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IHT.com: Article Discussions (2007-present)

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Created: 05/17/08

Last Edited: 06/05/08

Appreciations: 4

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Project Info

Owners

Michael Cosentino

Tags

user experience, news, design direction, development

Attribution Non-commercial
No Derivatives

From: Michael Cosentino's Portfolio

Fields:

Interaction Design, Web Design, Web Development

Article Template Redesign

The article page is the point-of-entry for the majority of visitors, thanks to search engines and RSS feeds. When redesigning the article template, I wanted to provide a rich experience that gives the reader a taste of the many features and content the site has to offer, such as featured videos, most-emailed, and the Homepage Snapshot box.

Visually, the template takes advantage of whitespace and clear typography that is familiar to readers of the IHT newspaper. It features a versatile article body area which allows a number of different photo sizes and innovative article tools such as "Listen to Article", "3-Column Format", and "Share Article." Ongoing enhancements continue to make the article-level template the hardest working page on the site.

More about the article template and its design theory can be found at the IHT Developer Blog: Who says type can’t be improved on the web? and When your home page is no longer your home page

Article Discussion Integration

When designing and developing the article comments feature, I wanted to provide a seamless user experience, while at the same time preventing user generated content from interfering with editorial content. The solution was to add a "Comments" tab to the top of any article which has comments activated. The user may leave a comment from either of the two tabs.

Rather than developing a complex commenting system from scratch, we modified Wordpress to work with IHT's publishing system using XML-RPC. In addition, daemons were created so that comment pages were published as static files and mirrored to load-balanced servers.

Homepage Discussion Call-to-Action

In addition to increased visibility and closer adherence to the new visual language of deluxe features, the number of comments was added, indicating to users the popularity of a discussion.

Reader Discussions

When examining usage patterns of commenters on IHT.com, I discovered that once a discussion link falls off the homepage the number of new comments greatly decreases. The Reader Discussions page was created so that users could go to one place to join in any of the active discussion threads.

For additional information, see http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/technology/lab/?p=10.

Reader Discussions (Detail)

Multiple sort methods are a key feature of this page's functionality:

"Date" allows users to browse threads in reverse chronological order from when they were originally published, "Recent Activity" displays the most recently active threads at the top, and "Most Comments" displays the most popular discussions from the past 60 days.