I’m in the “Do Not Like” camp, mostly about the presentation of “features” vs “posts”.
The new layout has two major issues for me.
The first is that there isn’t enough teaser content for the features for me to decide if I want to click through or not. So, to decide if I want to read a feature, I have to click through. This is annoying on a desktop, but basically unusable for me on my portable devices (android tablet, iphone).
The second issue is that the features don’t have a ton of turnover, and once I’ve read it, I will never need to read it again. But it won’t go away. And, it takes up the majority of the space on the page.
Meanwhile, the stuff that does turn over has been shunted over to the side, shrunken and almost have enough text for me to decide to “read the rest”.
I’ve been reading boingboing since it was printed on paper. (I still have my copies on my bookshelf!) It seems like the history of features vs posts dates back to the original boingboing zines, where there were always longer, deeper articles (sanrio puroland! party party!), and shorter blurbs about quirky stuff. Loved it, and hope both of these remain at the core of boingboing.
I think what drives me back to boingboing are the posts, though, with the occasional deep-dive into a feature. The emphasis is now exactly opposite of my usage in the new layout.
I’d call it a playful (and humorous) use of the craft of headlines to draw attention to a responsibly-reported and interesting precis on water-borne microbes, not clickbait. The difference is simple: clickbait is a deception or trick, used to “bait” readers into clicking on a link that leads to low-quality, slapdash or irrelevant content. But Maggie’s work is excellent and fully-worthy of the praise it receives.
That’s the deal with headlines: is a reward for trusting it in evidence? With Maggie, it is. So you can trust that a clever or crafty headline is going somewhere, when it has her name under it.
Feature turnover: we’re going from 2 a week to 2 (or more) a day. Once the site demonstrates that movement over time, I think the new layout will ‘feel’ right. It’s in anticipation of change that’s only just beginning.
You are making the assumption that everyone is familiar with Maggie’s writing.
Rob, I’m not the only one making these points. If I were, I’d be happy to be dismissed with a simple “everyone else seems to be ok with this”. But lots of people are saying the same things as I am. True, this one article is (imo) a particular low point, and perhaps it’s a one-article oversight which now you are aware of you might be more careful about, but the whole attitude here (and in, for example, the GOT spoiler thread) is one of “We know whats best and if you don’t like it you are wrong”.
But what many of us are saying is that the headline isn’t enough. Based on the headline, and Maggie’s name, it could be about lots of different things. As much as I might love Maggie’s writing, I don’t have enough information to know if I want to click through.
And I think that particular post got picked on because it resembles the “this one common household item could be killing you” meme.
The confusion here is that you’re assuming that “clickbait” implies something about the underlying article. Clickbait is used to “bait” the reader into “clicking” without enough information to determine whether the endpoint is something they actually want to read. The quality of the article doesn’t come into it. No matter how good the article is, if the article ends up being something the reader wasn’t interested in then they still feel as though they have been deceived by the low-information enticement to click.
After writing this, I did load up boingboing on my tablet, and would not have noticed a change: combined features and posts (though you can’t really tell which is which). I’d still prefer more text for the features, beyond the headlines plus maybe 1-line teaser.
You’re seeing a problem that none of us experience from the reader side. Especially with the abomination that is endless scrolling. I don’t see that there is a concept of a “front page” anymore.
Fair enough, but regular readers would most likely scroll down until they were caught up. Which addresses another problem that people mentioned - with the new layout, it’s harder to tell if you’re caught up. I don’t think the average reader cares (or is even aware of) what articles are ‘blog posts’ and which are ‘features.’ If one side of the screen is updating faster than the other, that means I have to scroll through Features I’ve already read to get to blog posts that I haven’t, or vice versa. CNet bungled their front page similarly - there’s a bunch of different columns that you have to check separately to know if you’re read up. It’s an annoying pain that used to be simple, and so I read their site less.
Exactly so. The headline’s intentionally ironic character might be easily missed at a glance, but I think the use of it here to criticize the new homepage design–by folks who know that her work is good–confuses one thing for another.
Whenever we update the design, we have an incredibly difficult dilemma, which is this: how do we separate useful criticism and feedback from the kneejerking that invariably comes with it?
The waters can get very muddy, because we nerds and geeks have a habit of trying to find quantitative or principled support for subjective opinions, But what we need are the subjective opinion. We need to know what people feel. All-too often, though, it’ll be parsed or presented in objective or technical terms that aren’t as meaningful to us.
For example, I know what the real problem is when people complain about clickbait. The real problem is trust.
When people cite 1990s-era usability guidelines, it’s would be easy to just ignore it – but they hide the real objection, which is the failure of a design to communicate how it works.
We appreciate and read all of the feedback on the new design. It’s not that we’re ignoring it – we just don’t feel a need to defend or justify it much beyond the announcement post. But you’ll find in the long run that a lot of the thoughts here will be used to refine the implementation, even if the basic concept of it is unchanged.
Totally with you on this. It wasn’t really even conscious because if it was I would have realised it was probably not trash due to being on BB, but that’s the problem with the new layout - it turns a quick flick through the potential new reads for the day in to something more time consuming.
