Phine Solutions web work notes

I use reddit, digg a lot to get the latest news, watch funny stuff and you know, waste time. Besides those two, Mixx.com is another information aggregation site that I like. It has some really nice features like story tagging, drag and drop page editing and local news setup. However, it is just not one of the site that I don’t frequently go to even I like it.

I don’t really know the reason. Maybe reddit and digg has given me more than enough news and stories that I need on a daily basis. But I do think the design of the Mixx.com home page has something to do with my lack of using it and it should be improved.

Not allocating the prominent space to the stories

On Mixx home page, the logo and navigation menu take up most of space. Below it is the popular photos section. Frankly I think these small photos with no description or a headline is a waste of the space. The actual submitted stories are pushed down below in kind of in a “mix” which does not draw immediate attention. Reddit and digg, are doing much better on present the popular storied using the good part of the page and big font.

Not emphasize the stories

Social news site is about stories. Digg and Reddit, though have the totally different approch on designing their home page, both show that the stories and contents have the highest priority. Both show a lot of headlines, emphasize the titles (using the noticable font on the page), and made sure visitors can get tight into it from the home page. On the contrary, Mixx shows less and tuck them in below the fold. And the short titles are unattractive, at least to me. This may be related to the Mixx users who actually submit the story, but I think Mixx should encourage the submitters to put more content in the title like a lot of redditors do.