We're very excited to bring our users a new sports section.
 
msnbc.com and NBC Sports have partnered to create the new NBCSports.com. It can still be found by clicking on "Sports" in the left-hand navigation of msnbc.com, but once you do, you'll find a redesigned section that builds on the quality you're accustomed to.

What's
new? More sports videos in a new video player, NBC Sports personalities
including John Madden, Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Jerome Bettis and
Johnny Miller, and special content from NBC Sports' marquee coverage of
NFL's Sunday Night Football, Notre Dame, NHL, the PGA Tour and the
USGA. We'll also have more fantasy sports coverage from Rotoworld.

We
know changes like this can be hard to get used to, but we also know
change is necessary to make improvements. We hope you agree that's what
we've done, and we hope you'll tell us what else you'd like to see.
 
So fire away, let us know what you think!

About a week and a half ago we published an investigative
report on bridge inspections. I was part of the team that worked on the related
Bridge Tracker, an interactive map tied to a database that provides specific information on bridges that you would cross along any given route within the continental U.S. For you geeks out there, we had a proxy specially built to pass info from Virtual Earth to MapPoint, which contained a bridge database that we got from the government through a FOIA request. And yes, it's all harder than it sounds.

Three months of blood, sweat and tears went into this project.
I realize that's a long time, especially in the news business, but we're still
learning how to do this kind of reporting effectively and efficiently. We're
still learning how programmers and reporters (two very different breeds) can
work together to create compelling journalism.

Anyway, we think the Bridge Tracker is useful (of course!),
but what really matters is what you thought of it. Some users said they
couldn't figure out how to use it, so we've made some improvements to the
interface since it published.

Usability aside, though, let's focus on the actual features
of the map, like the "Route options" tab. Here, you can filter bridges by
inspection schedule or status. Was this helpful? Did you use this tab? Did you
even notice it?

A lot of work goes into these things and we often wonder
whether it's worth it — or how to do it better.

So what if we built a Bridge Tracker v2.0? What new features
would you like to see? What would you change, and what would you get rid of?

There are plenty of ways you might find out about breaking news: you might happen to visit a website just as something is happening, you might be watching TV or listening to the radio, maybe you get a call or instant message or email from a friend, or find out through our breaking news RSS feed or Windows Live Alerts, or hear about it from us or another person on Twitter (have I mentioned we have several accounts on various topics on Twitter?). I found out about 9/11 from eavesdropping on a phone conversation while waiting in line for coffee. Like I said, plenty of ways.

Hearing about it is one thing. Finding out more about it might be another. If you hear about it on the web, maybe you turn on your TV to be up-to-the-minute. If you see it on the TV first, maybe you call a friend to tell them about it, or go to the web to read more about it. Needless to say, there are plenty of ways to hear about something, and plenty of options to learn more about it.

We are interested in learning more about what you do when these news
events happen in order to better respond to how you get the news and
then react to it. We are also interested in figuring out how new technology and web offerings could allow for faster awareness, the ability to better track a breaking news story, and perhaps get more focused and detailed updates as the news is happening.

Think of the last few times breaking news has happened.

• How did you
  hear about it?

• Where did you go after you heard about?

• Did the topic of
  the news affect where you went to learn more about it? For example, if it was news about a celebrity, did you go to a celebrity gossip page first? If it was local news, did you first call or email someone you know that lived there?

• Did you wish there was a way to more closely follow the breaking news as it's happening? Would you want to track breaking news and get little updates as they come out? How would you want to follow it: on the web? email? widget? phone? alerts?

I'm hyped about the election process. Seriously hyped. If you asked my family, my girlfriend, my friends, my imaginary friends, and my pet goldfish, they'd tell you that I talk about it pretty much every day and they're ready for me to shut up about it already. Much to the dismay of all the aforementioned people, I have found myself thrust into a project here that has only fueled my polit-intoxication: Politics Widgets that you can embed on your blog, your Facebook account, or any other website for that matter.

Many of you are already familiar with our Candidates + Issues Matrix that allows you to rate your level of satisfaction with the positions of the presidential candidates. Another application that will become increasingly interesting as the primary season heads into Super Tuesday is our Elections '08 Leaderboard. This contest could very easily come down to delegate count if multiple candidates refuse to concede before the end of the race, and totals could change at the drop of a hat due to a certain candidates' efforts reinstate the stripped delegates of Michigan and Florida. Throw in the super delegates and it's anyone's guess where things will end up.

All you have to do is click "Grab It" and you can quickly and easily post this little guy on your blog or website. After any state holds its primary, the data is automatically updated for you so there is no need to constantly re-grab or manually refresh the data. Just think of the action you'll see on this widget come February 5th. I'm positively giddy.

