I commend the design team on making it fast and light. A lot of sites with this style (a vague similarity anyway) essentially freeze my computer for several seconds as they load. Buzzfeed is the worst (I don’t think I’ve ever seen their front page so don’t know if they actually have a similar design, just assuming) and I really wonder how people actually spend any time on sites like that without extreme frustration.
On the topic of clickbait, I have to agree on the headline for Maggie’s article. However, it’s really a poorly timed example. Maggie’s headlines are quite often like that, and perhaps normally they’re more obviously poking fun at the standard clickbait headlines of that type.
By the way, for you clickbait connoisseurs, check out the New York Times twitter feed. Their blurbs there exhibit an astonishing ability to both tell you the gist of the story and to entice you to want to read more. Of course, for actual news they’re mostly straightforward, but it’s for the features (and e.g. NY Times Magazine stuff, to which Maggie is a contributor btw) where the headlines and blurbs get really good, and I suppose that stuff might mostly be visible on the weekend. They’re masters at it.
I think the redesign has some issues, which others have covered well already, but I know from experience that this is not set in stone (and Rob confirms a couple comments above) - lots of tweaking to come I’m sure. I am reading BB far less than I used to, and almost never look at the front page myself (I follow links to articles from the editors on twitter etc.), but that has nothing to do with the design. The push for more original features and the like will possibly have me reading more, but I will say that what originally drew me to BB years ago was the daily dose of wonderful things, most of which are now being de-emphasized in the left column.
No, the problem is lack of information. I might well want to read an article (or watch a video) that’s got a clickbait title, it may interest me. But I don’t know, because they refuse to give me information. It might be something I’ve already read/watched/etc elsewhere that I don’t need to see again, and information would help me decide that. It may be something that is perfectly relevant to other people, just not me, and if I had more information, I’d know that. But they don’t care about me deciding whether this is for me… they care about getting me to click. Or, they care about getting people who are less likely to just not click a page with a clickbaity title to click. Maybe that’s what you’re doing, using natural selection to gear your audience towards more acceptance of clickbait. But it’s still clickbait. You say clickbait is deceptive, but that’s not a defining characteristic… as somebody else said, it’s all in the word: it’s something that baits you into clicking. Whether it’s good or not is irrelevant to the judgement of whether it’s clickbait.
A failure of a design to COMMUNICATE how it works? “Despite what you think, it works fine, I guess we just haven’t COMMUNICATED that fact properly.” This is less encouraging an attitude than you seem to think.
“It’s not that we’re ignoring it, it’s just that we’re not going to change our minds. This is the way it’s going to be, except for a couple of the tiny details that you might help us improve, and so, if you don’t like it, too bad.” Your right, of course, but you might want to remove the “we have open minds” part on the original post, since it’s clear you’re not actually open to changing yours.
I prefer the simple, straightforward layout. I appreciate the link to the old version and will be using my bookmark to bypass your new cluttered homepage.
EDIT: I spoke too soon, the “alternate” version doesn’t auto load content as you scroll down like it used to. At least give us back the same functionality that we were used to.
I follow this train of thought (and agree that it’s their site to do with it as they please), but it seems that if you’re going to pretend you’re a magazine, with an emphasis on long form journalism, then a big title, and image and a very small amount of text is a poor lead for bringing someone into the articles.
The front page of boingboing appears to no longer be a destination, but rather a table of contents. To me, however, it fails at that as well. It seems it should be either enough detail on the articles to make you want to click through and read the whole thing or an even more concise/ tighter design that allows you to skim the titles of many articles at once. Now it seems there aren’t enough things above the fold to make it feel useful, but at the same time, there isn’t enough content to draw you into the articles. It seems to be caught in an ugly middle.
It also ignores how (western) people read web pages. Left to right across the top and then down.
I love the featured content and frequently read it. I also love (maybe more) that ‘the blog’ has its finger on the pulse of something really interesting. But now, its all one big angry salad that doesn’t seem to serve any of its stated purposes.
I’m really disappointed. Boing Boing had a simplicity and readability that I loved. I used to show it to clients as an example of how less is more. Now all we have is more. A great big heap of more.
Boing Boing was always about good articles. This looks like every wannabe magazine site out there. Disorganised, distracting, confusing quantity with quality.
I don’t suppose for one minute that you will change it back. But I can hope…
Yes. One of the problems (among many) with the web site is trust. This is the internet. We trust no one. This new design screams “We’re hiding information.” The gut response from everyone is suspicion and annoyance.
You have a number of stated goals with the redesign. Maybe it’s met the technical requirements, but is poorly executed. BBC News, Ars Technica, and Economist have very different styles, but wonderful execution.
Well, at least the redesign was enough to get me to make an account after the previous one got blasted into nothingness the last time you decided to shuffle things around in these parts, so you’ve got that at least.
I came here just to add my voice to the “hate” camp. As has been said before by others, the site is now cluttered, confusing and less easy to use. More eye candy, less actual content. The lack of visible lede on the front page is particularly irksome. Like so many other places, the drive here, too, seems to be shifting away from old users and towards new. Chase the clicks, and nevermind if you alienate a few of the old regulars.
This bloody redesign-pour-redesign bug has lately-ish caught a number of places I (now increasingly used to) frequent, and it’s making me exceedingly unhappy. I really don’t expect things to get better here, or anywhere else (and judging by Rob’s comments above, that not me being overly cynical) - it’s quite clear that being simple, clear, functional and minimalist is for the moment so last season. Apparently all I can do is wait for this present design craze to pass and hope that the next one will be less dire. Disappointing, but there you have it.
As for Maggie’s article, I wouldn’t click a clickbait-y link written by the illegitimate lovechild of Carl Sagan and Mr Rogers. I will not be a party of encouraging such behaviours, however “ironic” the usage, and I sure as hell will not be encouraging them.
I’ll be bookmarking that then, and hope it stays. As for the self-loading at the end of a page, yeah, it’s a feature I disable with NoScript. Always hated the auto-loading.
Oh for goodness sake. Your “criticism” was a prediction that they would sequester criticism to make themselves feel better. That isn’t criticsm, and it isn’t even related to the new layout. I don’t like the new layout, but I didn’t like your post either.
I have immediately liked every BoingBoing redesign I’ve seen in the 12 years I’ve been following. I don’t like this one.
I appreciate that features are more prominent now. That makes sense! But my brain isn’t good at processing two streams of information that are temporally disconnected but spatially adjacent. Especially when they are kind of in a grid but not really.
And as many other commenters have mentioned, the ‘blog’ stream simply doesn’t have enough space for explanatory text now.
That said, I sure appreciate what BoingBoing does in general.
I think we can reasonably have different ideas of what “clickbait” is, but I tend to side with Rob’s idea of it more. When a fish goes after a worm in the water, it’s only bait if it’s on a hook. Otherwise, it’s just food. Read the underlying article and ask yourself: Did I just get hooked?
You criticized Rob for not taking your criticism seriously
I said, “Hey, come on”
You said, “Read my other posts too.”
In a thread where one of your primary criticisms is that their headlines expect clicks without giving any underlying information, it seems rich for you to expect that, having read that one post, I would search for more before replying.
You said something stupid on the internet, I thought you were stupid, the joke is, apparently on me?
It makes me sad that whatever you wanted to say, it all boils down to this empty cynicism. This never works, you know? It suggests that whatever we say or do will be interpreted through that filter, and that your particular criticisms (unlike those of many other people here) aren’t valuable or useful.
