Bloomberg Blog

Introducing Bloomberg Queue

Everybody is busy. Always on the go. There's a lot of news out there, including on Bloomberg.com, and people don't have time to read everything. That's a big part of what we think about when determining which features to roll out on our website. While we revealed a new home page about one month ago, we are already adding a hopefully quite useful new tool.

Today, you'll find the Bloomberg Queue on our homepage. (Special shout-out to our launch sponsor Dell. It's the first creative execution in the U.S. of their new broad scale corporate brand campaign - positioning the company as a full-service information technology solutions provider that puts customers front and center.) 

 

   

 
The way this new feature works is simple. You see a story you want to read, but you don't have time right then. Add it to your queue (using the + sign), and read it later. Or, if you've read a story and want to save it, you can do that too and "star" it, or search within your queue for it.

We'll also suggest stories you might find interesting based on what you've already added to your queue. (The more you add, the better we can do with our story recommendations.)

Right now, you can do all of this using a browser, either on your PC, Mac, tablet, or phone.  We are working on giving you the ability to use your queue across any connected device online or offline.  Stay tuned.

 

Eric Steinle is head of product and design for Bloomberg web properties

Goodbye Noir

Let's start off by saying that some of you are not going to like what we are about to write:
The Noir version of Bloomberg.com (noir.bloomberg.com), which launched in 2006, is no longer accessible. There were prominent messages on the Noir site providing advance notice of this change.

We know Noir has passionate fans, and we maintained it until we were able to incorporate (in a single view) all of the data and news you loved into the new site. This view lives in a new tab called "Quick." It features data including stock indexes and world markets as well as headlines in one place, just like Noir.

We know it's not the black background some of you are used to, but you can expect us to continue delivering the best news and data so you can get what you need in the least amount of time.

We realize change is hard. We hope you'll embrace it, and we encourage you to check out Quick at Bloomberg.com/quickview.

The Bloomberg.com Team

Bloomberg's Successful IPv6 Test

Yesterday was world IPv6 day. For those of you who may not be completely familiar with IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), let me briefly explain. Believe it or not, we are actually on the verge of running out of Internet addresses due to the enormous growth of the World Wide Web. These IP addresses are assigned numbers to computers, printers, etc., and without them you cannot communicate or connect to the web.

Bloomberg maintains a strong focus on assessing the technical landscape and its evolution. On that front,  we've watched this trend closely. While there has been good progress in recycling and reallocating the address space, the global move to IPv6 is now inevitable and underway.

We've launched dual-stacked (both IPv4 and IPv6 capable) and IPv6-only versions of the Bloomberg.com website and performed several tests. What we've found so far is that almost all of our readers have environments that are compatible with dual-stacked domains (99.95%). That's great news, and it means that we'll likely migrate our main site to a permanently dual-stacked configuration in the next few weeks!

So, what does this all really mean for you?  It's similar to adding new telephone prefixes -- it shouldn't affect you, but over time, having an IPv6 capable allows us to participate in the growth of the Internet with no hiccups or interruptions for you.

Andre Stechert heads Bloomberg.com's R&D Team

Bloomberg Takes HD Online

We know you’re looking at Bloomberg.com and saying to yourself, “Hmm, this video clip is really sharp.” Well, it is. This week we upgraded our video quality to match the high-definition format of Bloomberg TV. 

When you see a clip from our U.S. TV feed, or if you are watching Bloomberg TV live, you will see it in all its high-def glory (full-frame 16x9).  Don't worry, we hope to do the same for our international feed in the near future.

You may not see every single video look perfect just yet, but we are working to improve the quality and delivery speed of all the video we provide on Bloomberg.com.

Here's a video where "Bloomberg Enterprise" profiles Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. and features an interview with CEO M. Farooq Kathwari.   