Then there's this one, which you can set to display any candidate + issue combination, including randomized candidates and randomized issues, when the widget is grabbed and embedded to your site. Got a favorite candidate you'd like to promote? Want a way to quickly sum up their stance on an important issue while giving people a chance to voice their opinion on it? Spark off some lively debate with one of these.

I think the point of these widgets ultimately is to allow users to keep tabs on stories and events that they find compelling in a way that fosters greater interaction and community. What sorts of stories and topics, if any, do you find compelling enough to keep track of on your personal sites or communities in this manner? I can easily see how this could be used to keep track of compelling photo galleries, a running tab of video game and movie reviews, finance calculators, the possibilities are endless. What do you think?

I'll admit I'm not the biggest sports fan. I know that the Super Bowl is coming up (football, right?), at hockey games you watch the puck, and that Safeco Field has the best views of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound (only because I wasn't watching the Mariners game I attended). But when msnbc.com's Whine of the Week article plays the world's smallest violin for well-paid sports-babies, I can't get enough!  So how did I become a Whine junkie in a section I rarely tread?  Well, admittedly, I do work here in site UI design, so I sort of need to know where everything lives. But as I said, I'm not a sports fan, so where would a non-sporting, design-geek type find the very entertaining weekly Whine?
 
This is where you, our esteemed readers, come into play. What drives you to crossover into a topic you would have never gone before?  Did you discover the Answer Desk by John Schoen accidentally or are you savvy with our business section?  How about accessing yesterday's Nightly News netcast or clips from this morning's TODAY show?  Did you see that 150-inch flat screen television in our special coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show?

We want to know when, why and how to best showcase our exclusive content only found right here at msnbc.com.

Take a look at these design explorations below. Three of our features and coverage of a special event (the Consumer Electronics Show) are shown. 

Do you enjoy the "sample platter" of varied content from across the site in one area?

Sample platter #1 (click to see the full-size version)

Sample platter #2 (click to see the full-size version)

Or do you prefer to exploring each category's content to peruse the news and maybe find something that strikes you along the way?

Categorically correct: (click to see the full-size version)

Good or bad, we like to hear how you look at the news.

For Iowa's big night, I was the designer in charge of helping our two cover editors make the best cover-grids they could make and troubleshoot technical issues they might encounter. Turns out that I barely earned my free pizza that night because no matter what surprise political win or early candidate speech was thrown at the editors' wire-feeds and TV screens, they were ready for it!

One editor focusing on the current cover and one anticipating the next move worked like a charm! Aside from a couple minor tweaks, I was just there to admire what I thought was impossible to achieve less than a year ago: editors making light-speed changes, big and small, to a visually complicated cover without the intervention of a designer.

The media editor was able to constantly switch to better photos  as they became available. It was amazing to watch everyone in the newsroom pulling together to beat the competition and deliver up-to-the-minute coverage, and I think we did just that. In terms of layouts, there was a bit of planning, too, and it was really helpful to have pre-made layouts to choose from in different situations. Looking back, I wish we had changed the overall layout a little more often throughout the evening. But for a first time dealing with constantly breaking live coverage for a whole evening, we can't be too picky. There's always a next time.

We have a new tool that takes screenshots of our cover every time it's changed and, as I was reviewing all of the different versions of that night, I was pretty surprised at how alive it really was the whole time. One of our media editors (Thanks, Meredith!) made a small animation with all of them for us to get an idea of what kind of work goes into the cover. Wow! Photos are changing left and right, getting better and better, headlines are being tweaked, deck shortened, mistakes fixed...mistakes? What mistakes? All of that so that when you come to our site, you see the best we can possibly offer at that minute. Take a look at it and see all of the changes that occurred in the span of a few hours and think that when you came to our site, you only saw one or two snapshots of those and probably took it all for granted.

So until this year, what we had at MSNBC and other news sites was the freedom to change our lead story five, even 10 times a day. For all-evening events, such as caucus nights, we could switch the lead a couple times but we really had to focus on the big story. We were not able to put the light on interesting moments of the evening because it just wasn't technically possible to do it well and barely worth doing it anyway for only 10 minutes.

Times have changed. And that night, as we looked at our competition working in an almost static past, our coverage was alive, always new and updated. Like the others, we always had our lead story in a prominent spot, but we had much more to offer: live coverage as it unfolded, with live video, live photos, live updates, live live live!

Is this what you want to see from us in the coverage of an event, such as the Iowa caucus? What are your thoughts after watching the animation? Is all this worth it to you?

