One of the standard elements of most magazine themes/designs today is the featured content gallery, but has this fad run its course? Are users patients enough to wait for the auto scroll or click on the numbers/dots/thumbnails to see the next story? Let’s take a look at a few examples of what’s being used on some major news websites:

To be honest, we used the feature box on The Daily Beast as inspiration for our own at The Dagger. But looking back on it now, I see some flaws. First, there are 9 stories shown in the slideshow (technically 8, one is an ad, a pointless one at that since it is third and most will never see it). It took 1 minute and 10 seconds to allow the slideshow to complete the cycle. I’m willing to bet that there is a reason that ad is placed third, reason being that is the threshold for a user’s attention.

I do like the 8 second delay between switches, but again, when you have 9 stories linked, that time builds up. The size of the box is good, perfectly fitting above the fold and allowing for two more decent size columns to its right.

Techcrunch recently went through a redesign and added in a passive featured content gallery. Their gallery shows 4 stories in two columns within the 640px container. While I like this setup better than the Daily Beast’s, it certainly has it’s flaws.

First, while the navigation/scrolling is developed nicely, how many people actually know it’s there? The arrows match the style of the new redesign, but aren’t intuitive enough to be noticed by the average website visitor. Second, all that is shown is the headline with no excerpt from the article. While Techcrunch’s headlines have improved and become clearer, this still could pose a problem in the future.

So what are your thoughts on featured content galleries? How can we improve their look and functionality? Should they be eliminated all together?