Gregory Flynn is responsible for the evolution of video on Bloomberg.com

@pkedrosky One of World's Most Influential

Our very own Paul Kedrosky has made TIME's list of the 140 Twitter feeds that are shaping the conversation. The good folks at Time are asking people to vote on whether or not the people they chose are the right ones. Kedrosky comes in at No. 111 - right behind Felix Salmon and ahead of Kara Swisher, Om Malik, Fred Wilson and others. If you like tapping into Paul's financial and technology expertise or just his overall witty comments, vote YES for him to stay on the list. Too bad you can't see his cool charts on Twitter, but you can always go to his blog for that.

 



The Bloomberg.com Team

Yes, Bloomberg is Hiring

Given all of the recent job cuts across the media and technology industry, we just wanted to let you know that Bloomberg is actively hiring. We've got 12,900 employees in 166 locations around the world, and we're growing.

As we expand our offerings in areas like sports, government, web, law, news, etc., we'll be looking for talent across the board - engineers, marketing professionals, reporters, and everything in between.

More than 500 R&D engineers alone will be hired this year. We'll be adding another 1,600 employees in New York. And, we're expanding operations internationally with new office openings in Mumbai, Dubai, London, and New York just to name a few.   

We know it's been rough out there, but if you think you're the "New Type B" who can solve great 'unsolvable' problems - check out the opportunities.

The Bloomberg.com Team

Companies, Indexes, Funds, SE-Oh My …

Everyone knows that Bloomberg.com has an abundance of valuable company information, charts and market data. To be precise, we have pages on around 150,000 funds, 91,000 public companies and 14,000 indexes from all over the world. This includes well-known brands like Microsoft and lesser-known companies like Al Jouf (in Saudia Arabia) as well as the Deutsche Bank Energy Index and the Schwab Core Equity Fund.

These would normally be an SEO manager’s dream. Unfortunately, the pages were buried on the site and so didn’t generate much traffic. In fact, many of these pages weren’t even indexed by Google.

In order to make this data easier to find – by both our users and the search engines - we created various lists and directories to give our funds, companies and indexes more exposure. You can now find the information sorted by country, industry, and alphabetically. For example, we offer you a directory of:

• Athletic Footwear public companies
• Public companies in Lebanon
• Balanced Funds
• Stock Indexes in Indonesia
• And more…

Now that the first step is complete our initial SEO goals have been met: Google, among others, have indexed all of our quote pages. This is where the real work begins.  As an SEO specialist, I am not only working on getting the quotes pages indexed in Google, but more importantly getting them into higher rankings so they generate traffic to our site. 

To do this, we will tweak the html code, create more links to funds, companies, and indexes, and finally wrap it up with a surprise. It’s a big undertaking, but we’ll keep you updated. 

Ulli Muenker is the SEO lead for Bloomberg.com.

Building the Kedrosky Blog

Paul Kedrosky is officially blogging on Bloomberg.com.

To the reader, Paul’s blog looks and feels similar to the other content on Bloomberg.com. That was the goal, but how we get there is actually quite different for Bloomberg. For one, Paul travels – a lot – and he needs the ability to upload his content without logging into the Bloomberg system. He also requested the same functionality of his current blog. Our talented R&D team was able to overcome the technical hurdles and establish a process that was seamless for Paul, his busy schedule, and the Bloomberg.com editorial team.

What’s exciting is that we're laying the groundwork for outside contributors to work with Bloomberg.com. The majority of the content on the site today comes from the Bloomberg Terminal and is then posted to the Web. Posts for Paul's blog actually do the opposite. He authors content that is posted directly to the Web and is then sent back to Terminal. This allows us to begin to think of other ways we can leverage this process and enrich the content on Bloomberg.com.

Now that the blog is live, our design team will be working hand-in-hand with Paul to produce some innovative data visualizations on a variety of topics. Users can also comment on Paul’s blog. We’re also enhancing the Bloomberg.com video player to allow Paul to embed his appearances on BloombergTV directly on his blog.As always, we're already thinking about how we can improve the foundation. Check back regularly as we continue to build upon Paul's contributions on Bloomberg.com.

