GUI of online Newspapers - Case Study

One of the main reason why NewsPapers are striving to move to an internet edition lies in the difficulty to fit in a computer screen the content of a newspaper page even-though the size of most of newspaper have reduced during these last years (in 1999 67% were broadsheets formats, in 2005 only 58% remained broadsheets) and even-tough computer screens get bigger and bigger.

The main French daily NewsPapers, Le Figaro, (350 000 and 450 000 copies daily) seems to have found a good way of putting on the web their entire daily issues by developing a nicely done interface. The challenge of making something readable was great.

As I live in China and am a passionate of news and current affairs, I am registered to their online edition. I'll detail bellow the main structure of their online edition.

Once you entered your login and password you get to the first page of the paper, the actual paper I mean, and as we may guess, the articles are unreadable, you can read some of the titles according to the size of your screen. (See bellow image)

On the right hand-side you have tabs that allow you to chose which page you want to reach by displaying each page in a small thumbnail.
You can also click on the "display all thumbnails to get the entire issue in thumbnails. (See bellow image).

Get to the page you want and you can see that when you point your mouse on any of the pages corners, the corner folds on itself to show you that you can get to the next/previous page.
At the bottom of the interface you have this little menu allowing you to activate many functions. You can hide and show this menu by clicking on the top of it. (See bellow image).

So now I'll show bellow the 2 ways to get a closer look to the articles and being able to actually read the articles.

1) Circle with your mouth the part you want to read or click directly on it. (See bellow image)


You'll then get in a full size window (integrated in your browser window) a close up of the page at the place where you've clicked or the area that you've circled. You then get this view where you can start reading your article, you can move your mouse according to the place you want to read and it will bring you to it. You can close the window, minimize it or expand it. (See Image Bellow)


2) In the full page view, place your cursor over the title of an article and you'll get a bubble with the beginning of the article and its popularity (voted by the readers). (See image bellow).

If you click directly on the title of the article you'll bring a full size window (integrated in your browser window) of the article in a selection-able text block. (See Image bellow)


You can then chose to read it as a block of text or in a 2 column layout. (See image bellow).


So in a general way the User Interface of this online newspaper is quite well done. You can easily browse between the pages of your favorite newspaper and then get to the articles you're interested in. The reading is then easy and not eye-tiring! The nice search features are a plus and the options you have to bookmark your favorite pages quite, a good idea.

Does any reader of this blog has experienced nice User Interfaces with online newspapers? What would be the improvement possibilities? What are the limits?