It's a concept that we all learned as tykes in the sandbox with our first red wagon or dump truck: it's good to share. Now, in this fanciful web 2.0 future (though I'm not yet convinced that web 2.0 has grown up all that much since kindergarten), sharing takes on a whole new meaning. A host of social bookmarking and networking services allows anyone to save, post and describe links publicly and amongst their friends, on sites like del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Digg, Facebook and Newsvine.

As we prepare to rethink the story pages that make up the bulk of msnbc.com, we want to know how our readers use (or don't) these types of social sites. Most sharing sites have special interactive bookmarks or browser plug-ins that help users save web pages as they surf. Some sites, including many of our competitors, even sprinkle their pages with icons encouraging users to "Digg this!" or "Facebook that!" My favorite collection of share this badges comes courtesy of Add This.com, who have abstracted the concept into a widget - that's right, there's a cottage industry for adding social network icons to your site.

Now comes the part where you share with us. Do you use a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia, a social networking site like Facebook or a social news site like Digg or Newsvine? If so, how do you add (or digg or seed) content to the site - with bookmarklets or browser plug-ins? If you do use one of those social sites, do you ever click on icons embedded in a web page itself?

And those of you who don't use a sharing site, what do you think of those icons? Are you annoyed by all of those extra, unexplained icons on the page? Do you just ignore them? Do they make you curious about what all the fuss is about - curious enough to sign up for a site like Digg?

Let us know what you think in the comments. We've got our own ideas about putting social network badges all over the place, but we want to hear from you. We can be an opinionated bunch about design, but we keep a pretty open mind. I'll follow up in a few days with some thoughts and responses to the comments you leave.

New
homepage –
check

New
video player – check

New
Nightly News site – check

Vacations
– check

So
what's next? Everything else. Only this time, we'd like to make changes with
you, not just for you. Think of this blog as where we all meet up, in
that:

• We'll post our early thoughts on everything from page
  design problems to new site features and even entirely new sites.
• You tell us what you do and don't like in the comments.
• Later, we'll follow up with another post, often
  including mockups and prototypes—real behind the scenes stuff.
• Your comments will again help refine our work.
• When we publish changes or launch new features, we'll
  post how they're working out.
• And we'll turn again to the comments for help with any
  problems post-launch.

Working
together just sounds more fun. So if you're in, bookmark us. Or get our feed.
Or memorize alphachannel.msnbc.msn.com. Or just look at the bottom of the
msnbc.com homepage soon for the latest post. But do come back often. We'll make it worth
your while. Totally.

NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk embedded with Marines in Fallujah last week. Starting later today, you'll be able to embed her report (or any other msnbc.com video clip) on your blog or site, like this:

Click the "Embed" button above to see how it works. Just copy the code to your clipboard and paste it where you want it, and you're good to go.

We also have a few more video updates. Some of you have asked how to use the MSN Video player instead of ours to view our clips. Here it is: http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&brand=msnbc>">http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&brand=msnbc.

Still coming for our new video player are search, rollover caption bubbles and some performance tweaks. Thanks to everyone for your feedback on the new player.

 We read every mail and post, and continue to work diligently to improve your viewing experience.

Update: Thanks to Andy over at beet.tv for his post: http://www.beet.tv/2008/01/broadcast-journ.html. He notes that he's unable to resize the embeddable player, and he's right. We decided to come out the gate at 425x339, without a scaling function. We will offer that functionality in a future release.

Home is wherever you find yourself
To help find you way back to the homepage of our site, a "home" button has been added to the beginning of the breadcrumbs on every page beyond the homepage. The msnbc logo in the top left and bottom left of the pages should always get you there as well.

Fly-out navigation improvements
I know it sounds sort of strange to say that being less responsive is better, but this may be one case where it is true. One of the complaints we heard a lot was that the fly-out navigation was a bit too quick to appear when you move your mouse over the links. We've added a slight delay to the fly-out, so that if you brush across the links the menus won't instantly appear, but if you keep your mouse over the links for a moment, the menus should appear.

And if you don't like the fly-out menus, there should be a "Disable Fly-out" button at the end of the blue list of links. We have received reports of the menus disappearing when you're trying to move over to a link in the menus, and are working to improve that so it doesn't happen as well.

Plenty of other updates
We've done quite a few tweaks under the hood to make the site load faster and look better, and to warn you when and if things aren't displaying properly. We are also working on some new interesting ideas for customized content such as stocks and sports scores which we will talk about soon, but if you have any particular ideas or issues that you want to mention, please do.

