“Welcome to Now” beckoned the synthesized female voice that accompanies Sprint’s “Now” widget. This Flash-based mobile Web portal features a compendium of useful and trivial information, entertainment and diversions — all arranged in rectangular modules arranged around a small square containing a fetching game of Pong.
Designed by the Goodby Silverstein ad agency to generate a buzz around Sprint’s mobile broadband network, Now has some serious limitations as a widget — it’s not totally customizable. However, the site’s information design and portability have me considering whether this could another step in the emergence of a new design paradigm business model for news.
When I first saw the full-page version of the site, I thought of Kevin Barnhurst’s 1994 book Seeing the Newspaper, which explored newspapers as visual and cultural objects. According to Barnhurst, a century ago the design of modern broadsheets such as the New York Times helped middle class Americans become comfortable with their country’s emergence as a world power. Newspapers gave those Americans the illusion of having all the information a world leader needed readily at hand — and their information hierarchy reinforced the era’s definition of “all the news that’s fit to print.”
By contrast, the information architecture of Sprint’s Now widget is flattened and spatial. Just above center and to the right, there’s a space where you can click and add your own webcam feed. On the periphery, there are RSS feeds for MSNBC’s Newsvine, the New York Times’ small business update, FOX Sports, Google’s top 10 searches and “Boing Boing.” (Interestingly, BoingBoing’s editor didn’t know Sprint was using their feed.) For most of the modules, a small “INFO” link in the lower right-hand corner yields background on the data sources.
What if a mobile Web page like this was truly customizable, so that you could arrange the content of the boxes to suit your interests, and you could save that widget to your desktop, phone and blog? Your cell phone provider becomes your ubiquitous information provider. The feeds become something like the programming on basic cable. Instead of news as a product that delivers eyeballs to advertisers, it’s news as part of your basic broadband information package. Perhaps, continuing the cable analogy, it’s a platform for developing premium news services as well.
Tidbits contributor David Herrold notes that other services such as PakeFlakes, iGoogle, and Netvibes already serve customized content to mobile browsers. But their mobile presentations aren’t quite so slick or engaging.
Meanwhile, Computerworld’s John Brandon says: “Sprint Now site uses real-time data to show you real statistics using a fake Web aggregator. It’s fake in that you can’t move the widgets, or customize them. Yet, it’s a proof-of-concept that sites like Newsvine, iGoogle, and PageFlakes could and should model.” So it’s possible we may see more of this approach as more handheld devices get better browsers.
What do you think? Is Sprint’s Now a possible window to the future of mobile news?
