My impression is that Boing Boing has an amazingly high proportion of readers who are design-obsessed and/or web, UI, or graphic-design professionals. That’s not surprising given your mix of content. (I’m not but I play one at my employer and currently at a non-profit.)
Right now you are wasting this free resource. Why then don’t you regularly enlist their help in coming up with a better design? You could have run this as a preview feature for the new design, and you would have gotten most of the same feedback while it was still easier - psychologically and technically - to make changes with it, to fix the things which are actual specific problems, and possibly to find better ways to achieve the goals you’re after. At the moment it sounds like you’re rejecting most or all of the feedback because the group sunk a lot of time into the redesign and now feels this is the only way to do it. (If you’re not, and that’s just the way it’s coming across to me, good.)
Getting feedback earlier in the design process, before everyone’s so invested in a particular choice, works much better. Better still, present two or three different “sketches” of the content layout and ask people for feedback on which is best or which features are best, and you’ll hear good things about most of them and very likely come up with a better idea still. [Cites are available, if this isn’t common sense enough.]
I’ve really enjoyed Boing Boing over the years, so I thought I owed it to you guys to let you know why I’m going away until the next redesign.
I’ve been where you are, and I know that the design team you hired has been telling you for months: “Everybody hates every redesign at first, and you’ll get lots of negative comments, but that’s actually great, because you’re shaking things up, and everybody gets used to it and realizes that they like it more by the end of the week!” The problem with this logic, of course, is that it shuts you off all feedback.
Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, this redesign literally makes my eyes and brain hurt, so much so that the three times I’ve clicked on it, I’ve had to click away before I could actually find any content I liked.
Worse, you’ve clearly jumped on the same bandwagon as so many other sites, all of which have become unreadable to me in the process. The idea seems to be that iphone users are cool, and desktop users are uncool, so the way to be cool is to redisign your blog so that it only looks good on an iphone and looks like crap on a desktop, but who wants a long read on the iphone? This is a content-based blog, not a box of little bon-bons to pop into your mouth for empty calories. I’ll keep checking in every month or so to see if you’ve switched to a better interface, but I can’t read this.
I loved that BoingBoing was one of the last easy-to-read blogs in my daily internet catch-up. It was always one of the first that I read after waking up, along with morning tea. Now it’s a copy of all the other big-block, confusing, image heavy sites out there. Same reason I hate going to the full Verge site rather than just the mobile one.
What was broken about the old site? Why the radical change? I wanted to read a ton of stuff every day, now I’ve become so frustrated I find myself not wanting to visit at all. Too confusing to figure out what I want to read, what things are actually about – and it does irk me that the whole thing smells of clickbait. I don’t know that that was the actual intention, it’s just how it reads. My interest in clicking on these links has been significantly impacted by the amount of information I’m given.
I don’t normally comment because it’s just not my thing – I’m here to read and think and find out cool stuff. But when I grew so frustrated with the new design (standing in the way of finding things and actually reading anything) I thought I’d pop in and finally say something. I’m heartened by the fact that the frustration isn’t just mine – I’m not the dumby, other people are also confused. But from what I can tell from the BB staff responses it looks like the people who run the blog aren’t taking the criticism seriously. Which is a shame, I think; I expected more from this blog in particular – which has always been so responsive to the readership in the past. I’m pretty sad about losing my daily dose of BB, but life is too short to get worked up about it more than this comment. Just time to move on after a long good run of reading.
I just noticed now that the features to the right are NOT in chronological order. For example, the Ralph Steadman article, which has been around for two days, is above the “The Oversight” article. And comments above mention the same thing about Maggie’s pitch-drop article.
This is Not Good. It’s hard enough with the horizontal ping-pong (which I didn’t mind that much), but having no idea where to look vertically for new articles is Bad.
If you want people to read your fancy features, you can’t bury new ones in between old ones, or no one’s going to know they’re there.
Okay so now that I understand this somewhat more after reading the article, I humbly ask if there could possibly be a pair of URLs for folks who find this blinding to use instead?
One could display just the “blog” content in a single column and the other could display just the “zine” content in a single column. There could still be ads off to the sides or in the content area or whatever. It might also be useful for some people for there to be two RSS feeds to consume differently as they see fit.
Just FYI: For me, it’s a bit too busy, and it’s more difficult to focus on, and click through to a post compared to before. I prefer the old format, so I hope you’ll keep page/1 going forward. I’m sure there are lots of people who love the new format too, so everybody’s happy!