David Regan is on the product team at Bloomberg.com.

 

We’re Thankful for New Features

Even with the Thanksgiving holiday in full swing, we still added a few new things to Bloomberg.com last week.

We know you love to share our business news stories with your colleagues, clients, and friends. So we’ve made it easier. On every article page, we now feature social sharing buttons from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, along with an email option. Our updated sharing tools save you time – which we know means money.

In addition, we added a new Web video series, Leadership Connections. As part of the series, top CEOs, politicians, executives, and more answer questions like: What are the qualities of an effective leader? And how do great leaders overcome challenges?

The first episode features global leaders talking about what makes a great leader, including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, and NFL Hall of Famer and former congressmen Steve Largent.

Let us know what you think.

The Bloomberg.com Team

Paul Kedrosky Joins Bloomberg

I have signed an agreement, announced today, to partner with Bloomberg across its entire news organization. 

What does this mean? Well, a bunch of things. First, I'll do a regular Bloomberg opinion column alongside people like Michael Lewis and others. There will soon be a new Kedrosky blog at Bloomberg.com, and you're going to see me on Bloomberg TV and listen to me on Bloomberg radio -- a lot, and exclusively. 

This is the part of these deal-related notes where people prattle on endlessly about how delighted they are. Well, I am. Delighted, that is. Really. Bloomberg is set to blast away at the fusty world of finansciencesocioeconomics media with more content, more analysis, more ... of more.

We see things in similar ways: we love data, visuals, and synthesizing across economics, markets, sports, science, technology, and current affairs. Meteorology too.  What's more, Bloomberg is fine with me doing my usual eclectic stuff, including speaking, investing in early-stage private companies, and so on.

If you have any more questions, here is an FAQ. This is the interweb, after all.

So, you're selling out?*

Yes. I mean, it would be stupid to pretend that there isn't money involved. There is. (All upfront, and all in Renminbi, of course. I have ace counsel.) But doing it just for the money would be boring. This simply seems like fun, and I'm interested in partnering with someone who can help grow a bigger audience for the sorts of things I like to do. And it helps that Bloomberg has more data than I do – a lot more. And, yes, yes, Bloomberg has money.

What's going to happen to Infectious Greed?*

Nothing, nada, nyet. I'll still be putting the usual sort of things on my site. Science, technology, economics, book stuff, academic papers, worrying over Wimbledon grass wear patterns, musing about what kind of tree Yahoo would be if it was a tree, wondering why Chinese cars don't use gasoline, and so on. You know, that sort of thing, heavy on synthesis and making connections.

Going forward Bloomberg will handle the business side of things on this site. My thanks to John Battelle and Federated Media who handled advertising on the site up to this point. They have been fantastic partners, and John is a good friend and a lovely man. Thanks John.

So, you're selling out?*

C'mon, same answer. It's about money, but it's not just about money. It's about audience, scale, data, and resources. It's about growing something and making it bigger, while giving me access to more people on a global scale. It's also about having fun. And if it's not fun, why do it?

What's going to be different?*

I hope that more data, a larger audience, and more resources will make the sorts of things I like to do more accessible to more people. Having said that: one of my goals in making the change – and the Bloomberg people have been hugely supportive of me in this – is to make the changes as seamless and transparent as possible.

To be specific:

1. The Infectious Greed site stays the same.
2. There will soon be a new blog on Bloomberg.com, called, why not, Paul Kedrosky.
3. I will be exclusive to Bloomberg, working with its terminal, online, TV, and radio properties. 

Paul Kedrosky is a contributor to Bloomberg.com

SEO Update: Increasing our Video Views

Bloomberg.com has always featured numerous videos that are popular with our users. With this week’s technology deployment we are using some key SEO tactics to help search engines find our videos as easily as our users.