An octopus that uses coconut shells as portable armor is the latest addition to a growing list of animals that use tools.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We are the web site of NBC News, and the primary goal of our new video player is to help you experience the stories you want to see when you want to see them. We want you to have a terrific experience watching Nightly News in the morning or TODAY tonight or Meet the Press on Tuesday.

So when our editor-in-chief asked me how this blog post was coming a few days ago, I told her what I still believe: Our product should communicate itself.

The video should be big and crisp but reliably load at the speed with which NBC News crews deploy to cover stories around the world. You should be able to quickly find what you want, whatever it is: Anne Thompson on what may be the death march of the penguins, Brian Williams and Keith Olbermann on the steroid scandal rocking baseball, Willie Geist satirizing the news on our very own ZeitGeist vlog, or Hoda Kotb on why women love geeks. And, for you technologically adventurous types, you should be able to watch Hoda's geek love package on the widest possible array of operating systems and modern browsers, including Safari, Firefox, Flock, Camino, Opera and Omniweb. You will need Flash 9 if you don't already have it installed, and JavaScript must be enabled.

Here's some more enticement to go watch good video clips (and play with the player) instead of reading this: Dawna Friesen reports, exclusively for nightly.msnbc.com, on a Nairobi man's dream come true. CNBC's Power Lunch team learns what it takes to rent a Lamborghini. Chris Matthews wonders if the writer's strike is giving presidential hopefuls a late-night free ride. Countdown's Oddball, meanwhile, has an electric eel powering a Christmas tree.

If you've clicked on one of the links above and come back, I'm sure you've noticed that, despite all of the thoughtful feedback you've given us over the years, we still have advertising in our video player. A few notes on that: First, my cat needs to eat. Second, and far more importantly, it's not free for NBC News to gather important news in difficult places. Third, look for some real viewer-centric innovation on this front soon.

Still reading about the player instead of playing? Here's a compromise: get all meta and let msnbc.com's Dara Brown guide you through our new player, from within the player.

If you're still here, below are some tips on what you should check out when you finally do go watch some clips.

When you launch a video, the list of thumbnails and headlines to the left of the player is your current playlist. You can scroll it and click on a thumbnail to switch to that video, or click the little blue + sign to add it to "My playlist."

To the left of the playlist is the navigation, where you can browse for the videos you want. Up top are, um, top videos, then most viewed videos, weird news and the playlist you have started to create with the little blue + sign. Below that are categories that match the sections of our site, from U.S. news to Travel. Click on the "Entertainment" button to get the latest clips in that category — or roll over it and click "latest clips" to get the same list, or navigate right to topics like "Television" or franchises like Countdown's "Keeping Tabs" or clips from Access Hollywood. The navigation works the same way under "Shows," where you can browse clips by the NBC News broadcasts they come from.

The related links and controls below the player should be pretty intuitive, but you may be a bit surprised when you click the full-screen button, which is my favorite part of our new experience. The overlays you first see at the bottom — the controls — and the left — the navigation — will disappear, but you can always bring them back by mousing over the bottom or left of your screen. In other words, you keep all of the goodness of the player controls and navigation without leaving the full-screen experience:

You'll notice at the top right that there's a "Beta" tag. Here's why:

1.      We are aware of a few glitches with the player but suspect that you might find some more in the coming weeks. All of the research, focus groups, hallway conversations, designing, engineering, doughnuts and testing in the world don't guarantee full success in the wild world we work in. So we ask you first for a liberal dose of feedback and second for a pinch of patience as we keep cranking to get this as perfect as we can.

2.      We're still chasing in some very important details. Namely: Search (you can, of course, search for our video in the fine interface at MSN Video, our parent and steadfast partner), Embed (coming soon, we promise) and Live (for a little while, at least, our Live video will play outside of this experience).

Please send us feedback and comment away.

Yes, I am invoking Al Green to try to spread a little peace, love, and understanding to everybody.

In case you get the impression otherwise, we are reading every single comment and e-mail that gets sent to us. We understand that a big change can cause confusion, unfamiliarity, and even contempt, but please know that we are taking every question and concern into consideration. If the comment you have left isn't showing up, it's not that it isn't being read or addressed, it's probably that it's something we already know about and are doing something about.

We have made quite a few adjustments and improvements to the site in the last several days based on your feedback and questions, and I'd like to mention a few in particular.

Local news, sports and weather
One of the latest things we've done is update the page where you can personalize your news. It hadn't been changed for several years and even allowed you to sign up for features that aren't on the site. Any personalized settings you had made before should still be there, but we've changed the form so it should be cleaner, easier to use and most importantly accurately reflect the choices you have.

