There’s a huge difference between good design and intuitive design. Good design is not a required characteristic of a usable site. But intuitive design is.
This is a lesson the digital publishing arm of the newspaper industry doesn’t understand. The recent redeployment of USAToday is one more example reinforcing my claim. The new site is a mess, it lacks intuitive design.
The first and primary visual focus of the site is a cluttered list of headlines without a clear hyperlink metaphor (colored and/or underlined text) surrounded by social features (commenting / voting) sure to confuse the majority of readers. This feels like dead-end marketing, except there’s an ad in that position as well. Where’s the content? Where do I go?
I was getting ready to applaud my old friends for jumping into the social media arena until I saw this tangle. I’d rather read the print version.
(I still dig the new features, though.)