Customer satisfaction directly related to design

Tracy Collins, senior director of operations for The Arizona Republic, said that focus groups who studied the newspaper after it was "downsized" showed a higher level of satisfaction than they did before the change in the web size. Collins said there had been a lot of fear about the smaller paper, so the reaction was a surprise.

He said that other studies have also shown that customer satisfaction is directly related to design. Now that we fellows of the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute have the benefit of Collins' advice, many if not all of us are eager to get back to redesign our papers.  (Of course, it's our students' job to do the redesign, but now we have ammunition to guide them to better choices.)

Though this shot is not great, it might be clear enough to demonstrate some of the points Collins made about clustering photos and creating a clear hierarchy. 

As a reader, I prefer pages with little "noise," but I was happy to hear the advice about pages with a lot of noise: make the hierarchy even clearer on a page with a lot of noise.

Modular design and naming of modules was a very useful lesson I hope to use, too.  Naming the modules and then setting expectations for each module will make our design sessions easier to manage.

So much to do.

JoAnn Augustine
American Canyon High School
Napa Valley, Calif.