A New Phase for MSNBC.com

The backstory

MSNBC.com launched their new design this week:

It was nearly two years in the making, with outside design assistance by big names in the industry like Cameron Moll and Greg Storey. Much of the redesign process was chronicled at Alpha Channel, the user-collaborative blog run by MSNBC’s team and their Creative Director Ashley Wells.

One of the posts by Wells called “Designs We Left Behind” shows the whole evolution, screenshot by screenshot, going into detail about why certain decisions were made — I found that stuff to be pretty educational.

There is also a slideshow tour to help prior users get accustomed to the new design and features. Regardless of what people think of the aesthetic changes, MSNBC took the right approach in covering their bases, soliciting advice from users and documenting the whole process.

Design Details and Features

So far the responses have been pretty positive, but users have also pointed out everything from the lack of doctype to the obtrusive javascript to the big unwieldy flyout menus. Looking at the big picture, those issues don’t bother me, given the amount of people contributing opinions to this massive project and the amount of legacy code involved. Overall, there are more net positives than you’d expect. Some things I liked:

• If you’re able to create a subdued rainbow effect as part of the branding and not have it look ridiculous, you’ve got my support. Same goes for the muted headers.
• For a massive mainstream news portal, it looks crisp, clean and friendly. Previous versions always felt a bit cold and businessy.
• The sheer compression of this much content is a challenge most designers wouldn’t get right.
• They’re finally catching up to sexier news sources like International Herald Tribune and allowing users to “pin” their favorite articles. IHT has done this for years, in slick AJAX fashion.
• Great, purposeful use of typography all around.
• They’ve finally gotten in touch with user-expectations circa 2007: granular RSS feeds, podcasts, mobile device support, widgets, and a way for users to upload their own content. Very Web 2.0 without being all dorky about it.

I don’t know how often I’ll commit an entire post to praising a mainstream, Microsoft-run news portal, but there you go — credit where it’s due.

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