Also, the ability to use the arrow keys to flip between content sections or for navigation would be nice.

I’m not sure I agree with those who would like to see more (visual) differentiation between the content sections on a page, because as is, I’m more likely to read the whole set. If you were to visually distinguish one section from another, I might just think its unrelated content and skip it.

Brade, I gotta admit your stream-of-consciousness notes about the Discussion comment flow is particularly (funny) and helpful—we’re working on that area in particular right now.

I definitely don’t like the “sneak attack” content that appears at the top when you scroll back up. This type of behavior is unexpected and could easily confuse readers–I’m sure you are more aware of your demographic than I am, but news sites are meant to appeal to every type of user, not just tech-savvy ones. However, I wouldn’t mind a click-triggered section called “top headlines” that opened up here when the user wants it to.

A couple of word choices for your new elements are simply bizarre. The term “explainer” is, ironically, vague as possible–not to mention the functionality of explainers, with all the grayed out text, is just weird. And calling those things at the very bottom “apps” is a complete misnomer. When I first saw the “close app” link, I wondered what the heck it would do, then clicked it. When I saw that it shrunk the bottom area, I finally figured that “app” refers to each tab on the bottom. It’s also jarring that each of them takes up a different amount of vertical space. I would also give a different background color for this section, setting it off more from the white area that holds the main content. Speaking of which…

Better delineation between the sections on each page. For the right nav, either “jump to text” is unnecessary or it should be prioritized differently, since it is the most important part. I’m not a fan of how they appear as unevenly spaced speech bubbles either–they look like inline comments, kinda like this site: http://www.djangobook.com/en/1.0/chapter02/

These “bubbles” should be opened so that they already show what section they link to (instead of having a mouse-over effect). And they should be evenly spaced.
But back to the subject of delineation–each section (text, photos, video, comments) should be more clearly distinct from the others, possibly using a slightly different background color for each area, or a stronger heading. Right now it feels like an Amazon product page, an all-white smorgasbord of stacked miscellany divided only by boring horizontal rules. Using the tab motif as a “show more” function is also simply a poor choice. In general, tabs are expected to
change the content area you are currently on (much like your “apps” section at bottom), not have “accordion” functionality and expand the page/section itself.

Most of the page requires mouse clicks to activate functionality. But on the “more from msnbc” section at bottom, you simply mouse over the various sections and the content on the right changes–confusing and unnecessary. Clicking to change these would be fine IMO. But the bigger issue is “trend this week” which is nebulous. You are already sorting these by number of stories published in 24 hours–does the trend graph also represent stories published, or does it reflect page views? And is it really needed? It just seems like an extraneous distraction.

Related to my earlier “apps” criticism, there is a link on the adjoining footer to “Apps” which means something entirely different (and in this case, more correct) and takes you to a page for iphone apps, etc.

The “hide tools/show tools” link for the bottom thingie would be better served hiding/showing a bar with the main nav for the site and a search box, instead of (or in addition to) the social site links.

I noticed that clicking “Leave a comment” warps me to a newsvine page. Just curious, will I get redirected back?… Posting a comment… having to register… validate email… okay, I’m back on this non-msnbc page… well, I’ll go back to the article and leave another comment since I’m “logged in” now… okay, takes me to “newsvine” again… what’s the difference between “post comment & vote” and “post comment”? hmm, guess I’ll try the first… okay, it just kept me here on this page, guess I have to find my own way back to the original story… scrolling to the top, looking for a prominent link to the story… okay, I was looking for the article title but I guess this generic “Read Article” link takes me back… there we go, now where is my glorious new comment? “view all comments” just took be back to that other site, let’s hit the back button… okay, let’s try “show discussion” this time–that’s better… guess my comment’s not on here yet, but as I look closer I see the comments are sorted by “thumbs up” — okay, that must have something to do with the other site I was on. at this point I’m really tired of trying to figure this out, and just going to move on now…

So those are my initial thoughts on the new story pages. It’s got some bold new ideas going, but needs help for the sake of clarity and sanity. I am going to guess that the ideas for these pages were inspired by Amazon product pages.