“Oh, you’re used to reading top to bottom, left to right and having posts in chronological order? Well here’s some bigger pictures!” - troll comment.
The only positive that I can find with the new redesign is that Features are now more prominent and “stick” better.
However, the “newshole” has been reduced to make room for more advertisements (this is understandable) and I now have a hard time determining the newest content (this is not appreciated).
Try this:
I’m betting that if/when you compare page-hit stats, you’ll find the single-column page will have MUCH higher view-stats.
Thanks for the option =D
A rose by any other name…
Reducing upfront content while simultaneously promoting click-through, no? The teasers may not include the phrase, “one weird trick”, but they read like clickbait teasers to me.
Grrrrrr me hate change mmmm grrr
I too quickly jumped over to the pseudo-old-style chronological link … however, seeing that the vast majority of the articles are merely a headline with a picture, I’m likely going to use the “zine-look” page.
Why oh WHY?!?! did you drop the paragraph-or-so text? How else am I supposed to know if I’m actually interested in reading an article? Vague headline with a picture is pretty much useless to me.
:\
You’re right, it’s not there.
Even if it were there, this new layout is strongly allowing/encouraging the missing of stories, which is fine on a site like Slate but will be a little sad on BB, where I’m used to scrolling through the day’s stories and at least glancing at each of them.
you’re not. you have to click through to the article so they get an extra page view.
I like the new 2-column format for desktop view, the implementation just needs a little refinement IMHO.
First it was the deluge of TV show recaps - I recently saw 5 in a row! - and now a redesign to enhance click counts and linkbait titles. I’ve been reading fewer and fewer articles over the last year and this redesign is like the last nail in the coffin.
I keep coming here mostly because I have my daily regiment of sites in my browser’s title bar and Boing Boing is just before Facebook, but I think I might actually drop it completely at this point because now it’s actually work to read the site.
However, on further inspection … I see that the single-column page has pretty much NO indication of what an article is actually about. i.e.- just some headline with a picture, and no paragraph or two to indicate actual content.
So on the one hand, I really really dislike the layout of the new “zine look” page, but just as much really really dislike the lack of content-descriptive paragraphs on the “old look” page.
In short, you’ve created two options for users, neither of which is particularly useful. :\
I try not to be a person that automatically hates something because it is new and different but I gotta say I’m not a big fan of the new design, mostly because when I come to the site for my daily fix of wonderful things I like to be able to easily work my way back to where I left off. I’m glad you left a reverse chronological order option available and I will be using that, but I’d appreciate having a link to that on the main page…
Sadly, I make use of your BBS one more time, in order to lodge the only posting since the last time I weighed in to offer my considerations:
Again, I agree with your motivations and certainly respect your collective rights to develop and redevelop and redesign your property as you see fit. We cannot remain static and stationary while expecting to live along a linear time line.
However, your tactics here fall short of your mark. Visually, it appears that you aspire to mimicry of a linkbait site. Why in the world would you want to dilute your brand/property/utility/benefits that way?
Since the BBS revamp, I visit about 75% of what I did before, but I stay roughly 25% of the time I did before. I have visited the BBS once since that time, where I used to read discussions at the bottom of the page. I never make the jump and login to see what else is being said. So, the initial info gets to me, but I never botherWith/takeAdvantageOf the BBS to further my understanding or refine my experience.
Quite curious what your statistics tell you about the BBS move.
Equally curious what your traffic logs will tell you about your latest efforts. I can but offer this single anecdote: it is likely that now I will visit even less, and perhaps not at all.
And that is a shame, as I have enjoyed (for the most part) tremendously our relationship over these many years.
Good luck, Godspeed, and we’ll see you around. Or not.
it’s very easy to dismiss negative comment as “Grrrrrr me hate change mmmm grrr”, yet there are a lot of points being made repeatedly in this thread that are simply being ignored.
But no, let’s just ignore legitimate criticism and pretend everyone who doesn’t “get” the new look just isn’t with it, man
The new design may be custom to BoingBoing but the basic idea is one you see on a lot of sites. I can’t stand navigating through any of them, so I can say in my opinion it’s a poor concept, with certainty that it’s not just resistance to change. But I’m less sure I’m the target audience at all; I happily read BoingBoing just fine from here, so long as there’s no similar redesign.
You know, I can actually appreciate the desire to emphasize the original/commissioned feature articles over the day to day short blog posts, but I wonder if it could be done without totally obscuring the blog bits.
But hey, if you don’t want this to be/be seen as a blog any more I guess that makes sense.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate this redesign since I first saw it. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for the redesign at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.
But seriously, I don’t like this at all. I come to BoingBoing because I like READING, not playing eye-ping-pong or laboriously mining for things that might interest me by clicking “read more” at links that are ambiguous enough that they might interest me and might not.
I’ll be using the chronological layout from now on, which mitigates the problems but the clickbait approach does not bode well for the future of the site.
Also, when I first saw it, I seriously wondered for a moment if it was still April 1st.
Quite the opposite. The new design hits the mark exactly – BoingBoing sees itself as a magazine, not a blog. A glossy, visual, deep-thinking and deep-writing magazine. Not a straightforward, sequenced, quick-read blog.
As such, there is a considerable amount of friction. If you’re used to thinking of it as a blog, then you’ll see nothing but reduced content (i.e. clickbait teasers) and visual nonsense. If you think of it as the online 'zine (what’s wrong with ‘maga’, by the way?) then you’ll see encouragement and excitement for the featured content.
Sorry, BoingBoing - I think I get what you’re trying to do here? Maybe? But the new layout is so dense and so busy that I just have a hard time looking at it. I know, I know, everyone hates change, but usually I try to adapt. This just has me baffled, though. Maybe my use of BoingBoing is at odds with what you all want - I’ve always enjoyed it as a cool collection of interesting bits of news and other things from around the web, and I like being able to scroll through them one by one until something catches my eye. I like having lots of text right there on the page, with or without an image, rather than having to click to somewhere else to figure out if I’m interested in reading more or not.
I don’t know, you guys do what you want I suppose, as long as you leave the link to the reverse-chronological style somewhere accessible. But if this site becomes light on news and heavier on pictures with one-liners, I’ll probably end up going somewhere else, even though I’d hate to do so after having been a reader here for so many years now.
Reminds me of this fiasco: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/slashdots-new-interface-could-kill-what-keeps-slashdot-relevant/
