I have to disagree with the previous commenter. I find the display confusing. The fact that they have to explicitly label the hottest story signals the failure of the visual cues.

In my mental model “hotness” is something that is signified using colour. Those oranges and yellows can’t help but conjure images of burning fires. But then I find from the key that colour dictates newness. Now it’s just confusing because I can’t escape from that colour-fire-hot thinking that my experience has taught me. And that means I’m having to really think about decoding the image. And the payoff for that extra processing? That older stories tend to be hotter.

Better to display a list and be done with the chartjunk.

Just discovered your blog via UXmatters. Definitely one for the feed reader.

Cheers,

Nick.

I found it easy to find the “hot” and “older” stories.

The color scheme could be problematic for some color-blind individuals, but it’s probably more useful to keep the differentiation just by the intensity of the color that varying over an entire spectrum. It’s probably easier to map story “heat” on a red to yellow line than on red to green to lavender. (And sometimes the only thing worse than variations on a single color is using the entire crayon box.)

The box and font size is no worse that tag cloud representations which behave similarly.

Ultimately, though, is it worth it? For me, no. I don’t care about what’s “hot” in terms of what others are reading. I prefer to have What’s New be in a predictable place (which it typically is, here, I think). And I prefer headlines in a list where I can scan from the same place on each line, and where I get more than three words of the headline per line.