I ventured into the drizzle this morning to buy myself a Baltimore Sun.

I wanted to see the new Sun Magazine. It was restored to life today after a fourteen year hibernation.

I will admit to you some measure of excitement as I strode through an unexpectedly chilly rain.

Is that nerdy? Perhaps that’s nerdy.

But my paper and my breakfast were waiting for me at the store, my coffee and my couch were waiting for me at home, and nothing else worth noting pressed for my attention.

I was, therefore, excited (nerdy or no), and you might even say I was in the perfect mental state for consumption: Eager and ready to fall in love with my purchase.

“User Experience” is just a hip phrase for “how’d it go?”

Well, it went okay.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Just “okay”?

Yeah. Just okay.

Why?

I was afraid you’d ask that.

The problem with trying to explain “why” is that the answer is strung up on so many thorny bits of the modern news-reporting apparatus that to do the answer justice would:

1. Take weeks.
2. Send me quickly onto ground where I can only speculate.
3. Make this post unreadably long.

Therefore, in lieu of trying to be complete, I will try to simply follow

The First Thread of my Experience

The first thing that happened, after I picked the paper out of Eddie’s wireframe newstand, was that the slippery advertising section fell out of the middle of the paper and plopped into a heap upon the floor.

Lying there on the floor, it provides us a convenient place to start.

Advertising

First things first: I am not, at the present time, judging advertising. I am not making conclusions about advertising. I am not arguing for or against the necessity of advertising.

What I am doing, at the present time, is cataloguing the size, shape, and general outward appearance of advertising as it is presented in the Baltimore Sun.

Bring Forth the Scale

By weight, the advertising inserts of the Baltimore sun consume 44% of the thing I bought.

Without the inserts, the paper weighs 14 ounces:

The inserts themselves weigh 11:

Of course, the actual percentage-by-weight of all advertising in the Sun is much, much greater than 44%. If I cut every ad out of every page of the “normal” part of the paper, and add that to the inserts, we’d get something a great deal higher.

But I won’t do that, for what I assume are obvious reasons.

The Main Attraction

Let’s move on to my original enticement, the new Sun Magazine.

Below you’ll find a visual representation of the advertising in the magazine. A red block covers each ad, and the pages are arranged in a rough order of “less ads to more ads”.

Out of 44 surfaces available in the magazine, roughly 53% of them are employed to sell products and services.

Naturally, in the real layout, these ads are not sequestered to the end, but are instead mixed about equally throughout.

Moreover, it is important to note that the ads are not marked clearly in red. Many times they are dressed to look like stories.

So What?

Well, this ever-so-cursory analysis tells us a few things. The design of the advertising, as it currently exists in the Baltimore Sun Magazine, leads to the following facts about the reader’s experience:

1. When I open the magazine, it is better than even odds that my eyes are looking at an ad.
2. If my eyes do land on an ad, there is no quick, guaranteed way to know this has happened.

These facts are a very simple, very incomplete, but very incontrovertible part of the user experience of the Baltimore Sun Magazine, as it exists in paper form.

Back to this Morning

I got home, I filled my coffee cup, I pulled out my sausage-egg-and-cheese-on-a-croissant, and I happily sat down to browse the news.

And the first thing that happened? Someone is making a pitch to me. And then I get pitched again. And again. Ah, is this finally a story? Oh, nope, that’s a pitch that looks like a story.

I am, in short, engaged in a gentle yet very real struggle with the product I have purchased, to make it do the damn thing it’s supposed to do: deliver me the news.

This process leaves me ever-so-slightly frustrated, and my very first impression of this new magazine is flavored by the sense that the Baltimore Sun doesn’t much care whether I read their stories or not, as long as I read their ads.

Which, I am saddened to realize, is probably actually true, for someone over there.

The Hard Thing about Details is that There are So Many of Them, and So Many of Them Matter

There’s a saying in software: “Software is nothing but a collection of details.”

It’s hard to talk about the design of a user experience, because, like software, it is nothing but a collection of details. Some of them may even be quite poor without sacrificing the overall experience of the product — and no one gets them all right.

But similarly, some of the details may be done very, very well, and yet a collection of less important details done poorly conspire to render the whole effort moot.

For example, you may write an absolutely superb article about Baltimore, but if you deliver it in a package with just enough little frictions in just enough places, you push the probability further and further toward the chance that a given person will never read your article at all.

The challenge of designing a successful, sustainable product is finding how to lower that friction without destroying the way you eat.

This is not easy. Of course it’s not easy. Generating income is always a force in opposition to the perfectly smooth user experience. This is the trick of it.

The slippery sloshy slurry of product design is a big ol’ mess, and you won’t get it perfect, and it’s hard.

But Principles Can Help

Somewhere in your gut is a guiding principle. The reason you’re making what you’re making. The change you want to see in the world. All of the power and all of the force of your creativity is tied to this principle. This principle is the fountainhead of your energy and the anchor of your resolution.

The burning clarity of a principle can melt away the slurry. Some of it, at least.

Take reporting. I won’t presume to offer a defining principle for a reporter, but I’d be very comfortable in assuming it generally involves a relationship of trust between the reporter and the reader. When the fortunes of the newspapers began to wane, and the managers began to turn the knobs on the dying business model this way and that, searching for the magical combination that would unlock the new prosperity, it should have been clear that trickery was fundamentally incompatible with the presentation of the news. And yet advertisers are given more and more leeway to trample onto the turf of the reporter — in the case of online news, literally trampling, obscuring, or shoving aside the story. And they are permitted the grossest kind of trickery — creating ads that look like reporting — with only the meekest protestation of a tiny “ADVERTISEMENT” printed in the header to show that the original principle is, by someone’s estimation, still followed.

These kind of choices represent a shift in principle, and it’s poisonous. It doesn’t mean that advertising can’t be part of the solution^[1], but it does represent a sign that the redesign of the news is not in touch with the core principles of the news, and that’s both frustrating and scary.

Principles, and Friends

It’s easy enough to talk about these things from the outside, but it can be terribly hard to see them from the inside. I was humbled to be reminded of this only a few days ago, when my entrepreneurial energies sent me speculating down a perfectly reasonable business path. Reasonable, that is, until my teammates pointed out that, for all its merits, it would necessarily become a huge distraction, and thus poison our existing efforts. It was hard to hear, at first, as critical messages often are.

So clarify your principles, but don’t assume you can follow them alone, either.

In the Meantime

I continue my search for a pleasant way to read the stories of my city. The new Sun Magazine, as a rather watered-down style mag with enough advertising incorporated carelessly enough to make it hard to find the stories, is not a draw, and I don’t expect to walk down to Eddie’s for a paper again soon.

I want to read the news. I care about my city. I feel connected to individual reporters at the Sun, hard-working folks like Julie Scharper, Gus Sentementes, and Justin Fenton. I want to read their stories. I just haven’t found a good way to do it yet. There are enough frictions, in enough places, to push me away from the paper and, heaven forfend, the the website. These products fight me when I try to use them. They get in the way of their own mission: for me to read their stories. Not just because of how they integrate advertising, but with their overall design, format, and delivery mechanism.

Of course, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m extraordinarily picky. On the other hand, it’s the role of a product designer to develop an extraordinary pickiness. Your raw sensitivity to the tiny pin-pricks of the experience is what guides you to file away the splinters. And the splinters, in aggregate, are the thing that bleed your product of greatness.

[1] I used to think advertising was necessarily a bad thing. I don’t believe that anymore, in part because of some great counterexamples.