

BBC News website: responsive design in beta - robin_reala
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/News-responsive-design-in-beta

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sthulbourn
I'm one of the developers working on this site.

For those of you who are on a wanting to see the site mentioned in the page:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news?view=beta](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news?view=beta)

You can ask us about any of the technical points of our site here:
[http://github.com/bbc-news/feedback](http://github.com/bbc-news/feedback)

~~~
nodata
Not sure if those images are supposed to be full of jpeg artifacts. Examples:

[http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/130/media/images/52908000/jpg/_...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/130/media/images/52908000/jpg/_52908535_bn-448x252.jpg)

[http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/130/media/images/73349000/jpg/_...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/130/media/images/73349000/jpg/_73349959_73349958.jpg)

[http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/130/media/images/66387000/jpg/_...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/130/media/images/66387000/jpg/_66387685_66387684.jpg)

Also the top\nread|watched bar has a font that is very difficult to scan, at
least under Firefox on Linux.

~~~
sthulbourn
We use pretty aggressive compression on images at the moment, so yes. We need
to start work on guessing the user's network speed so we can show higher
quality images.

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callum85
I read the negative comments before looking at the site myself, and was
expecting to agree with them. But now I've looked at it, I think it's pretty
good.

The design could do with a bit more 'refining', but then so could the old one.
It's just the old one has the advantage of being something that millions of
people have already gotten used to. It's hard to fairly compare your feelings
about something you use every day vs something new.

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yread
I like how the feedback in the comments is unanimously negative.

>Please DO NOT spoil the easy to read nature of BBC news page on the PC
desktop

>please refine the design at desktop resolutions

>Seems to me that content starts to disappear or change whenever there's a
'responsive design' revamp.

>A huge backwards step for desktop users

>Looks like another redesign which will result in reduced service for anyone
who uses a desktop

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redact207
A lot of valid points on the downsides to the design.

But from a progressive enhancement perspective it's an interesting approach.
The users who benefit from this are the ones with a slow connection and old
phone, with the desktop + broadband users paying the penalty.

As a desktop user, I don't like progressive enhancement especially as the
content I'm trying to read bounces around the page as it gets built.

If the goal is to optimise the user experience, I would have thought a nicer
way (for the user, not so for the developer) would be to create content
bundles for the different responsive modes and get it served up server side
based on interrogating the user agent and looking up which support html5 etc.

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nly
I'm curious how this design is responsive when, on the desktop, it still
doesn't utilise my browser windows full width. It feels even more plain and
full of whitespace than the current site.

The screenshots in this post don't show the vast swaths of whitespace on
either side of the page. Is everyone inside the BBC still using a 800x600 CRT?

~~~
stuartmemo
An extremely wide site risks becoming unreadable due to long line lengths, so
a max-width will be set to prevent this happening.

~~~
nly
BBC news pages don't tend to have long bodies of text though. Even news
reports tend to be concise. There's nothing to stop full articles and analyse
from columnists being columnar, but imho the news front page could use space
more effectively. It's currently just a big list of headlines, and when I go
in to a category that interests me (like Tech or Science) ... i just get
another list of headlines. How about two columns at least?

I've used Firefox's zoom feature to make it fill the page, and it'd look fine
if they did so... you'd just get more on screen.

I can't imagine how the vertical use of space is further burdened for US
readers who have ads to contend with.

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Kartificial
A representative of the technical team did a talk at the Mobilism conference.
Which was my favourite of all talks that conference. Interesting stuff.

Video:
[http://vimeopro.com/mirabeaunl/mobilism-2013/video/68025331](http://vimeopro.com/mirabeaunl/mobilism-2013/video/68025331)

Slides: [http://www.slideshare.net/jcleveley/mobilism-2013-a-story-
of...](http://www.slideshare.net/jcleveley/mobilism-2013-a-story-of-how-we-
built-responsive-bbc-news)

------
Grue3
Seems like there's way less content visible on desktop in beta mode. It's not
responsive design, it's just lowering the design to the lowest common
denominator.

~~~
callum85
I'm pretty sure it only seems like it. If you compare the sites side-by-side,
it's all still there, it just feels less crowded. Which is a good thing.

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gabemart
Direct link to responsive site:
[http://m.bbc.co.uk/news](http://m.bbc.co.uk/news)

~~~
techwizrd
That link still loads the normal site for me. Is the beta invite-only? I
didn't see anything in the article about a link to the beta.

~~~
stuartmemo
If you scroll to the bottom of
[http://m.bbc.co.uk/news](http://m.bbc.co.uk/news) and click "mobile site", it
forces the new responsive site.

~~~
gabemart
Ah you're right, it was just giving me the mobile site because I already had
the cookie I guess

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edward
The business page has a headline: "Energy firms told to hand back Â£400m". Is
character encoding really that difficult?

Screenshot: [http://imgur.com/Sl2Hf1m](http://imgur.com/Sl2Hf1m)

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afandian
By my count there's approximately half as much content on the new responsive
site. It feels lazily designed.

~~~
callum85
Are we looking at the same thing? I've got the new site open side-by-side with
the last, and the total amount of content looks the same.

~~~
afandian
I counted the number of items on each page (links to news stories) and came up
with 38 vs 75. I make that approx half the amount of 'stuff'.

