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Have Kotaku pulled a Digg with their resign? It's so bad

Joystiq's blog design is perfect. Clean and dont need to click on every fuckin news to read them. Thats what a blog is supposed to be.
 
Tathanen said:
Wow it's... really awful. I had to read their instructional post in order to even see that "Next Post" bar at the bottom. I do UX work as well and it's causing me physical pain. Instead of scrolling and being able to glimpse which stories I'd be interested in stopping on based on their headline and graphic, I have to click and load every story in SEQUENCE? A 5 second no-effort process has been transformed into a 60 second requires-attention process filled almost exclusively with "annoyed and waiting" time. There is no reality in which this is good for any kind of user, I can only imagine it's to force people to pay more attention to each individual story. Unfortunately for them it'll likely have the opposite effect of no one paying attention to ANY story, since no one will want to click through to them.

Man. For such a rapidly-updating blog to effectively lock their homepage to a single piece of content seems suicidal.
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell, the scroll bar on the right contains the minimized listing of the current top stories just like the old blog did. No need to click through each one. Anyway, I'm not hating the new design too much, at least once that scroll bar on the right actually loaded up for me (I had a problem with Flash). The new design is jarring, but I don't find it difficult to see what the site has to offer at a glance. BTW, I'm also a web guy.
 
I love this part of the FAQ:

We wanted to make the front page lighter and simpler to scan, while also emphasizing big feature stories that we've written.
Click to expand...
So putting one random story at the forefront and then cramming the rest in this tiny sidebar makes it simpler to scan?
 
hate kotaku, so much worthless news I don't care about like news on hentai games and Japanese voice actors pissing off their creepy fan base (embarrassing)
 
Raging Spaniard said:
In any case, the problem with that website is the content, not the design.
Click to expand...

This, exactly. The worst offense however, is the "Talk amongst yourselves" posts. Michael McWhertor and Stephen Totilo are too good for that site.
 
The only good redesign I've seen since YEARS is the lastest IGN. And this is probably great more because IGN was the crappiest website design ever before that update than because the new layout is great. Oh yeah and the lastest Google.com was also a tremendous improvement.

Not like I was already reading Kocktaku but it seems I will read it even less!
 
The Kotaku FAQ basically says:

If you want to scroll through the latest news and browse the text, just keep clicking Next Post.

(Not an actual quote)


They just want more clicks.

Classic Kotaku works well, but the content is still garbage.

watership said:
Michael McWhertor and Stephen Totilo are too good for that site.
Click to expand...

I agree with this.
 
I use to go there. Though they kind of do the murder stories just a tad bit much. I don't give a fuck if a dude was playing a Wii game, then decided to kill his child. Wtf? That doesn't belong on a gaming info site.

So I normally don't even go there, but yeah, its ugly looking now.
 
JeTmAn81 said:
As far as I can tell, the scroll bar on the right contains the minimized listing of the current top stories just like the old blog did. No need to click through each one. Anyway, I'm not hating the new design too much, at least once that scroll bar on the right actually loaded up for me (I had a problem with Flash). The new design is jarring, but I don't find it difficult to see what the site has to offer at a glance. BTW, I'm also a web guy.
Click to expand...

The problem is that there IS no right-side scroll bar. The browser bar scrolls the main story. The righthand bar is truncated based on your browser height, and once the ad loads, there are basically just 2 or 2.5(???) stories that fit over there (on my machine at least). You have to repeatedly click the button at the bottom of the sidebar to see more, which is the same problem as the left side of the site.

In a world so accustomed to scrolling, it's bizarre to see such a hard-line stance against it, particularly on a website built around a rapid flow of content. I dunno, maybe they figure that people who want the blog-roll are getting it via RSS.
 
Tathanen said:
The problem is that there IS no right-side scroll bar. The browser bar scrolls the main story. The righthand bar is truncated based on your browser height, and once the ad loads, there are basically just 2 or 2.5(???) stories that fit over there (on my machine at least). You have to repeatedly click the button at the bottom of the sidebar to see more, which is the same problem as the left side of the site.

