I love this family of blogs - Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, Gizmodo are daily visits for me. But this new design is virtually unusable on my netbook (my main rig for websurfing). It’s Java based, I think, and has frames… I thought frames went out in the 90s! No scrollbars make it impossible to be quite sure if you’ve seen all of the features… it’s so bad, I’m just not going to visit the pages as much anymore.
These guys are on the cutting edge of tech, media, and snark. How could they get it so wrong? I wasn’t a huge fan of their last redesign, which altered how comments appeared and introduced hashtags… gah, it’s too Twitter-like for me. But it was a tolerable change and I mostly ignored the stuff I didn’t like.
I know they had a massive security breach… wonder if that’s the reason why they made the change? I just find it terrible and I’m really shocked that such a savvy group fucked this up.
Yep, I really hate it. Even the “classic” view is still lame. I’m really wondering if they’re going to stick to it, since public opinion seems to range from “I like it about the same” to “It’s a war crime.” And most are on the negative side.
I at least want them to publicly respond to the criticism. They haven’t posted about it since the change.
I mostly only visit io9 and they’ve, at least, made an effort to bring it back into the headliner way it used to appear. And they say they’re going to add a scroll bar on the right column, which will be good as I only accidentally discovered you need to use the mouse scrollwheel, and I don’t use a mouse (I use a drawing tablet) so that was an inconsiderate design decision.
I’ve gotten used to it, but I left a comment with them when it debuted calling it “claustrophobic” and I still think that. It just feels jammed in and a very poor use of available space.
I haven’t visited io9 all last week, that’s how bad I hate it. I might be arsed if the “classic” view actually *was *the old site look&feel - how fucking hard is that to do? I’ll tell you - not hard at all.
I don’t go there for the big videos or pics, I open any trailer or whatever I want to see full-screen. So they’ve lost me as a visitor (and I actually have bought things off io9 links before, so they’re losing money on the change) over a non-issue.
I usually hate redesigns but I’ll go on record as being one of the few that kind of like it. Yeah, it still needs some tweaking, but I love the general idea. Previously I’d have to scroll down, and open a whole bunch of links in different tabs. That took up a lot of CPU and created a big mess o tab. Now I can easily see a whole bunch of titles at once, and click on the one I want, and it loads quickly and I only need one tab. The comments system makes more sense now too. I always thought the ‘star’ system was stupid, but now that you can easily switch between all the comments and just the starred ones, it works a whole lot better. Spoilers also seem a little bit easier to avoid.
Still has a few kinks of course. It won’t seem to stay logged in over more than one session. The scroll up and down for the side bar isn’t intuitive. Some people claim the videos are on autoplay (I don’t have this issue, but I remember this happening a few years ago too).
But overall I think it’s an improvement over the scrolling blog snippets page format.
I mostly get LifeHacker through google reader, so I don’t have to see it very often. But, when I click to see some comments, or head over to dead spin I don’t like what I see. All of that wasted space on the left. They make it so you have to scroll so much more than you should. Bad stuff.
Yeah, it’s a pretty craptacular redesign, imo. I’m going to Lifehacker and io9 a lot less than I was berfore. I agree that they needed to do something with their sites because loading the pages seemed to take so long before. This doesn’t make it any easier, though.
Arghh, I so agree, it’s terrible. I loved reading the comments on Jezebel, because often the discussion there added so much to the topic that it outshone the article itself. Unfortunately now it’s basically pointless to read comments – the lack of nesting, the way some are hidden…it’s just so much more difficult than it should be, IMO. And since people seem to be commenting less in general, it seems pretty clear this is a problem.
The best comment I’ve read since the redesign was the suggestion to visit the ca/uk versions, which still feature the old layout (so, ca.gizmodo.com or uk.jezebel.com). I don’t think it works for io9, unfortunately.
I want to like the redesign, because I do like being able to see so many headlines at once, without having to scroll down through them all, and I can see how the idea of a focused main story makes sense. However, they left out the things I would most look at to decide whether or not to click to read more of a story: pictures and a short descriptive blurb / deck. The headline alone is just not enough, and I don’t necessarily want to read or click through all of them just to get to the few I find intriguing.
The lack of a scroll bar on the right pane also killed it for me when I was browsing on my netbook – there’s no way to scroll down just using the keyboard? Yeah, that’s a fantastic user experience! sigh. There are so many interface choices that I just don’t understand. I just don’t visit as much now, which really is too bad.
It’s cool that io9 is making some changes and responding to the criticism though. Hopefully there’s a happy medium in here somewhere!
I’ve been accessing the internet on my phone since my computer broke down. Now I can’t get on Jezebel at all. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but no luck.
I LIKE doing it that way. I routinely line up a whole bunch of tabs so they can be loading up in the background, then I can go through them quickly one at a time. The new design sucks horribly. I hate it. The number of things I click on there has dropped by at least half. They must be monitoring those kinds of numbers. I don’t know what they’re thinking. More room for ads, I’m guessing.
I’m too busy being baffled to have a real opinion. It’s like somebody asking you “what do you think of your burger?” while you’re drinking a mikshake. It’s practically a categorical error.
Gawker sites, to my mind, are a different thing now. Rather than the blog paradigm, in which there’s a neverending linear stream of discrete articles, it’s a mishmosh of big, visual highlights with the main blogroll practically reduced to a “ticker” along the site.
I can only assume the idea is to make their sites more casual – somewhere you can visit a few times daily, and take in a quick splash of topical information.
I can’t figure out if the redesign is any GOOD for that, though. My gut reaction is no. It’s still a blog, only now it’s a blog that’s much, much harder to skim at a glance, and much more cumbersome for detailed reading. I feel like they’re aiming for a usertype / market that might not exist.
The fact that it’s unwieldy for platforms like netbooks or smartphones is just another downside.
But I personally just use RSS, so the gawker sites I read are, from my view, untouched.
I have no opinion on the commenting, since I don’t.
The only reason I used to open them up in a bunch of tabs is so that I wouldn’t have to hit the back button to get access to the menu. With the menu there all the time, I don’t have any need to open more tabs.
From the comments, it seems other people feel the site is slower. But for me, the pages are loading much quicker in-frame then they used to as separate tabs. I imagine if it was slower for you, that might color your experience. You can still open them in separate tabs if you want to though, by clicking on the links in the sidebar.
Terrible design. Luckily, I never heave to deal with it thanks to the magic of Google Reader. Anyone who reads a lot of blogs really should consider using an RSS feed–made my life so much easier and less wasteful. I also lost 10lbs!