Intuition turns Science

In 1995, the team that later founded Armchair Media comprised the nascent staff of CNN Interactive. We were faced with the challenge of creating an intuitive, expandable design system for a new Web site, a new concept really, CNN.com. While the Web is a medium of infinite change, we knew we had to get it right on our first attempt. Once the CNN news machine started pumping text, images, sounds and video through the pipes, there would be no way to turn back and start over again with major architectural changes. Our design had to grow organically over time with a minimal amount of mid-course corrections, and be able to support the weight of the addition of new content sections, new technologies, additional languages and more. The challenge was not small.

At the time, the web was a gray colored newborn with royal blue veins, pixilated typefaces and graphics constrained to the featherweight size of 8K. Our early audience? College students, CompuServe users and a few intrepid companies. There were no traditions to fall back on, no behavioral research—nothing but a cup of coffee and a whole lot of intuition. — Nav bar? Horizontal? No, not expandable enough. Right side? No, can’t be anchored. Left side! — Logo? Top left! — Feature special sections across the top horizontally. Done! — Top story, left side! — The more content on the main page the merrier. We already knew that users moved into subsections through contextual content. Damn the site map, let them use the scrollbar!

Launched to positive feedback, it took our users a little while to adopt to these new ways of getting the news, but get it they did. It took CNN.com less than a week to top a million “hits”. When measurement changed from hits to page views, the mile markers whizzed by just as quickly. In January 1996, four months after it first launched, it took CNN.com a week to record two million page views. Today, the CNN sites score that much traffic in just 57 minutes.

Our system worked and not much has changed since then. CNN.com still runs on that same basic concept as do most other news and information websites. Our intuition became tradition, and now The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study has turned it into a visual science. This is a must-read for anyone involved in user-focused design, and it’s probably the most important usability study of the year: Link

(Thanks to our friends at Monumental Interactive for the Eyetrack link.)