The Telegraph is a news platform catered towards the middle class. 'By people who know their own minds, for people who know their own minds' as the Telegraph motto expresses. Before we dive into the brief its essential for me and Lo to understand Telegraph as a brand. We need to take a look at their current digital news platform and see how their design aesthetic and content are informed and catered for their specific demographic. What's their user experience like on their current news site. It's it functional? Can the user navigate through the site without an issue and are there any improvements? As I've already mentioned in the target audience blog, the Telegraph is aimed at upper class people with loyalist readers from the ages of 30+, so the user interface should be modern and sophisticated to represent an intelligent reader.
Below is both the mobile and app version of the website for The Telegraph. The first problem I encounter is what I should be using? Should I be using the mobile site or the app version? Is they're a clear difference? This should be instantly clear on the site because if the app site is better in terms of user journey then The Telegraph should be directing readers to the app version.
The first two images below are from the mobile site. It's evidently clear that because The Telegraph represents an older readership the site aesthetics are going to be relatively modern with any interaction aspects kept to a minimal. I found navigating around the site very straight forward effortless with the use of highlighted colour used as indications for either call to action buttons or to highlight important keywords or headlines. The older generation isn't as tech savvy as the younger generation so that's why you wouldn't find any interaction or animation around the site. Older people are more stuck in their ways so anything to different from the broadsheet could become confusing for the reader. Impacting the impressions on the site, therefore creating a snowball effect as readers won't be engaging with their promotional materials or subscriptions.
The look of the site is very much stripped back not evolving much from the physical broadsheet. The site is text heavy with visuals to go with the text. The use of a serif typeface with the formal language of the articles demonstrating class and professionalism, again representing their target audience.
The images below are from the app version of The Telegraph. The layout is pretty much the same apart from a few added features like downloading articles and switching between 'top stories' and 'My stories'. The biggest issue that I've seen with nearly every news site is what I call the 'link dump'. The link dump if located at the bottom of the article page after the news story and is where the news companies place links and other sections of the site without any design decision or thought behind it. It’s a shame because the beginning of the article page everything is though through well designed but as you get to the bottom it seems like that's where no-one in the design teams knows how to organise the miscellaneous section below the article. It's create an unattractive dumping ground for irrelevant stuff to go.
If it looks unattractive then people won't click on any of it creating a pointless section of the site. There is so much potential to really think about how news sites can organise the bottom of the article page to make it more attractive and to make sure users click on to other parts of the site from the article page and not just read the article and leave.
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| Dumping of links. Unattractive, dull and repetitive. |
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