Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

msnbc redesign

MSNBC.com just launched a redesign this week, including some personalization / customization functionality on the homepage. From a purely design perspective, though, I like the new look. It’s clean, there’s a clear visual hierarchy and they’ve done a lot with their expanded content well. I’ll be interested to see how (or if) the design of the top of the homepage changes according to the dictates of that day’s news offerings.

The redesign seems mainly confined to the homepage and sectionfronts, though the new top banner / left navigation / footer have propagated through the rest of the site. The article pages may have gotten a minor cleanup, but nothing significant.

A few observations:

• I’m a bit torn about the level of customization they offer: On one hand, I can control the display of content groupings in a pretty granular way, specifying the number of headlines displayed, where it displays in relation to other groupings, etc. But there’s no way to remove or add completely new groupings (for example, remove “Sports” or add an area based on a topic / keyword of my choice, like “Campaign 2008”).
• It’s interesting that they’ve done a good bit with personalization, but don’t seem to be pursuing the social network / comments / user participation route at all. (Especially curious given their recent acquisition of Newsvine.)
• It’s also interesting that they continue to draw a hard line between text-based stories and multimedia / interactive content — there’s very little mixing of the two in lists of headlines.
• I’m not sure if this is a change in language, or if I’m just noticing it for the first time: Section fronts are “categories,” and sub-sections within those categories are “topics.”

The creative director behind the redesign writes about the homepage’s evolution on the site’s new Alpha Channel blog about the redesign.