Remember when this was state of the art?
Today, I’m excited to announce that Daily Kos is introducing our new, improved front page to our community and readers. Many of you have been kicking the tires on some early features of our new design for some time now, allowing us to gather a lot of great feedback. We have made a number of adjustments based on that feedback, and we could not be more excited now to show off our work.
Design Goals and Motivation
You can find a broader look at the new front page project here, but here’s an overview:
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It’s time to retire the blog format. Online publishing has moved on from blogs for good reason--reverse chronological order of stories fails to reflect our editorial priorities. A publication tool that lets us better manage story placement on the new layout is still in the works, and the new front page design lays the groundwork for this.
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We wanted a front page that highlights the many activities Daily Kos engages in--not just our journalism, but also community stories and groups that help organize on the site, petitions and other activism campaigns, fundraising, elections and endorsement work, and the work of our nonprofit affiliate Prism. The new front page will be an index to all the great work that makes Daily Kos what it is and will provide many ways for people to get involved in progressive politics and causes.
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Mobile! Half of our traffic now comes from tablets and phones. It is time for us to provide a first class user experience on these devices.
Feedback from Community and resulting changes
We received a lot of feedback regarding how you all use the front page to get to content you’re most interested in, and we made the following adjustments:
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More items in the “Latest Community Stories” section
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Every section now has a link out to a comprehensive list of associated content. So, if you’d like to read every story Prism has published, you’ll see a link in the Prism section to a list of all the stories Prism has published.
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The ever-popular “Trending News” section now has its own distinctive appearance to help readers find it quickly.
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We rearranged the sections on the page to shift the freshest content towards the top to give you quick access to our latest stories.
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Links to stories you’ve visited will have a different appearance versus links to stories you’ve haven’t read yet to help readers quickly locate new or unread content.
Rollout Process
As a way to ease our Community into the website transition, we are going to avoid a forced switch to the new site en masse. Instead, we will be randomly choosing a small group of users who will be switched over to the new format, and we’ll provide an easy way for those users to override this as desired.
If you would like to give the new front page a try yourself, you can find an item in the user dropdown menu located at the top right of most every page on the site that allows you to choose which version you prefer. Switching back to the old version is just as easy--just select the option in the user dropdown menu. Over time, the number of people randomly assigned the new layout will increase as we adapt to feedback.
Please check out the new front page layout and leave your thoughts in the comments. Your feedback helps fuel our design process.
The Future
The modular design of the new front page is simple and flexible to better facilitate a broad range of potential future customizations. With this groundwork laid, we are excited to introduce new improvements and have the ability to respond quickly to new ideas as well as changes in our reader’s online reading and site interaction preferences. But more than anything, we are looking forward to hearing your feedback and hope to be able to incorporate as much as we can in the new design.
Here’s a quick list of future plans for the front page, in no particular order:
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Election night customization: We’d like to have the live results infographic better integrated into the front page. Here’s how that could look.
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Accessibility improvements: These will begin as soon as the new front page design rollout is wrapping up, so by the time you are reading this, work should be under way. The design of the new front page is better geared toward a more accessible experience. The redesign creates a new front page that acts as an index to the entire site, providing a more navigable experience. Furthermore, the front page is organized into sections with individual items contained therein, which we’re hoping will help those using screen reader or keyboard access a faster way to find content on Daily Kos.
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Speed improvements: The new front page already loads more quickly than the old one; however, we think there are even more opportunities to slice milliseconds off load time, and we will be investing resources to make that happen.
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Alternative Top News Layouts: This item is likely pretty far down the road, but we’re hoping to create alternative layouts for the Top News sections--perhaps a larger top slot and fewer additional stories to highlight breaking news, or something more customized for election nights.
A great deal of care and a tremendous amount of work have gone into redesigning the front page of Daily Kos. Change can be challenging, but I hope you’ll find the new layout provides a serious upgrade to your experience on the site. Please share your thoughts and ideas for improvement in the comments below.
