We’re all aware of the issues newspapers face with the advent of the Web. They’re losing their readership to various free online Websites and blogs, thus decreasing their ad revenues.

Although most newspapers have an online presence to compete against those indirect competitors, those portals don’t draw enough money from advertisers. And even though the content is trimmed compared to the physical newspaper, it doesn’t really push people to buy the more profitable printed version.

In an effort to respond to these various issues, La Presse is now offering a new product called La Presse sur mon ordi. It’s like a sophisticated PDF viewer in which you can view scans of the printed newspaper on your computer. This allows La Presse to make money online with their paper version (it costs $10 per month) while keeping the same amount of advertisements. Although it’s a valiant effort to innovate, this new product presents many flaws.

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Are you free tomorrow night? Because you’ve just been invited to join us at the UX happy hour! It takes place tomorrow (December 3rd) from 5 to 8 PM at Laïka, located at 4040 St-Laurent Street.

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You may have noticed the growing trend of carousel navigation in Web design. This method allows you to display several headlines without cluttering your page. But do users feel comfortable with this technique? Let’s take a look at the different challenges linked to this type of navigation. First, what are the benefits of properly implemented carousel navigation?

• It saves space. It really is the main goal behind it and it accomplishes it well. You can gather several headlines under a singular carousel navigation, thus saving screen real estate.

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Search behavior evolved largely due to Google. People now assume that only the first page of results is relevant.

Pagination is often painful to use, difficult to search and arbitrary but, the alternative (displaying all results on a single page) is no better since it calls for intimidating and slow-loading pages.

Continuous Scrolling (or loading results as the user scrolls down the page) takes the best from both approaches. By displaying results onScroll, it optimizes page load, creates shorter pages and contextualizes the results which can easily be searched.

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Good design: Tickspot Errors

Tickspot is an online time tracking application. Their Website is simple, friendly and easy to use when things go well and when things break.

Error messages are clear, to the point and very hard to miss. The use of bright colors attract the eye without being too aggressive. Icons help with recognition.

(After submitting a form with errors)

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