In a world so accustomed to scrolling, it's bizarre to see such a hard-line stance against it, particularly on a website built around a rapid flow of content. I dunno, maybe they figure that people who want the blog-roll are getting it via RSS.
Click to expand...

Have you tried scrolling with the mouse wheel? This works just fine for me for scrolling through the posts on the right. I guess it's my setup as well, but I can see at least five posts at once in that column. Maybe they didn't do a good job of making it scale to different resolutions.
 
Any site that requires javascript and/or Flash to show even basic informations gets a big "no" from me; here, without a javascript, even the main article doesn't load.

Also, the sidebar still hasn't loaded, even though I turned off all ad-blocks. ;D
 
JeTmAn81 said:
Have you tried scrolling with the mouse wheel? This works just fine for me for scrolling through the posts on the right. I guess it's my setup as well, but I can see at least five posts at once in that column. Maybe they didn't do a good job of making it scale to different resolutions.
Click to expand...

I've been using the scroll on my laptop's touchpad, it only scrolls the main content area. I put the cursor over the sidebar and scrolled, still the main stuff. Maybe if I clicked over there then scrolled... but I can't actually load their sidebar at all any more to test.

Like Mr_Zombie said, requiring AJAX/JS for your primary content load is pretty ridiculous.
 
It's really shit considering the bar on the right isn't loading any stories anyway, I'm just stuck with one big ass and boring story.
 
someone is going to get fired here... they managed to throw site's most important content into the sidebar widget...

how many hours until it goes back to what it was? i give them 48 hrs tops.
 
MrTroubleMaker said:
me either lol
Click to expand...

Me neither. I get one main story, 2 to 3 feature story call outs on the bottom and on the right a loading symbol. On a brighter note I really like the redesign of VG247 and they seem to have more articles these days. I usually see a story on VG247 than later in the day it pops onto Kotaku.
 
Ugh, I hate web designs that force more clicking. Nice for their ad revenue I guess, but pretty crappy for the users. With the shorter article descriptions on the list, they definitely are trying to encourage you to click more articles. Kotaku isn't my favorite site by any means, but I like how the old site was nicely designed to give you the jist of their articles right there on the front page.
 
Oh god, that's atrocious. It actually makes me kind of uncomfortable. I really don't know how anyone could get any enjoyment out of navigating that mess.
 
Ratrat said:
Don't care about Kotaku but I'm sad that I'll never visit io9 ever again.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this. What a ridiculously stupid redesign on every conceivable level. I love io9 but I will not suffer through that to read it.
 
I used to go to kotaku a lot until Gawker Media got hacked. Wtf happened to the site. One story on the front? that's it. I don't want to click next post to see the next one. I have them on my RSS feed. It still lists their most current posts in the last few hours, but going to the site directly sucks. Not user friendly. I won't be going there anymore.
 
I hate these new frames that are resource hogs (new twitter does the same thing). My computer does suck though. Can't even scroll with the scroll bar :lol
 
Wow, Lifehacker is completely broken after the redesign. There is NOTHING in the middle. I guess subscribing to the RSS feed is the only solution for now.
 
Kotaku is the only game news site I get at work so I frequent it for better or worse.

What is crazy is that people in comments have been talking negatively of this design since they put up the beta page. And after io9 switched, every "open thread" was full of comments about how bad io9 looked and where people were going to go after Kotaku switches. Surely that should have been a sign to scrap the design. If there's one thing no site should ever fuck with, it is the community.

I didn't really like the old layout because it was so slow. This one is faster and more responsive but... yea. It's bad.
 
Folks, I know some of you will hate Kotaku no matter what.

Others are complaining about legit design and tech issues. Some are the product of intentional design decisions. Others are symptoms of bugs that were not squashed prior to launch. The site is supposed to run much faster than it currently is. You should be able to swiftly and smoothly navigate through the headline stack. It's also a known issue that the current design isn't optimized for all screen sizes, and that's being worked on.

With any luck, you will soon be able to go back to complaining about us only for our content.
 
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