One of my strategies for mini-breaks through the day is to just fire up a new tab in my browser and scroll through headlines, weather, and whatever else the New Tab utility decides to grab. I use Edge as my work browser, and I don’t have as much control over what happens this space as I do in Firefox or other browsers.
And, that’s a nice thing. It means I can’t ever spend time optimizing this tool, and I can’t limit the amount of visual or rhetorical noise it makes. A new tab is like a mental palate cleanser. Spending a few minutes clicking through headlines, ads, weather, NextDoor posts, and whatever else the Edge developers think I need is a great way to stop thinking about one thing and move on to another.
Every once in while, though, something will come across the feed that’s really… weird.
The other day, this story came across the headline feed. The story itself didn’t grab my attention so much as the visual did. It reminded me of reading order activities I’d do when I taught tech writing and digital design classes. The gist is that, regardless of someone’s primary language, we don’t actually read left to right, top to bottom (or right to left, top to bottom; or top to bottom, right to left). We process the full object first to recognize that there is even text to begin with.
Generally, that means we look at the middle of an image/space and then process the stuff around it. We are drawn to the biggest, highest-contrast points (the bright spots in a dark image, or the dark spots in a bright one). We are drawn to the intersections of lines or the intersections of white spaces.
We figure out what the whole thing is first, then we look for text.
We read the big text first, then we look for supporting points.
We start with big, simple, different elements because they tend to be the most important things to pay attention to, and they usually have the core information we need.
In this news headline, the first thing we really see is a divider line between two bald heads. And, if you’re scrolling quickly, you might not notice them as bald heads at first. I’ll be honest here: I thought it was a butt.
This makes the rest of the message a little weird if I don’t spend the time to really unpack what I’m looking at. All of this processing happens in a few milliseconds, and it’s just our mind’s way of figuring out what’s happening around us.
So, I see a butt or bald heads, and below it, text is superimposed over the core parts of the face that people use to recognize one another (eyes, nose, mouth, etc.). Something about a “fragile truce” halting what the world thought was going to be a 21st century Russian Revolution.
Again, processing takes milliseconds. Butt? Bald heads? Fragile truce. Halting armed revolt.
How do these things connect? Was the truce based on baldness? Was the armed revolt a hair thing?
A few seconds later, I connected the dots and remembered everything else I’d been reading about the Prigozhin/Wagner Group/Putin story and moved on, but this did confuse me for just a moment.
Good palate cleanser.
But wait! What’s the lesson?
The important thing about this graphic is that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. The headline is a good attention-getter. The graphic in the story is a useful tool to identify the main actors. But, the headline widget in Edge’s New Tab does a weird thing when it pulls this content.
Tools like this rely on simple algorithms to look for popular news stories (most reactions or shares or some other metric), then they grab the headline and the largest image on the page (typically the Hero Image or a similarly tagged item at the very top of the page).
The algorithm composites them together into a single block with the image as the background and the headline as a bottom-aligned line of text. The images are usually very large, so there’s some zooming and cropping to focus on what is likely to be the most important part of the image (usually just some math based on the rule of thirds).
Now, some websites take advantage of this algorithm and actually craft their headlines and choose their images to get the most clicks from a tool like this. Edge isn’t the only game in town, and we’ve all seen “Top Headlines” widgets across the web. So, we’re used to seeing things that are put together well.
It’s just really fun to stop and notice when the algorithm gets things weird and consider how this might inform projects later on.
In this case, is there a lesson? Not really. Whenever a publication process is out of your control, all you can do is hope your original material is designed robustly enough that nothing is goofed in the process.
