user experience

I often say a key goal of any Web site redesign should be to make the next redesign easier. Given the rapid pace of redesign launches among newspaper.com sites in recent weeks, it appears some last-generation design work was aimed toward that goal.

OK, if you count niche brands, naplesnews.com represents maybe site 6 or 7 in Scripps' redesign rollout. But it is our fourth newspaper market to get the new look and underpinnings, as of last evening. And the first in a market where we could legitimately ghost a palm tree and pier into the background.

We just switched moments ago: knoxnews.com becomes the third local site in Scripps' newspaper division to take on our latest site design and architecture. Check it out!

Charles Apple, one of the primo bloggers at Visual Editors, picked up the discussion about the future of design at newspapers and the troubled Society for News Design, in particular. In Apple's post, he channels Dean Lockwood of the San Antonio Express-News:

While I joined my son yesterday on a college campus visit (yes, he's that old, meaning yes, I'm that old), our gang at Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group rolled out the second site in our latest cycle of user experience upgrades: redding.com, site of the Redding Record-Searchlight in northern California.

As with Site 1, courierpress.com of Evansville, Ind., redding.com demonstrates Scripps' latest thinking about news Web sites, in form and function:

• Flexibility to showcase news of the day.

(Update [1:25 p.m. EDT, June 26, 2009]: Clear customer service just sent a note to members answering my questions and more. I added it in full at the bottom of this post.)

Greg Sterling noted the end of Clear, the program that let travelers pay to register with biometrics in exchange for swifter passage through security at several major airports.

As a Clear card carrier for roughly two years now, I got word of the shutdown last night. My first concerns, as I posted to Greg in comments on his post, are:

1. Do I have any prayer of a refund for unused months on my membership?