I’ve been really interested lately in designing things to digest at a glance. Seeing that my 9-to-5 is in dealing with news, I am particularly interested in that aspect, so while I think things like Dashboard and Net Usage Index and Henchman’s Helper and Google Analytics are all interesting, the thing that has caught my eye more than any of those was this photo from the early-mid 1900’s of the a newspaper’s storefront window.

I found it very interesting to compare that scene with today’s newspapers and web sites. In the storefront window scenario, they only give you what you really need to know, and in a way that you can digest it all in a glance and move on. There are two elements per news item that are scaled accordingly: the headline is huge, and the deck is smaller and gives you just enough information to give a little context or update. Today’s newspapers and web sites are so crammed with titles and links and leads and boxes and ads, you are basically forced to skim and scan as a way to handle the amount of text thrown at you. Even the bastion of simplicity that is Google has a news page with a completely jumbled mess of links, photos, titles, decks, sources, etc.

One exercise I wanted to try was to design a news page that was made for the person that wanted to know what was going on in the world, but had very little time to do it; something similar to that storefront window that you could randomly pass by and learn what’s going on. So what I’ve done is taken the Google News RSS feed, cut it up, reordered it by the number of related articles it has in Google’s system, and redisplayed them in large blocks. This is no groundbreaking feat of ingenuity or design, but I think it does the job of telling you what the most important things are out there in the least amount of time:

The News at a Glance
(This looks completely wrong in IE for now until I fix it.)

What do you think?

Well, that was fun. After seeing some good roundups of election night graphics and a few personal tours by the designers themselves (such as Khoi Vinh of the New York Times and Nathan Borror of the Lawrence Journal-World) I thought I’d share my own rundown of what we did at Minnesota Public Radio for election night results.

First off, the big deal was the special election block on the homepage, which included a live map of the governor’s race and a balance of power for both national and state houses, both of which were updating behind the scenes without having to refresh the page.

The other big thing was the interactive results map, which allows you to see up-to-the-minute results without having to refresh, drill down to specific counties and districts, and even switch the view of the map to see the geographic strengths and weaknesses of specific parties. Notice how I didn’t have to include a screenshot of those? That’s because there’s permalinking to specific zooms and views. There’s also switching back and forth from Flash to HTML versions of the results because of that fact. Here’s a screenshot anyway:

I personally don’t think there’s nothing terribly amazing about our basic results pages, except for the fact that I consider them to be fairly readable, digestible, don’t look like pre-packaged crap from an outside supplier, and just the fact that there are a lot of pages, which allows you to look at however general or specific you want to be.

Another interesting part of our election results was the fact that we gave them to anyone else who wanted them, through our election results widget. Places who used it ranged from personal sites to political bloggers to small town papers to political parties themselves, and the customization ranged anywhere from not having to do much to a fantastic super-customized approach. There were even times were you could get our results faster from somewhere other than our own site, due to our traffic load. This may seem strange, but I think that’s kind of an awesome public service.

In general the night went rather smooth, even while having almost 10x the usual amount of traffic. The data retrieval from the Secretary of State slowed up a bit later in the evening due to a similar kind of media crunch on their end, but data still eked out along the way. I’d love to hear any comments or criticism on anything you see on the site or in the interactive maps, because hey, I hear this kind of thing is happening again in a few years.

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