tomorrow once more

"It seems that Tomorrow.sg has no purpose, no structure, no quality control and no quality in general." - link

Given the recent (brief) flurry of attention my recent post received, my friend and I spoke about the issue a little more and we thought that sharing our views could generate some discussion which might ultimately help the editorial committee. If you think my earlier characterisation of Tomorrow.sg was unfair, I fully agree because I made several unsubstantiated statements. And besides, in this country, the only good criticism is constructive criticism. So we're trying to be constructive now.

Our suggestions can be roughly categorised into the following sections:
1) User Interface
2) Software simplicity vs complexity (customisation and its headaches)
3) Content Management (Organisation)
4) Content Selection (Filtering) link added 10/08/05

We'll deal with the first and least controversial point about the interface first, and address the others in later posts.

With regards to the interface, the site is pretty and quite professional looking. But it might be possible to optimize it further for purposes of navigation and functionality as there's a lot of wasted space.

To begin with, the banner graphic is too big and we hope that the flag icons go after National Day. Although the stars and crescent do give the site a slightly patriotic flavour, this might be to the site's detriment if Tomorrow wants to be regarded as an impartial news aggregator.

Then there is also a lot of white space. Perhaps this is to prevent the blog from being too cluttered, but to me as a user it means a lot more clicking and scrolling. Compare with two other top blogs with user-contributions: BoingBoing and Slashdot for efficient use of space despite larger fonts. A lot of empty space is also created by lists of links and trackbacks. It might help to save this space and make the font bigger.

We also feel that there is a lot of unecessary information in the dual sidebars, and they are not well organised. Here is a list of the items on the front page:

1) Home/About/Contact/Archives/View/News - If people want this, they will look for it. So it can easily be fit in a horizontal bar or at the bottom of the page instead of occupying prime front page space.
2) User Login - See LiveJournal for an excellent implementation of space conservation.
3) Top Contributors - It's more of an ego thing isn't it ... or perhaps incentive for people to find content for the site?
4) Popular Tags - Somewhat useful, but as I will argue later, a more structured means of organising would be more helpful. This would be a good user-defined complement.
5) News from Editors - Is this really necessary since there's already a link to it on the navigation menu?
6) Support Us/Google Ad - Well, I guess the money has to come from somewhere ...

Of course this just relfects our own opinion of browsing habits. A good way to see which parts of the main page are extraneous would be to track the number of clicks for each of the various portions. The less used sections could then be removed, making the site look cleaner and more sleek.

Also, if we were asked to consult for the design of the site, we would remove the entire right sidebar and on the left we'd have (in descending order)
1) Smaller Login Box
2) Money Spinners (assuming its a necessary evil)
3) Popular Entries
4) Top Contributors
5) Topical Directory

The rest of the items can go below. That's all we have to say on interface, and that's all I'm going to write for now. I'll wait to see how well received this feedback is before I venture onto thinner ice. If you managed to read this far (I hate long posts), here's a wee bit about us.

For credibility reasons I felt it was important to do a simple intro. I also don't want people to think we're smart asses who make cheap talk, so I hope our ideas will be weighed on their own merits. We are both concerned Singaporeans and avid members of the online community and we like the fact that Tomorrow.sg is trying to bring the blogger community together. Both of us also have some expertise in these matters as we've had formal tech educations and so could code Tomorrow.sg from scratch ourselves if we really had to (although in my case it would become NextYear.sg).

The reason why we make these suggestions is because we know that the technical and content management for a site like this can be a formidable task and it would be a pity to see such good effort not attain its full potential. We honestly feel that Tomorrow.sg can be a powerful channel and offers an alternative to the mainstream media for people to get fresh perspectives on matters close to their hearts.