Your local news, sports and weather choices appear in several places: the current weather conditions should appear in the top right of the homepage, and the weather forecast should appear in your "Local news & weather" slice further down the page. Your local news also has its own page and so does the weather. The sports scores for any team you have selected are available in the "My news" tab on the homepage.

Your stocks and market data
Your personalized stocks are still there, they have just moved into the tabbed box near the top of the page. On the homepage, they are in the "My news" tab, and on the Business section, they are in the "My stocks" tab.

Market data should now be showing up under the "Business" slice on the homepage. The Business section has the markets under the "Stocks & economy" slice, as well as a prominent graphical representation in the top right of the page.

Launching videos and slideshows unexpectedly
Trust me, you're not the only one that wants to know what you're clicking on before you do. We are doing as much as we can in order to put a word, label or icon next to anything that does not launch a standard text page. We know there are some areas of our site that are so inundated with video that it's confusing, and we are working to make things everywhere as clear as possible.

Shortcuts to the fun stuff
We've added a list of links to the bottom of the left-hand navigation that takes you to some of the more popular and requested things, such as Sudoku, the crossword puzzle, comics, games and more.

The fly-out navigation
If you don't like the fly-out navigation, underneath the main list of categories in the left-hand navigation there is a "Disable Fly-out" link.

If you like the fly-out navigation, but just maybe not how it behaves, we are investigating how to improve it to make it a little less, um... responsive.

If you can't see much of anything on the page, or the tabs don't work, or the local news and weather isn't showing up
This is probably because Javascript has been disabled on your web browser. (Much of the site's functionality was and still is based on this programming language, which is native to most -- if not all -- web browsers.) Javascript may be disabled because of a virus-protection program on your computer, but is more likely due to a security setting in your web browser settings that can be enabled. If you need to enable Javascript in your browser, NASA has a pretty good resource on how to do it... don't worry, it's not rocket science.

Another reason personalized settings may not be showing up is that your browser needs to be able to accept cookies. Google has an excellent resource on how to enable cookies on many browsers.

Anything else that I didn't cover?
Please leave a comment if you have something that I didn't cover. I will read them all, and try to publish and respond to as many concerns that haven't been answered as I can. You should also know that we have a help, technical support and troubleshooting page, which may already provide the answer to your question, and which also provides ways to contact us about your problems, suggestions, comments, and concerns... and maybe even some kudos.

So, it turns out that more than a few of you are aware of the command+U key combination in your browser (for the non-geeks in the house, that's a common keyboard shortcut for View Source). And a few of you have even noticed that, despite our efforts to write the best code possible, the HTML markup still leaves much to be desired. For instance, the site doesn't validate with the W3C and, a far greater sin, doesn't even bother to declare a DOCTYPE. How, some have asked, can we say that we care about standards when we are missing these fundamental pieces?

The short answer is that msnbc.com is eleven years old. We have thousands of legacy pages that date back to the time when Netscape 2 was the dominant browser in the marketplace. We're working on solutions to get this content into our new, more flexible system, but if we'd waited to port everything over, we'd be declaring a DOCTYPE of HTML 6.0.

The longer answer is a bit more complicated. We could, of course, just leave legacy pages without a DOCTYPE and carry on, boldly into the future, but some pages (like stories) still use components that don't expect a DOCTYPE and break the page rather horribly. We're also having to reconfigure our CMS to support DOCTYPES properly - a task that's actually more difficult than writing a line of markup at the top of the page. For instance, to be XHTML compliant, we have several dozen legacy bugs to fix to be considered valid XML. I'm personally lobbying for HTML 5, so, Safari 3 users, get ready.

Then there's the classic problem of design and development disconnection. The site architecture actually supports having a DOCTYPE right now - I could pick one from a dropdown, hit republish and make the world a better place. In fact, when I first fired up TextMate to write the first draft of HTML that would eventually become the new site, I specifically chose HTML 4.01 Transitional. Why? Because it makes my job easier. Using a DOCTYPE makes bad browsers behave, at least a little bit. Not using a DOCTYPE has made life harder for all of us working on the site markup because it means we have to work around the various quirks of that perpetual thorn in my… side, Internet Explorer. But we ended up not designing with a DOCTYPE because we weren't sure that feature was going to make the release and had to assume the worst in order to make our deadline. Declaring a DOCTYPE right now would actually break the site in some browsers because of these workarounds. Believe me when I say, I would've slept a lot more, and probably have at least a little bit more hair on my head, if appeared at the top of our homepage.