The first step is to increase accessibility to our videos.

We do a great job of featuring our most important videos in prominent positions throughout our website. But once they have been replaced with more current content, they are harder to find.

Today, we released a video archive that makes it easier for search engines – and our users – to find our videos. This archive, which is sorted by date and goes back to April of this year, allows search engines to index our video content, so more people can find it.

Now that the search engines are able to find and index our videos, we can give them more clues about the video content. This helps them to better rank the videos based on the terms users are searching.  The more details we provide, the easier we make it for them to rank our videos.

To give search engines the information they need, we include all videos in our XML sitemaps (aka Google Sitemaps). In these sitemaps, we submit information to the search engines about video page URLs, description about the content, publication date, and more.

As a result of these two initiatives, we expect to generate more traffic to our videos. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Ulli Muenker is the SEO lead for Bloomberg.com.

Welcome to World of Bloomberg.com Feedback

Our users may be surprised to learn that we receive approximately 3,500 to 4,000 queries each month via the Bloomberg.com feedback link. We take feedback and customer service seriously and respond to all valid emails.

Feedback queries run the gamut. Many are submitted by dedicated media users who are fans of Bloomberg Television, Radio, and podcasts. Some are about anchors, guests, and news topics. Others are leads for the Bloomberg Professional sales team.

Our users alert us to technical problems and issues on Bloomberg.com – we truly appreciate that. In these instances, we work closely with the R&D team to ensure all of the kinks are worked out in a timely manner.

Users post their opinions, likes and dislikes, and comment or query us on just about “everything” going on in the world! And I mean “everything.” For example, a grandmother contacted us seeking help for a homework assignment she was doing with her grandson. It had nothing to do with finance, but I asked our intern to help. He did, and received a nice thank you note.

Another unusual query involved a Bloomberg terminal user in Thailand who contacted us when his city was in the throes of violent demonstrations. He emailed us from his office basement asking us to contact terminal users to let them know that he was safe and would be in touch.

The most dramatic emails we’ve received were during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Several people turned to us for help. They requested links for the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and survivor lists. It was a very trying time, but we were committed to helping in whatever way we could. One story that stood out was a sister who was trying to locate her brother in Louisiana. With the help of a radio ham operator, the Salvation Army, and Bloomberg, we located him and followed him until he was safely reunited with his family.

Why do these people contact us? I asked one of them once and her response was, “Because we trust the Bloomberg name.”     

Virginia Nafziger has been responding to Bloomberg.com web queries since 2003.

Behind the Scenes: Bloomberg Game Changers

Last week Bloomberg Television launched a new original series: Bloomberg Game Changers. This documentary series profiles innovative leaders in technology, finance, politics, and culture. The show airs Thursdays at 9 pm ET on Bloomberg Television, with clips and entire shows also posted on Bloomberg.com.

We aimed high to profile some top industry players – and we think we succeeded. Our first subjects include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, comedian Jon Stewart, and this week’s profile of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, to name a few.

Our team of producers and associate producers began by researching our subjects to get archival photos and videos that detail their lives from childhood through their current jobs. We quickly expanded our search from the Bloomberg archives to every news archive, hometown library archive, personal videos from friends, and YouTube. 

The hard part was locating people and convincing them to speak on camera. We contacted old friends, classmates, and colleagues. Some had lost touch over the years but many of them still have relationships with our "Game Changers." You need a great pitch to persuade people to appear on an unknown show to talk candidly about these high profile people. We explained that the show was not an investigative report or a gossipy fluff piece – a tough sell.

We also interviewed biographers, journalists, and analysts to fill in the narrative thread of the stories and added narration where needed.

In order to make a compelling documentary, we needed to edit all of the content, write narration, create graphics, fact check, and get legal review (which can take up to 12 weeks). For each show, we interviewed between six and 12 people, with many interviews lasting more than an hour. We had to cut some great stories to fit our delivery time.

