article. This consideration is of particular interest as studies have shown reading speeds on digital displays to be up to 10% lower than for traditional print products. The clean interface design of the Guardian also adds to the finishability of a day’s worth of news, something very irksome to achieve going through a traditional news website’s every subsection. A feature that I feel could be added is a calendar that allows users to jump to a specific date (for those who missed reading yesterday’s newspaper for example).