Scientific American‘s Web site is always evolving, as you probably have noticed. Our site has undergone a redesign every year since I started working here in 2007, two of which were major upgrades. And there has been ongoing refreshing. The Web changes constantly and as SA’s Editorial Product Manager I’m always looking at our site with an eye toward improvement.

A few months back we updated our home page to make the Science Agenda area more prominent, and we added more social features and multimedia. We also brought the slide shows smack into the center of the home page. In doing so, we realized it was time to take a hard look at the design of our slide show pages.

Slide show prior to redesign

Prior to the 2010 redesign, the slide show pages had a “filmstrip” navigation that allowed visitors to view the images and click around in any order they’d like. When this page was redesigned in 2010 (shown left), that functionality was left out in favor of space for longer captions. Tough trade-off.

We also heard that readers and visitors have been unhappy with the width that the template provided for our images. Some of the photos we receive from scientists and researchers are beautiful, high-resolution images that were not showcased appropriately within this narrow space.

The last and largest issue was that some readers would complain that the page reloaded for each slide, which forced them to scroll back down to the image for each slide. True. We agreed. There were some business reasons for this problem, like tracking visits by slide and serving ads but nothing that couldn’t be solved by smarter technology.

So our Online Art Director Ryan Reid took all this feedback and came up with our new slide show design that launched today, thanks also to clever handiwork performed by our development team. As you can see, we have eliminated the wide right sidebar in favor of a smaller ad to give our images more room to breathe, we’ve added back the thumbnail navigation and the page still allows for longer captions. We’ve also enhanced the functionality with some other new features, such as the ability to link to specific slides and to browse additional slide shows.

Close up of new slide show template

The first new slide show we’ve published with the redesign is “A Brief History of the Toilet.” Let us know what you think of the design and user interface. We hope you like it. We’ve got our eye on our video pages next.