One of the most attractive features of the Scroll.in design is, well, you scroll down and look for what you want to read. No right clicks needed; no need to scan a home page all over to look for what is where.
Simple, clean and elegant, but a bit challenging for some readers. It also reduces the power of the editorial team to set a hierarchy on the home page.
Many online news pages still divide up their home page much like traditional media. Important articles from the main sections are clearly marked out. The online editorial team also gives the reader an ordering top to bottom and left to right of what it considers its most important offerings of the day.
But Scroll.in is different. There is no hierarchy that has been decided by the editorial team. Stories are constantly added and shuffled from top to bottom.
Each story does have its section heading (“Opinion”, “Opening this Week”, “Note Demonetisation”, etc). But that is a small strip. The size of the letters (what in the media is called the point size) in the main heading is the same for all articles, the length of the headings too are more or less the same.
The uniformity makes for simplicity in the look of the web site. But are readers made to work to find what they want? And in the process can they end up missing something? (There is the pop-down menu at the top, but then the reader is asked to make that extra effort and go looking for what may interest her. And often readers want to know the Editor’s selection of priorities in article selection, which they can’t right now.)
To illustrate, I visited the Scroll home page at 10 am on Friday, 2 December. I saw the page lead with a story on the Bangalore Bearded Club (uploaded 12 hours earlier, and sourced from Quartz, and still on top).
Rather unusual for a morning lead, I thought.
Important stories
Bangalore’s bearded men were followed by a topical and important article on the difficulties faced by workers in Delhi on the first pay day after demonetisation (uploaded at 9 am), a report on Mamta Banerjee’s complaint about the deployment of the army in Bengal (uploaded at 8.40 am) and finally (before the break with a horizontal listing of video stories) a review of Kahani 2 (uploaded at 8.30 am).
I went to the “Latest” section on the top of the page and found none of these stories there. There were instead news reports compiled by the Scroll staff on the cyclone Nada crossing the Tamil Nadu coast, Tamil Nadu’s response to the Supreme Court ruling on Jallikattu and Vladimir Putin’s hope for new ties with the United States. All news stories, none with analysis or by-lines – the stories which are Scroll.in’s strength.
The Bangalore Bearded Club had been the lead at 7.30 am as well, and at the time was followed by a review of the film Moana, then the interesting report on the song which inaugurates public functions in Tamil Nadu and, finally, by a dense opinion piece on legal aspects of the central bank’s frequent changes in rules regarding currency exchange.
I put the twin issue of a lack of hierarchy and uniformity in layout to Naresh Fernandes, the Editor of Scroll.in.
He has some interesting things to say about why this layout has come to work for readers…and promises changes ahead.
First, the editor admits that these issues of a lack of categorisation and an inability to signal hierarchy have been the subject of continuing discussion within the publication. The team is not unaware of the issues.
Second, he points out that with a majority of readers now accessing Scroll.in on their phones and increasingly so, the publication may well have been ahead of its time in its scroll-like design when it was launched in 2013.
If you try and organise a home page on the screen of a mobile device exactly as you used to do in age of the desk top, you end up with an unreadable page: too much and in too small a point size for anyone to make sense of.
A scroll then is the ideal design, and one which Fernandes says is increasingly used by digital publications the world over.
Easier navigation needed
The design of the home page may not also matter as much as before because more people read Scroll.in’s stories via social media links than by visiting the home page and clicking on a story.
There are still many who do read Scroll on the desktop and perhaps come directly to the site as well. What of them, even if they are a dwindling number? Fernandes recognises there is a challenge here, especially because the constant reordering of the stories on Scroll.in’s home page may mean readers visiting the site later in the day end up missing important articles posted in the morning. Those stories may by then have gone two-three scrolls down.
The good news from Fernandes is that the editorial and tech teams have been looking at all these issues and a new design is going to be rolled out by the end of the year. This, the Editor says, should help “our readers find the pieces they’re looking for easily and that they discover other articles of interest too”.
I look forward to the new look and hope it retains the strengths of the existing design, gives readers easier routes of navigation – and tells us what the editor thinks are the important articles of the day.
The Readers’ Editor can be contacted at readerseditor@scroll.in