CNN rearranges the furniture
The new look CNN.com went live a few hours ago. The launch was carefully planned with previews appearing over the last week on several sites including Media Guardian.
CNN say the new design places greater emphasis on story telling and video. They’ve certainly gone for that as the central splash is dedicated to a feature video while breaking news and headlines are found in the left hand column.
CNN Health article design
It’s a bold move to lead with a feature video but I expect that’ll change when big stories break. But CNN’s a TV broadcaster where are the links to live streams?
Talking of TV, I find it puzzling that this change is out of step with CNN’s on air graphics.
The new site has much more in common with CNN International’s superb TV brand of the last 3 years which was designed by London agency Brand 42.
It was modern, clean, angular, flat and unshaded. It was agreeably spaced and used Helvetica. Unfortunately it’s been dumped in favour of horrible American-style idents which are at best 3D, shiny and wooshy, at worst garish and tiring.
Apart from the colour, I much prefer the previous header which lives on atop international feature pages such as this one for CNN Business Traveller.
Business Traveller with old-style header
I find navigation is much clearer on this old header thanks to a well designed grid of links. There’s also clear links on the right to TV, video, iReport and mobile services.
In the new design the link to iReport, CNN’s site for user-generated content, is still there but almost impossible to find. The TV link’s been relegated to the footer which is a very strange decision if you think about what CNN’s known for.
However there are a few improvements on the site. The article pages are pleasently spaced and switching between the interantional and US edition is much easier than before.
There’s a nice interface trick to help navigate a video; as the user scrubs along the progress bar the time is displayed in huge digits. It’s neat but as I’m unlikely to be searching for a precise second, how about flashing up subtitles, chapters or headlines?
Big numbers as the user scrubs through video
There’s also a fairly slick page called NewsPulse. It uses AJAX to update the most popular stories as categories are changed on the left hand side. However it’s only available on the US version for some reason.
NewsPulse lists the most popular stories
The video player page is largely unchanged and remains far superior to that of the BBC. Whilst watching a video the user can build a playlist of what to view next from any category on the site. The player can also be embedded on blogs.
Overall I’m nonplussed. As far as I can see there’s no more video on the site than before. All that’s changed is the prominence of feature videos on the homepage. There’s much less emphasis on live news and almost no mention of the live TV channels. While the red header is bold, rearranging the links it contains has reduced its functionality.