Here's a side by side screenshot of what I see.
[http://imgur.com/HmiHhe2](http://imgur.com/HmiHhe2)

EDIT: I was counting items in the whole page. In that screenshot I count 11 vs
51, which is a greater difference.

~~~
callum85
Ah ok fair enough. There's no less content on many other pages I compared
though. And as for the amount of stuff on the homepage, I wouldn't say the old
site necessarily had the 'right' amount. I find the new design a bit easier on
the eye, easier to scan, and more conducive to delving into specific topic
pages that interest me. I don't know though, I might just be subconsciously
overcompensating for all the negative comments because I feel they're overly
harsh. It's impossible to really know how good a redesign is until you've
lived with it for a while.

~~~
Nagyman
Agreed. Looking at old and new is striking. I much prefer the new as it
focuses on the important content. The old looks like a product of organic
growth (understandable) that seeks to pack in as much on the homepage as
possible (and "Above the Fold"). The homepage isn't the be-all, end-all of a
website and should pull you in to other areas for exploration.

Calling it "lazily" designed is condescending and disrespectful of those who
put their time and effort into this. Thick skins are required for web
design/dev, but some professional courtesy is appropriate, I think. The
developers themselves are here. How about something more constructive? What
would YOU change? (OP, not callum85)

~~~
afandian
Hi there. Yes, always a balance between objective comments and what I would
say to someone's face (although the word 'lazy' is on the mild end of things).
I love the BBC, feel that their news reporting is broadly trustworthy, and
would gladly pay a license fee.

I'm talking about the homepage here.

Why did I use the word lazy?

My first impression is that the new version feels more in the direction of a
news aggregation site. Looking at it, the structure is much simpler and the
hierarchy is shallower. It feels like the relationship between content and
layout doesn't require any editorial input, like the headlines could have been
drawn from any aggregation source (I'm talking about the layout not the
content).

Looking back at the current site, it appears that editorial input has gone
into the structure of the layout. The Ukraine story leads with a headline and
then has various other pieces looking at the story from different angles.
Similarly, it feels like for the Clegg vs Farage bit the editor has said "we
want to do something about this subject, let's have a headline and some other
items about it".

That's the reason I used that particular word. It feels to me that the new
layout could be automatically generated current one couldn't, at least not
quite so easily. Ergo it feels like someone has put effort into a curated news
experience vs an automatic one. So I think I stand by using the word for that
reason.

The above is my personal impression. I may be factually wrong. But we all
respond to immediate experience don't we?

And then there's the principle of mobile first, and what happens when it meets
a site like this. There is no question that responsive is difficult to do.

Maybe I do want to see less on my mobile, and maybe that's suitable for that
medium. Allowing that to impinge on the desktop version, however, isn't
something that sits well with me (or with others by the looks of things),
especially if it means I am presented with a narrower view (one story on
subject X presented to me on the front page rather than more than one).

Different audiences exist on different mediums. I listen to BBC Radio 4 news
and the news team puts together a programme in a certain way. I've heard the
news on other less wordy BBC Radio stations and it's tailored to that
audience. I'm glad that they acknowledge that different audiences want to
consume news in different formats. It's not just the length of the story that
differs, it's the style of presentation, selection of stories, and form of
analysis. That feels like a very good analogue for the comparison here.

The argument that you should see the same content in both cases (mobile,
tablet, desktop) isn't open and shut. I see a huge disadvantage in the new
homepage on a desktop, and I can't assume that the same idea hasn't at least
occurred to some of the BBC people. To say "we need to make it work on mobile"
is a laudable aim, but to then say "and we'll make sure that looks nice on the
desktop too" feels lazy.

What would I change?

I'd have an explicit conversation about mediums and formats. And I'd have my
point of view, because I'm me.

I'd keep the desktop site as it is. Mobile is important. You can drop bits
from the desktop site to make it work on mobile. You could even do it
responsively, although that would increase the overhead.

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thedrbrian
Yes, finally the sidebar can take up a third of my ten inch iPad screen. Yes.

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mattmanser
The redesign has been complete disaster for readability on the desktop.

Go look at:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/robertpeston/](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/robertpeston/)

See how little actual _information_ they've managed to fit into the desktop
design, you have to scroll miles just to scan the stories.

The design itself is rubbish with everything seemingly randomly spaced out.

Not impressed at all.

I'm actually getting really disillusioned with the mobile first movement, what
it seems to actually mean is completely broken desktop experiences.

And bootstrap, as much as I love it, is part of the problem moving to mobile
first.

~~~
LoonyPandora
I can see zero difference in the information density between the existing non-
responsive design of that page [0], and the beta version of the responsive
design [1].

While your point that mobile first design inevitably causes a lack of
information density at desktop resolutions has some merit, it does not apply
in this case.

[0] [http://cl.ly/UFuw](http://cl.ly/UFuw)

[1] [http://cl.ly/UFzs](http://cl.ly/UFzs)

~~~
mattmanser
They have been using those blogs to test the new layout.

If you went there over the last few months you'd be asked to give feedback on
the new design.

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lclarkmichalek
Eugh, I _hate_ change

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danso
At the last newspaper I worked at, which admittedly was in a state capital,
the vast majority of our readers were during the work hours, at their office
desktops. It's never made much sense to me the idea of treating that use case
as archaic and ancillary...except that making things "responsive" is seen as a
catchphrase of being forward thinking, something newspapers are desperate to
jump on having missed the boat for far too long

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GenesisMachines
Well that's an ambitious project for a company that just fired all it's
developer departments so it could hire cheaper workers in Salford. For those
of you who don't know Salford, it's the music of Joy Devision made solid.

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dblacc
They still have developers in London

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sthulbourn
Yes there are. I'm one of them.

~~~
Veus
Why let the facts get in the way of a good rant? :)

