I was reading a story on Textually.org earlier that was about a new digital HD billboard being put up in Times Square. At the bottom was a link to other stories about interactive billboards. Looking at the list, a small image of a billboard from Yahoo! caught my eye - there appeared to be a game on the screen, hmm, interesting. I read the story and it in fact was a game. It was hard to tell though because the image was so small, so I navigated to the original story on Adweek.
In the same vein of blake8086's post, here is a crude miniaturized breakdown of what was presented to me:
The green is what I wanted, the blue is what I already knew from the Textually story and the red is what I don't care about. That's all there is. That's the only picture size available in a story about a large-scale, outdoor interactive digital billboard. No click to enlarge, no slightly-larger gallery, nothing. It's sort of amazing there is even a photo. I've seen countless stories that describe some tangible object or past event and yet there is no image. Why is this acceptable? It's great if Mr. Joe Journalist can effectively paint a picture with carefully chosen words, but how about just showing us a picture? If I have to go look it up on Google Images then your design has failed because you have now given me an errand.Also, it seems sort of ironic that the ads here take up significantly more real estate than the entire reason I went to the page in the first place. I guess that happens when you run a news site about the advertising world.
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) recently posted a blog entry saying that he believes the printed newspaper will cease to exist in the "time it takes for most people to upgrade their cell phones two more times". I have no idea how to judge his projected time frame, but I do agree that we are headed down that road (especially with things like electronic paper making way for rollable display devices and the growing wireless infrastructure). Whenever this happens, I hope the news providers will have realized that shitty design just won't fly.