Sometimes I get the impression they do this type of stuff to just remind us they’re in charge. Anybody reasonable really would see issues with this redesign, but they’re pot committed. IF they fix this or return it to how it was, they might have to listen to us more
Ok. Resisted urge to knee-jerk response and spent some time with it. Instead, I must thank you for implementing the one change that the previous design desperately needed: defined page sizes (as opposed to the accursed infinitely extending single page). So, thank you for giving us boingboing.net/page/[digit] . Too bad the default page is a neurotic, zig-zag, nigh impossible to follow, mess.
My biggest complaint with the design is the need to click through. While the old design was leading to a never ending “front page”, I could still see immediately what was new, get some context, know when it was posted, and how many comments there were, at a glance. The new design requires me to click through and then back out of each article, where before I could scroll and get enough information from the initial scanning to know if I wanted to go further into a post. If this is the future direction, I will be spending less time here.
On a positive note, I turned off ghostery and noscript to see if the page would look any more or less hellacious and it didn’t change at all. In that sense, it’s better than some of the previous changes in comment systems. I stopped commenting for a good 4 or 5 years before the BBS system was implemented, because at one point it wasn’t worth the effort. Unfortunately this change makes me feel like scanning through the site isn’t worth the effort.
To be honest. I don’t like the new layout. But i am very, very happy that you still provide the classic view (http://boingboing.net/page/1). Linear and equal sized articles, no endless scrolling. Thanks!
Seriously though. I will no longer be a frequent reader. Reducing the front page articles to sometimes two sentences and requiring click throughs to read each article is not a relaxing experience. Both in load times and page positioning.
Also the same things already voiced: Bad chronology and the new columns are equally annoying. But it seems in most iterations (page view, RSS) the articles are now abbreviated. So those are not an acceptable workaround for me. Most of the content I can get elsewhere. As sad as it makes me (as i like the original BB content) I’m out.
It’s also worth noting: I put up with the bad cooltools copy a while back as I understand advertising and Amazon affiliate links make money. But I don’t quite get why BB has recently become TV guide. Reading spoilers on the front page and generally just “reading about tv” seems like lowbrow, cheap content that already had me on the fence.
this seems relevant to the level of reader engagement with the change (think I got linked to it from BB, but can’t find that url at the moment).
Excited, interested, and devoted to a piece of the world, fandoms have an ever growing presence and power in our culture.
But how will that power morph in the coming decades?
Will fans be able to control the media they celebrate?
Doesn’t work for me. If you wanted to put more focus on original in depth zine type articles, you should have added an new site, Boing-Boing In Depth or something. Trying to mix both on one page doesn’t work for me. Before I felt like I was compelled to check the site regularly to see what I missed. Now it’s such a jumble I think I might stop checking it at all. It puts the burden on me to sort through it. And I really don’t like the feeling I have to click through everything to see what anything is. I liked the prior emphasis on text. The new emphasis on pictures makes it look like just about every other site. And frankly, most of the pictures aren’t that amazing. Feels like you lost what was unique about Boing-Boing.
I’ll check back a few more times and see if I get used to it, but right now, I feel like I’m likely to move on. If your readership drops, you should know why.
I get that sometimes there are reasons to draw extra special attention to some items because they’re extra awesome or hotly debated or whatever, as a regular reader I need this like a fish needs a bicycle but I understand it can be nice for incidental visitors.
To just pull these ‘highlights’ to the top of the page without any visual indication at all to set them apart from the regular feed however, that’s nothing short of madness. When I saw the IUD piece as the first headline I thought you lot had somehow borked the sorting while tweaking the new look. (By the way, if you’re going to ‘feature’ a weeks old article, maybe you should reopen the comments…)
Besides being confusing, these three ‘hot’ (or ‘stale’) items are so large that even full screen on a 1200p screen I can’t read the first new headline without scrolling, that seems like a poor way to get more attention to your in-house articles.
The new design makes sense re making Features more prominent. It needs work from a readability perspective, maybe some shading and separation lines, and could use more text, but those are easy fixes. The change also make sense in light of the comment migration to BBS last year.
I’m in the only-use-the-BBS camp. Refresh, look at comment counts, and then dive into interesting discussions.
There are 3 main options for now: main site, site1, and BBS, each being fine tuned. I can’t say it’s the direction I would have chosen, and rule by committee is no picnic, but what’s the real issue?
