After years of discussion, design and hard work from our developers, Daily Kos is launching a new front page. This story will outline the motivation behind the changes, so you understand why we did what we did, and then give you a chance to provide us with feedback. All criticism is welcome!
Design Goals
It has been clear for some time that the blog format has become a thing of the past. There is a simple elegance to showing the most recent news at the top of the page, but the blog format fails in many other regards. The most recent news clearly is not the same as the most important news. Community stories and other important site features are crammed into nooks and crannies surrounding the main staff front page blog column. Finding interesting stories requires scanning past a large amounts of story text when titles and story images are already carefully crafted for you to choose to read it or not. Publishers on the web have moved on from the blog format, and for good reason.
Stepping away from the blog format required us to identify what opportunities a redesign might present. Here are the goals we came up with after much deliberation:
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To communicate what Daily Kos is all about. We are a news, community, and advocacy organization with many ongoing initiatives intended to effect political change: “News you can do something about.” Separate sections on the new front page reflect the diversity of our initiatives.
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To grow the community. The new front page should provide new users with a suite of ways to inform themselves about and engage in progressive politics. Included here is a mobile-first design strategy to account for the half of our traffic which comes from mobile devices.
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To create a launching off point for users to find great content. To do this we sought to increase the legibility of the front page, to create places to showcase content from more writers. We are hoping that we can make it easier for readers to find a lot of interesting content quickly.
How to Be a Beta Tester
The process is pretty simple. Just take a look at our work-in-progress new front page, then leave feedback in the comments on this story. We are open to all feedback that might help us succeed with the goals we listed above.
The beta is a work in progress. You will see bugs. Parts of the new front page are incomplete. We will be constantly integrating your feedback to better improve the product. So instead of getting angry or upset at something you don’t like, take this opportunity to tell us how it might work better. We obviously can’t promise to adopt all suggestions, but this isn’t the first time we’ve done this. We’ve integrated a great deal of user feedback in every single redesign we’ve ever done.
Also, we are taking accessibility very seriously in this redesign. We are especially interested in feedback from people with visual impairments, or using specialized accessibility equipment like screen readers. Everyone should be able to access our content, period.
The design process has been a fulfilling, introspective exploration of what exactly Daily Kos is, how best to communicate that understanding and make everything on offer accessible and approachable. We are excited to open up the process and hear what you have to say.