Our biggest challenge: keeping up with the latest news that seemed to break every time we thought we were done. In the end, we created 11 solid documentary profiles that highlight the careers of game-changing individuals. Let us know what you think.

Nina Weinstein is the executive producer of Bloomberg Game Changers.

Stomping Out the Bugs

“… ‘bugs,’  as such little faults and difficulties are called, show themselves and months of anxious watching, study, and labor are requisite before commercial success – or failure – is certainly reached.”

This quote comes from a letter Thomas Edison wrote to a colleague in 1878. Even back then, engineers were baffled by bugs. And tech bugs are almost as annoying as their real-world insect brethren, only they don’t always buzz out loud to let us know they are around.

The quality assurance (QA) team at Bloomberg.com has a mission to methodically shake those bugs out before they cause problems on the site. We want our users to enjoy the full features of our site as soon as they are launched. The good news is that technology has improved Edison's testing process from taking months to days. 

So how do we manage to de-bug Bloomberg.com and still find time to launch new features?

QA plays a leading role here (if I do say so myself). After the developers hand off new software code, QA makes sure it works (“functional positive testing”), stretches it to the limits of the data systems that feed it (“functional boundary testing”), tries to break it (“functional negative testing”), and sees how fast it responds under high load conditions (“nonfunctional” or “performance” testing). 

Confused?

Here’s how it works: Specialized software simulates hundreds of people navigating our site at once to see if all goes as expected. If the code is fixing a previous bug, we click through the same scenarios that failed to make sure there is no longer an issue -- that’s called “regression testing” in QA speak. We use tools that pull the HTML code for every single URL on Bloomberg.com to ensure that the code creates a consistent Internet experience no matter what computer platform or browser our users prefer. Lastly, we check our pages by eye on all of the major browsers, including Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on both the Mac and PC platforms to check every corner of the user experience.

Once QA is confident we have exhausted all options and all bugs are fixed, we lock down the code for the next deployment. Since we challenge ourselves to release multiple deployments a week, this whole process takes place in mere days.

We think Edison would be proud.

Eric Mumford is on the QA team at Bloomberg.com

Testing the Technology behind Bloomberg.com

At Bloomberg.com we are proud of our ability to react to customer feedback in a timely manner. We utilize Agile Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) methods to deliver updates faster than most enterprise Web applications. A key to our success is our approach to quality assurance, more commonly referred to as QA.

Bloomberg.com’s QA team is a group of technologists who are trained in quality methods, versus more traditional QA teams that perform manual testing when a new build is delivered. Our QA team writes software – automated tests – that checks the Bloomberg.com software code as the developers are creating it. Problems or “bugs” can then be discovered and fixed efficiently – often before the software is deployed to the public. Once bugs are found, the QA team takes ownership of tracking how quickly they are fixed.

We measure how many lines of Bloomberg.com code are executed when QA tests are run, which gives us insights into how much of the developer code is being exercised by the automated tests. If the automated scripts are only testing half of the code, the other half may be at risk.

The team also uses open-source tools to test the performance of the code and to ensure old bugs don’t suddenly reappear (what we call “regression testing”). This gives us some certainty that the final product is close to error free.

All this works well because our QA team integrates tightly with product owners, visual designers, and developers. We have a daily cross-departmental meeting to discuss our current projects and the problems we may be facing. It’s a quick check in that gives everyone a chance to speak, but doesn’t dwell on any issue. Topics that require further exploration are set aside for smaller teams who volunteer for the work. This enables the entire team to change direction quickly rather than needing days to adjust development, testing, or delivery approach.

The result: We have grown from building software once per month to successfully rolling out two production deployments per week for three consecutive weeks.

Eric Mumford is on the QA team at Bloomberg.com.

Expanding Our Reach

This week, we’ve added two new key subsections – Media and Auctions.

Bloomberg.com has always covered the media. Our media subsection makes it easier for you to find this specific content. Located within an already comprehensive Industry News section, the media subsection features the top global news in the category.