Like anyone else who's eyes haven't glazed over by reading this far down, I'm a geek. I know it's easy to fire off a quick blog post and become righteously indignant about these sorts of things (guilty). Again, I ask for your patience and understanding. We know what needs to be done, we actually do this stuff for a living (some of us for fun, as masochistic as that sounds). We're working hard to deliver the very best site possible, inside and out, I promise.

It sure seems like I have spent the whole day writing, talking and thinking about MSNBC.com and its new Portal to Progress. This evening an associate asked me if I could write a comprehensive article about what Newsviners might think about this refurbished site. At first I was struck with pride at having been asked. On second thought I began to fear the return of my old nemesis; writer's block any time I was asked to produce a special item. On further reflection I began to realize I owed it to Newsviners to do my best to represent what I felt would be their views of the new site. Thinking even farther down the line I began to question why anyone would think that Newsviners would have a viewpoint that differed greatly from Joe/Jane Reader as they surfed along and came upon the site. There is a difference.

How are Newsviners different? They are different because they spend much of their time within a community that has grown and developed because they felt a need for something more in a News Site than the standard fare. They also had developed a stand off position vis-à-vis Main Stream Media (MSM) and the growing establishment of Citizen Journalists (CJs). They had built a wall of distrust or disaffection with MSM that precluded them from participatory contributions to the established publishing sites. They had lived a period of learning and enlightenment that carried them far beyond the normal give and take of social news sites but left them wondering for a way to proceed in this new world of on line news, community and existence.

Along comes MSNBC.com and its new interface with the world. Finally an MSM organization willing to accept the incursion of CJs. Finally the best of both worlds given an opportunity to join forces for the benefit of all. It is in this light that I now recommend MSNBC.com to all my Friends and friends at Newsvine. AND to all those would be CJs who are chomping at the bit to participate in a meaningful way on a fully functional Internet News Site. MSNBC.com has opened a gate of opportunity for all of us. It has done it in a very sophisticated manner with all the whistles and bells we have all come to appreciate. Where the MSM site lacks direct input, that facility is provided through their Community Page which leads you right to Newsvine.

I see a grand future opening before us. We are now able to direct our destiny and efforts toward the chronicles we so love to inscribe. We can now take advantage of an organized system that brings us before a world wide audience to succeed or learn to accept something less based on our talents and willingness to work. We can be masters of our future through the proper and proficient use of the space provided us by the Newsvine/MSNBC.com group.

I did not spend a lot of time telling about the formatting and utilities available at MSNBC.com. This is due to the fact I recognize the ability of Newsviners to discern the fantastic and elaborate facilities put at our disposal. It is up to us to learn its nooks and crannies and to appreciate the effort that has been put forth to create the site. Thank you MSNBC.com for being here. We appreciate your efforts.

Thanks, Jerry Firman (oldfogey)

Friday was a great day for news images and multimedia on MSNBC.com. We launched a redesign that puts visuals – slide shows, audio slide shows, videos and Photoblog – front and center in the news we publish each day.

So, you may be wondering how to find your favorite features, like "The Week in Pictures" and "Space shots." Or perhaps, how to find the latest slide show we've published. All of these are easier to find in our redesign.

Where did the "Multimedia" button in the left menu of the site go? The multimedia button has been renamed "Photos." The "Photos" front was redesigned to help you find more of the images, audio slide shows and original video that interest you through thumbnail images and organization into topics.

Where can I find the most recent slide shows MSNBC.com has published? Check out the "Photos" tab in the "Explore" section of MSNBC.com's redesigned cover. Also, as you scroll down the page, you'll see various topics of news, and each one has a "multimedia" column to show you the latest videos, slide shows and interactives. In addition, the newest slide shows are also available on the "Photos" page, at the "Top slide shows" tab.

Where can I find my favorite features, like "The Week in Pictures," "The Week in Sports Pictures" and "Animal Tracks"? A great way to find these is through our "fly out" menu, shown below. You activate the menu by hovering your mouse over the "Photos" button in the left menu of the site. Or check out the "News photos" section for "The Week in Pictures," The "Sports photos" section for "The Week in Sports Pictures," the "Entertainment photos" section for "Celebrity Sightings," and the "More photos" section for "Animal Tracks."

Where can I find MSNBC.com's Photoblog? Click on the "Photos" front page, and find the "Participate" tab. You'll find Photoblog, FirstPerson galleries of pictures shot by you, and Frequently Asked Questions.

Admit it. You saw our new homepage and it lived up to your wildest fantasies about online news presentation. Me, too. Okay, maybe—maybe—two, three people tops will say 'what were they thinking?!' Rest assured we were thinking. For about two years. Here's how it started.

