Created an account after years of lurking to say I HATE the redesign.
Love the site.
HATE the redesign.
Unreadable, uncomfortable, unpleasant.
Replaced my bookmark with the chronological link.
Praying to dog that I never have to see this monstrosity of a front page “design” again.
Please never remove the chronological format because there’s no way I’m going through the torture of all those multi scaled boxes.
A good designer should make things easy to read - not harder.
Remember, the greatest threat to effective design is self-indulgence. Whoever thought it’d be cool to do it this new way, or whoever is trying to justify their position with new work, has lost sight of this fact.
Readers want large readable text that flows from top to bottom. Please give readers what they want.
A bad design, poorly executed. Redesign for the sake of redesign without any reason behind it. I immediately got nostalgic and clicked the reverse-chronological link, only to be taken to a page with huge images and a few lines of text for each post. So I guess that’s it, no going back to an easily readable site. Also, to divide the site into “more posts” and “more features” when you want to go past the first page is just odd. In all my years surfing the interwebs I’ve never seen a site divided up like this. You want more emphasis on feature articles, fine, put them in a bar at the top like Polygon for example. There’s a reason most sites on the web look the way they do, with main content down the center and other content off to the right. It has to do with the way we read. Pick up any book and you start at the top left and work your way down the page. It’s why the blog format works so well, it is similar to how you read a printed page. Breaking the content into tiny boxes on the left, huge images on the right and an overall reduction of text just makes the reader work harder and click more often and divides their attention rather than concentrate it. Instead of trying to re-invent web layout, stick with what works for the majority of websites and design a site that is easily read without having to click “Read the rest” just to see the actual content of a post. This is just another nail in the coffin of a once great blog and I think the number of daily visitors here reflects this.
I’m not opposed to redesign in any way. But one major curse of the web these days is “Read the rest.” Now not only do I have to load this page, but any time I want to get beyond six words of an article (which you have to do anyway if you want to know what it’s about) I have to move to ANOTHER page, then BACK again, then into ANOTHER page, then BACK again etc. It’s actually more load work than if you just put all the text on the page to begin with, and it’s painful on a phone or other mobile device. And say I load the page before entering the subway or going offline? Now the page is useless to me.
This is pretty much how I feel. I like a blog format, so long as I get a paragraph or two of text before having to click through. I don’t mind a newspaper format, so long as stuff other than the headlines is arranged by subject matter. This seems like a bit of an odd hybrid. Also, it’s ad-blocker mandatory for me, which I try to avoid for sites I support.
I also had an immediate reaction that it is designed to maximize click-throughs.
Other sites I like, Skepchick for example, have taken on a look like this. It’s not for me, and I rarely go back. Looking at it’s work.
Thank fsm for the link to the chron. view; I returned to the abomination that greeted me this morning and was getting panicky looking for it in vain. Retained enough linear thought in the midst of such ‘busy-ness’ to click through to this announcement post and locate the link.
That being said: I’m here for **words and ideas supported with illustrations ** not a series of graphics barely supported with descriptions! Forcing the click SUCKS.
I have a first generation iPad that was mostly used for reading boingboing. Now the front page crashes Safari. Lame.
Not going to upgrade hardware just to keep reading your site. Bye
Yup. I opened the page up and my brain immediately freaked out. I can’t read it. I like the new font and the general cleanness of the page, but it’s just too busy for me to process.
Fortunately, there’s still http://boingboing.net/page/1 which is the old layout. I think I’ll need to update my bookmarks to point to there instead, but I suspect the end result is that I’ll be reading the site less. I know you guys work hard on the site and are probably really proud of the work you’ve done, but for someone with ADHD like me, I cant read it. The last incarnation of the site was just about nearly perfect for me and boingboing became the #1 link I opened in my browser after my email.
My first thought was “what the hell just happened” when I opened the site, but I think that I’m over it now. Here are some – hopefully constructive – criticisms.
The column for special pieces is too big unless there are going to be a lot more of them. The regular blog posts have been the main attraction but they only get ~1/3 of the width.
This is, to some extent repeating myself: the regular articles are too small; but here I mean in the sense of absolute size. Cory’s “This day in blogging history” is all title and not even the full title at that. Maggie’s “Who will stand against the mammalian hordes” is about the picture - a tiny tiny picture.
Unless there really are going to be more of the special pieces, some of these are going to be gathering dust on the front page with closed comment sections.
Chrome Beta on android fails to render anything on the site. Regular Chrome on android is fine.
Luckily there are tools that exist to save us from the urges of redesign. I downloaded some add-ons to firefox, did a bit of CSS-Spelunking, and now I can actually parse it as before. Nice try, I guess…
It’s been suggested here that one purpose of the redesign is to encourage clickthroughs, that is to say traffic, that is to say revenue… Call me an old cynic, but I’d be interested to know if that was a major factor; and I’ll be interested to see if it works.
Edit: Now that I’ve had more time with it, I actually like it significantly less due to the lack of text on the front page. Your readership is made up ofreaders.
I love the look!
Much more positive experience on opening up to the new redesign than the last time, for me at least.
But I do strongly agree with the rumblings of click-bait. It was lovely to be able to scroll through the list and read almost everything. Now it’s much more Slate-ified. We can’t read anything without clicking on it, and we can’t even know if we’re going to be interested in it.
Maybe you could have a hover-to-see-more mode, just giving us the first paragraph at least…? Or a corner disclosure twisty on the posts showing the paragraph, so we don’t have to keep loading up new pages?
Hate the zine look. Thank God for the chronological link.
Why do I hate the zine look?
Well… pictures too small on the left hand side, headings too small on the left hand side. Insufficient text acompanying an article to allow the user to decide whether it is worthwhile to click through or not. Everything on the right hand side too BIG!
The purpose of Boing Boing (if I’m not mistaken) is to provide stories of interest to a wide variety of users. That automatically assumes that the user decides what they are interested in. By using the GIANT images to the right, it just says to me “Look at this first! This is more important!” In other words, BoingBoing is deciding what I should look at. That’s just wrong.
Also, on the chrono link page…
Try and standardise the amount of text with each article. Some have literally a one sentence text accompaniment. Others have a paragraph, or even two.
That said, I shall persevere with the chronological link. But the zine page will never be displayed on my monitor again. Nevers, I tell ya!