As we continue to build a site that caters to business decision makers, we realize that we need to offer more than just straight-forward business news and information. In fact, we’ve always had a pretty robust Muse section that features the top cultural news from around the world, including the best in art, dining, books, travel, and more. The addition of the auctions subsection allows you to easily scan top stories in the auction world.

What do you think? 

The Bloomberg.com Team 

Our Next A/B Test – Well, A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H Test

As you know at Bloomberg.com we're always testing new designs and features with A/B or “bucket” tests. For these tests, we show a small population of our users variations of a new design. We can then compare the performance of the new designs against what currently exists, the baseline. (A vs. B – get it?)

This week, we're kicking off our latest homepage bucket test – this time with eight variations. The test uses a fractional factorial experimental design (whew, that was a lot!). This approach allows us to focus on several elements (or factors) that we want to test. We then create variations of our homepage out of the different combinations of these factors. We aren't exploring all possible combinations (that would be WAY too many), just a fraction of them – that's where the "fractional" comes in.

Testing in this manner gives us a better understanding of the impact each factor, and combination of factors, have on user engagement. The specific factors we're testing include headline treatments, market data visualizations, the content of our top headlines, and visual variety in content display.

Don’t be surprised if you see something a little different on the homepage, you’re likely in one of the eight test “buckets.” Once we are done, we’ll report back with our findings and post examples of the different variations. In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you think.

Jay Bergesen is on the product and design team at Bloomberg.com.

Behind the Curtain: We’re Having Fun with SEO

Despite what some may think, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not “Black Magic” that manipulates how a Web site ranks in Google. It’s the process of optimizing a Web site’s internal and external data to ensure better natural ranking in search engines, which in turn means more traffic to a site. 

This doesn’t only benefit the Web site – it benefits users. By applying SEO techniques, search engines get a better understanding of a Web site and its content. Web users are then given more relevant results. It’s a win-win for everyone.  

SEO is not new, but it’s a new focus for us at Bloomberg.com. Sure, we were receiving some natural traffic from search engines, but unlike most news sites, it was a small percentage of our overall site traffic.

With the redesign, we took a more pro-active approach to SEO. Our goal is to create an SEO-friendly site that generates a significant amount of traffic from search engines. Since we are starting from practically nothing, we have high hopes for our use of simple SEO best practices.   

Here are some of the things we implemented thus far:

• We create different meta data for each individual page
• We make link text descriptive, e.g., “more Economy News” instead of just “more”
• We add descriptive headlines on pages, e.g., “Science News” instead of just “Science”
• We create a flat site hierarchy: Every page is accessible by no more than two to three clicks
• We generate SEO-friendly URLs for all pages
  

The results speak for themselves: One week after our relaunch, our search-generated traffic spiked to more than double what it was before. (It’s a beginning.)

These best practices are a good foundation, but there’s still more to do – SEO is not all techie stuff. Next, we plan to work with our editorial team to ensure they are aware of their important role in generating more SEO traffic.

Our ambitious goal is to increase search-engine traffic to Bloomberg.com to more than 20% of all traffic by the end of the year. Stay tuned.

Ulli Muenker is the SEO lead for Bloomberg.com.

Why We Redesigned

Many of our users have been asking why we decided to redesign Bloomberg.com. It’s simple: We want to build the best Web site for business decision makers, one that provides news, data, live video and commentary in an easy-to-use format.

Before we began, we spoke to top business executives like you to understand how you consume business news and information. Here’s what we learned:

• You wake up and check email and business headlines, often before you do anything else.
• Your top source for business news is the Web. (Music to our ears!)
• You crave non-stop access to the news and information that affect your industry and interests
• You want more data presented in an easy-to-dissect manner.