The gentle evolution

This is our existing design, just wider. And with a rotating video area in the top right. And collapsible links in the center. And icons. And time stamps. Nothing terribly exciting. User groups liked it. It felt safe. But they didn't love it. Neither did we.

Culture shock

Don't tell our editors, but I really just designed this one to scare them. Or, ehm, 'challenge assumptions.' Did we really need navigation on the left? Why not scroll visual stories sideways? How about we then just list stories? Let readers dial the amount of detail up or down and sort them by importance, number of related videos, user ratings, number of comments, time published, etc? Kinda like news search on steroids.

Nobody ran screaming. They had questions. But good ones. Turns out some of them had even stranger ideas. So we put a more colorful version of the one above in front of user groups with a few more measured options.

Sample platter

User groups can be tough. They debate shades of blue. Ads drive 'em crazy. But they all agree on one thing: Put the date at the top of the page. Done!

Our first concept was just too complicated. So many options, so little time. The second, with its big rotating top stories, did better. But it didn't offer enough variety. The last one pushed a video clipping feature at the top—a big ol' box of video. They weren't buying it. Turns out news video is often an impulse item.

All these users really wanted from us was simplicity. At-a-glance top stories. Interesting pictures. An easy to find sports section. 'Tell me what's important, but give me options to decide on my own.' Hm. So we don't have to re-invent ourselves? Like into a social news site? Or one that moves instead of scrolls? Just live up to our potential by doing we what we already do, but better?  If you say so …

Closer

I started this one on a plane with some help from Curious George sitting next to me. "I don't like type on photos." Neither do our photo editors. Let's start with that. Then add flexible layouts. That way we can re-mix the news as it changes. "And you can skip all of that entertainment fluff," said George. Whoa, Hoss. It helps pay the bills. Beside, everyone has different tastes. My wife might put entertainment up high. What if I let her do that and help George pretend he only reads weighty world news? So I sketched out a series of strips. Move buttons. Resize buttons. And headlines bundled with video, multimedia and in-depth topics. Yeah, that might work.

Back to user groups. They studied the new sketch versus the current site. Chins were stroked. Brows furrowed. Silence. They were torn. That's a good sign, because the site you've already got always wins with these people. But not this time. They noticed the top layout powered by actual humans. And the resizeable, moveable strips. And more multimedia. Some—no, most—began to favor the new one. Not quite perfect. Not yet.

Outsourcing

It helps to have design buddies. In this case, we called on Cameron Moll, Greg Storey and JD Hooge to clean up our latest sketch. Solve this problem. Keep that. Make this work. Explore. Each influenced our final design. Along the way, we landed on a humble new lowercase logo and peacock-inspired color spectrum. Professional, but friendly. By now you know that below is where we ended up. Where to next? Let's discuss …

Ashley Wells is msnbc.com's Creative Director and the design lead of the redesign project

Not to be a stick in the mud, but when this blog launched a week in advance of our redesign rollout, I was wary of the idea. Why? Because when it comes to large, complex technology projects, the words "coming soon" may be the two most dangerous words in the English language.
 
Now that "coming soon" has turned into "now launched," I can breathe a cautious sigh of relief and let you in on a dirty little secret of large software development projects: They can sometimes go sideways in the late stages in the most unforeseen, horrible and completely absurd ways. Such as:

• That one "last little fix" you rushed to get in late turns out to break something considerably more important, like headlines rendering.
• You discover a performance issue that only manifests itself during an "extreme traffic" news event that, predictably enough, erupts moments after rollout (and yes, we are keeping a wary eye on Pakistan).
• An intense discussion over whether denying a late design change request amounts to a "nit no one will notice anyway" or "the usability apocalypse" turns into a conference-room-clearing chair fight.
• That one "last little task" you thought was going to take about half a day to complete turns out to take a million billion years.
• Something breaks on the live site and every group involved looks at each other and says, "I thought you were testing that."
• An asteroid hits the server farm.

All the above are strictly hypothetical, because this project went off flawlessly. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 
 

Hans Bjordahl is Group Manager of the Site Development team at msnbc.com and co-director of the redesign project.

Every evening when the hour hand passes five, most of us leave our jobs for relaxation and time with family.  For the more than four hundred years that newspapers have been dropping onto doorsteps, five o'clock has meant something different for a few folks.  Starting around this time, journalists and designers get to work designing tomorrow's front page.

It all starts with questions. "What happened today?"  "What could happen tonight?"  "How important is this story?"  "Do we have great pictures that we want on our front page?"  "What design and accompanying stories will really capture the history of today?"  When everyone is comfortable with the answers to those questions, folks get started drawing the layout of the front page.  By early morning, a designed cover is complete and ready to catch each coffee spill.

