Tuesday, April 10, 2007

CNET’s What’s Hot Grid

I honestly don’t know, and I’d like your opinions. (All 30 of you – I checked my Google Analytics yesterday…that’s how many visitors I’m averaging over the past week…)

Is this useful? If yes, is it usable?

Here’s a little more about this tool, quoting CNET:

What’s Hot gives a visual snapshot of which stories are most important on CNET News.com right now. What’s Hot is updated every time a story is published, or at least once an hour…

The bigger the block, the hotter the story. The brighter the block, the newer the story. Bright yellow means the story was just published.

I definitely appreciate their attempt to innovate in this space. And I’m not trying to damn it with faint praise. I really do think it’s kinda neat. But I’m wondering about a few things as I look at it…

• Scan: From the gestalt p.o.v., is the image as a whole conducive to quick scanning and accurate parsing?
• Use of font, position on grid, and color for encoding importance: I’m all about multi-encoding to impart information, but are these encoders working together, or interfering with one another? Maybe they’re not doing either. There’s just something that’s not hanging together for me, and I can’t put my finger on it.
• Color: Warning, snarky tone approaching…this thing’s color scheme is what my wife always accuses me of doing when I dress myself: thinking that putting on nearly-identical colors is a good thing. When I go to work with a medium-blue shirt and jeans, she tells me I look like a plumber. CNET’s What’s Hot looks like, well, a Burger King employee. Plus, the palette as a whole is way too saturated.

There’s a lot more I could say about this, but I encourage you to check it out and provide your feedback. It has a couple of other neat features that you may want to play with.

You can check it out in context by following this link. Look on the right side, about halfway down the page.

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