So there’s a new screen in town, but is it any good?

New user interface elements

There’s some really great design elements on the new Independent website.

This will be familiar to readers of the New York Times, but the addition of tabs under which content has already loaded is a nice feature. The Breaking News box on the homepage uses tabs with some underlying AJAX or plain old JavaScript/DHTML. This means that a click doesn’t force a full reload, meaning faster access to content. Nice touch.

Sliding news

There’s also a nice sliding news interface element which is quite cool. It allows you to skip through headlines, again without forcing a page reload

What are the benefits of the new UI elements?

So far, these elements certainly have a WOW factor, but what is the point?

In my view, designing for a content-rich site like a newspaper website can be a tough job. The challenge is lots and lots of content, all vying to be “above the fold” but with very little screen real estate particularly before we start to include advertising. What normally happens then is content and advertising compete for the user’s attention. So here’s the main benefit: better access to content

There’s also some great content in its own right, the Editor’s Choice, the Most Popular (a self-fulfilling prophecy?).

Again, another example of well thought out navigation is with the World News section on the homepage. Main headline and the top stories, but also links to region-specific world news. Other improvements to the navigation throughout are the “Related articles” and “Also in this section”.

Web 2.0 (At risk of death of death by a thousand clichés)

With Boo.com relaunching over the last couple of weeks, there’s a lot of Web 2.0 in the air. The Indo have taken some of the best elements and the ones we’re getting most used to from the world of blogging.

There are RSS feeds for every section.

Indeed, not just an RSS feed for every section, but for subsections too. For example, I’m not too interested in soccer or the Gaelic games but that’s okay, I can just subscribe to the Rugby feed (RSS).

User generated content

Along with “Web2.0″, “user generated content” is being mentioned ad nauseum but while the Indo haven’t gone down the blog route per se, they have opened some of their articles up to reader comments.

My favourite feature: less intrusive advertising

In the previous incarnation of the website I think advertising often won out at the expense of the reader’s experience (remember those sly overlay ads jumping out at you over the article you were trying to read?).

It’s great to see this recognised and addressed in the new design and it’s an obvious point worth mentioning explicitly: you can’t focus on advertising revenue at the expense of the user experience.

So, for me the real benefit of the new design is reader-friendly access to content.

At first glance, I’m giving the Indo the thumbs up. What do youse think?