Statistically speaking, I only buy one newspaper a year while I'm studying. I get updated on what is happening locally via The Star Online website, and it was working fine until.... the online edition turned 10 years old. They went out on a massive redesign that was even worse than the last one.
The last one, from a user-centered design perspective, is too cluttered. There was quite an information overload, but the new edition outdid itself by having too much whitespace. Perhaps they were trying to minimize the cluttered look, but the content is still too packed together in some areas... and too far apart in other areas. This creates an unbalanced view, and my eyes never know where to focus on.
Don't get me started on their navigation bar. The old one had at least 3 distinct navigation bars on its homepage. That was bad. The new one had only one distinct navigation bar on its homepage (good) but they made them into drop-down menus (BAD). Drop-down menus disappear whenever the mouse moves away, and the user is forced to memorize the contents under each section. Worse, I don't know where to find the Columnists section, as I need my weekly fix of Mary Schneider's But Then Again columns.
(Sigh) Overall, a great disappointment. If you are a webmaster of the Star Online website, do contact me for consultation services :P I'm beginning to sound like Jakob Nielsen, the father of web usability.
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