That's not the case with online news.  Every news site looks pretty much the same each day.  Business, Sports, Politics, Entertainment – aside from the stories in these sections, the design of the sections themselves is pretty uniform and, well, boring. As someone who has worked in software for a decade, I have often described this as every news site looking like one big database query.

Behold the previous MSNBC cover design (with a few helpful guides).

Aside from different artwork and headlines, you can count on the cover looking relatively similar to this every day.  Designing a front page using a template this rigid is fairly simple: the most important story drops into the lead position, the next set of important stories drops into the secondary lead area and so on.  Big news breaks?  Just drop it into the lead position, make it red and make the headline gargantuan in size.

Can you blame us?  Our publishing systems allow journalists to compose good-looking news pages very quickly.  We love databases, repetition and optimization.  We know that when we standardize on a process or procedure, there is less room for bugs.  Fewer bugs mean more sleep or, for the geekiest of us, more time on Xbox Live.

But we've grown bored with repetition and we suspect you have, too.  In redesigning msnbc.com, we wanted to build components that allow the site to – we've been saying this a lot lately – change at the pace of news.  To see what that means, here are four examples of how our cover could now look.

The number of different ways our site can look on any given day is nearly infinite.  The new msnbc.com gives editors almost as much flexibility as the blank sheet of newsprint that has recorded the day's top stories for centuries.  That flexibility is precisely how we, in technology, saw our charter in this redesign effort: build tools that allow editors to present news in the layout most appropriate to the news itself.

How is it all possible?  How can msnbc.com editors quickly compose news layouts that reflect the landscape of news on that day? The answer lies in a component we lovingly call The Grid.  If looking under the hood scares you, just think of the grid as our equivalent of Dr. Brown's Flux Capacitor in Back to the Future.

Meet the grid
The grid is the brainchild of a number of technologists at msnbc.com.  Over the past year, we've spent many late nights focused on achieving two goals: flexibility and efficiency.  Stories, videos and photos need to be presented creatively and uniquely.  As importantly, they need to get on the site quickly.  We've achieved this by dividing the composition of section fronts into two distinct stages.

In the template creation phase of production, a slew of designers break the white canvas of an msnbc.com page into cells.  These folks have ultimate flexibility: designers can size cells individually, style them and position them anywhere on any page.  This team can author these templates and publish them to the site in less than hour, at which point editors take over.

Editors then use these templates by dropping stories, slideshows, videos and other juicy bits of content into the predefined styles.  They proceed to tweak each component to appear as best as possible and, perhaps, add a photo or abstract, at which point the grid is ready for publishing.  Quick, efficient and, we think, beautiful.

We all know that when news breaks, it's never what we expect.  Because this entire template creation and usage process takes less than an hour, we can design templates for specific news events.  The grid's most exciting aspect, however, is its versatility.  Look at this shot of a new msnbc.com section and note the red regions.

Our grid component is responsible for drawing all of the regions highlighted in red.  This means that all of the flexibility editors have with the topmost region of our pages applies to the rest of the page as well.  We hope that this will lead to interesting and immersive news experiences.

All this adds up to a new way of thinking about a redesign.  We love the new look of msnbc.com, but we think of it just as a point of departure, a framework for news experiences yet imagined.  To us, the most interesting days on msnbc.com will always lie in our future.

Jeff Maurone is a Program Manager on the msnbc.com technology team.

Msnbc.com is in the midst of a major
period of expansion, highlighted by the redesign of our site.  

 
Last month, Newsvine.com became part
of our family and we announced a new sports site in partnership with NBC
Sports.com, this month we launch a major new site design, and in the coming
months will be exciting developments in our video user experience.  

 
That's an ambitious agenda for a
company of our size and if you imagine a dedicated team of programmers,
editors, designers, and managers working tirelessly to make it happen, you
would  be right. Despite the immense resources of msnbc.com's
parent companies, we fund ourselves and rely on a remarkably small and skilled
group of employees to create the site you see. At msnbc.com, the cultural
fusion of software engineers who never stopped working nights after they left
college and journalists obsessed with breaking news 24/7 has created an
environment where hard work is the norm. But hard work has its limits and with
this redesign come some very smart behind-the-scene innovations that will
vastly simplify how we create new features and future versions of the site. We
will now have the ability to change almost everything you see in a
fraction of the time and effort previously required.   

 
Will that mean more rest and
relaxation for the people of msnbc.com? 
I doubt it. The teams here have a long list of ideas they are eager to
implement, including some great suggestions from many of you. I can't wait to
see what's next.

Charlie Tillinghast is the president of msnbc.com.