Our redesigned home page aims to fulfill these needs. It displays more content in an easy-to-navigate format. We give you the straightforward news and data to draw the insights you need to lead the conversation throughout your business day. In addition, we enhance the display of our financial data with bold color to ensure you get a clear view at first glance, while still having the option to dig deeper.

As we continue to evolve the experience on Bloomberg.com, we hope to deliver a relevant mix of news and data curated just for you. By learning about your interests, we will give you more of what you want, when you want it, in the format you prefer.

We hope you will think of our site as providing you a distinct business advantage, serving the news you need, when you need it so you can stay ahead.

Are we hitting the mark? We want your input. As you know, we are developing the site in an iterative process. Getting your feedback allows us to make changes and test new designs. 

Kevin Krim is the global head of Bloomberg.com.

Our Iterative Process: Keeping Users Top of Mind

The redesign of Bloomberg.com is a big deal to our users, so we spend a lot of time communicating with users and collecting data about usage on the new site. Many love it. Others see a lot of room for improvement. And still others are downright upset with us for making such a drastic change. All of your viewpoints are valuable.

The new infrastructure powering the site (Ruby on Rails and modern markup, thank you very much), along with test-driven development, feature-based branching (using git) and some automation in our deployment processes allow us to do something not quite possible before: We can respond to users in near real-time.

It’s techie, we know.

The important point is that our tools help us develop new features and new variations very quickly. Those variations are key to serving our users. In the first eight weeks of launching our preview site, we’ve made nearly 170 adjustments to the site. 

For example, this was our first home page design: 

Our users liked it, but they wanted to get more headlines in one view. We experimented with several variations.

First, we put the design on a diet. We made a more efficient use of space in the global header (logo, clocks, etc.) and slimmed down other elements of the design. We gave more room for the content to shine, saved 100 pixels between the top of the page and the first headline, and almost doubled the number of headlines “above the fold“ – all while adhering to the spirit of the original design.

We created this variation where just the first headline received the “featured” treatment with a photo and summary:

And this version where we maxed-out on headlines:

We put all 3 versions into a bucket test, along with the original design. Interestingly, no variation significantly out-performed the others with our key engagement metrics. As is often the case, people say one thing and do another.

We’re digging deeper into some of the motivations behind the “show me more headlines” feedback and we’re continuing to experiment with the way we present headlines. In the meantime, this is what we launched to the public – a further refinement of the design to give even more room for the content to shine:

This process, of iterative design, is not new or unexpected, but our motives for employing it are distinct. Instead of attempting to build a "sticky" experience, making it difficult to get to information in order to boost advertising revenues, our goal is to make information easier to find and more streamlined, and to give users their time back.

Jay Bergesen is on the product and design team at Bloomberg.com.

A Redesigned Bloomberg.com: Step 1 of 1,000

Two welcomes are in order: welcome to the redesigned Bloomberg.com, and welcome to Inside Bloomberg.com.

This redesign is a first step in the transformation of how Bloomberg.com delivers news, information and data to global business professionals from the moment they wake up to that last check-in before bed.

The new home page layout helps you quickly gain insights into business and economic trends. It features a stream of headlines that give you a broad perspective from our global news organization. Since color communicates data quickly, we use bold color and white space to display market data so it’s easy to read at a glance.

Also, you can now view Bloomberg TV live on the site 24 hour a day at near HD-quality. That includes programming from the U.S., Europe and Asia – and it’s all free.

Tell us what you think. We want to know – really. This is quite literally step 1 of 1,000. Over the coming weeks and months, we will add new features, improve existing ones and fix things that aren’t working correctly. Your feedback will help us decide what to do next – at least the next few hundred of our remaining 999 steps.    

Which brings us to this page: it’s also new. Our posts will give you a peek behind the scenes at Bloomberg.com, how we think about the issues we’re facing, what we like and how we work. We hope this will be a conversation – it’s no fun to talk to ourselves (but we will if we have to!).  

Kevin Krim is the global head of Bloomberg.com.