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

Wha? Terrible design.

How will they fish for clicks on older articles? That site lived off of sensational titles and lead ins. You would think they would get more real estate
What am I looking at?
Feels heavy/clunky/something has to load after every click.


2/5

Can't wait to read a review criticizing a games UI.
 
Why does the header bar over the article scroll with the article, but the header bar over the side that lists other stories stay in place just scrolling the contents (and thus looking much better)...

Bad coding, or Awful design choice?

Regardless, this certainly hasn't enticed me to start reading Kotaku again, in fact I'm far less likely to read than ever before. Good job Gawker.
 
edgefusion said:
Oh god that sidebar does not play nicely with OS X's inertia scrolling, jitters about all over the god damn place.
Click to expand...
fuck, you weren't kidding, tried it on safari and the thing scrolls from standstill to jerky speeds in an instant. Uncontrollable.

This must be one of the worst redesigns I've ever seen. I've loathed other site redesigns for being too cluttered or messy, but at least they were functional. This is unusable.
 
Terribly fucking design and its disappointing that io9 is also using it. Looks like it was the vision of one stubborn person because I cant believe a collective group would settle on such a terrible design. I just fucking hate having to scroll inch by inch to see the articles on the right
 
A lot of people don't want to read big news articles it seems like. They want quick nuggets of new information so they can come to sites like... here to discuss them with people they would probably rather discuss them. This new redesign makes it seem less quick news and more read this article that I wrote.

I stopped going to Kotaku when they made the pictures smaller and started pushing out non-news like cakes.

Look at Joystiq. I originally replaced Kotaku with them because they kept the quick news forefront and don't really do lengthy articles that the general user wouldn't care about. And they kept nice big pictures up so you can quickly see if you're interested.
 
The one thing that annoys me more than anything on a website is when a frame follows my scroll. It's maybe an OCD thing, but I hate when things follow my scroll.
 
thetrin said:
The one thing that annoys me more than anything on a website is when a frame follows my scroll. It's maybe an OCD thing, but I hate when things follow my scroll.
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I hate that too. When viewing all of the videos in a channel on youtube and the frame moves while you scroll through the videos it's the worst.
 
thetrin said:
The one thing that annoys me more than anything on a website is when a frame follows my scroll. It's maybe an OCD thing, but I hate when things follow my scroll.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it bugs me too. Annoying ads ruined those. Especially the ones that like to scroll in front of the page and stay there until you can find the hidden [x] button.
 
Oh wow their footer navigation is INSIDE the scrolling blog post column, which ends up displaying it ABOVE the "next post" bar. Could the hierarchy be any more broken? I absolutely can't stand when people use laughing emoticons in situations like this but if we still had them I'd be sorely tempted let me tell you.

At least the righthand sidebar does indeed work with a scroll-wheel. Not that it really excuses the terrible paradigm of two columns that scroll independently of one another, which makes the user have to think about where their cursor is when they scroll their mouse wheel. And to add insult to injury, it has an outside (browser) scroll bar that scrolls the INSIDE content, and NO scroll bar for the outside content.

But hey you can always Click A Button to scroll it!

*boggles*
 
Main problem with the new design is that it really goes against a few aspects of human nature. The thing a visitor needs first and formost is a way to browse through the options that are available on the site, and this new format, right from the beginning, shoves content in their faces and relegates that browsing of content to a far less useful small sidebar.

While I appreciate what they're trying to do, I don't need one piece of content up at all times. As much as people like to think they're multi-taskers, they're not: they read one story, they're done, they move on to find the next one they want to read. Those are separate tasks, and each task should be given top priority when it is the primary task. Maybe not an exact comparison, it's like pulling a book off of your bookshelf, reading a bit of it, and then when trying to find the next book you want to read, putting the first book - still open - directly on the shelf so that it gets in your way as you browse for a new book. You're done with that book; you don't need it open and the primary focus of your view anymore.

As for the arguments of "we wanted bigger images on the homepage", that's BS. I had no problem running a design back when the Play site was up that could incorporate big images to draw attention to top news stories AND present logical and prioritized content browsing options.
 
stephentotilo said:
With any luck, you will soon be able to go back to complaining about us only for our content.
Click to expand...
If you're going to keep posting dumb shit like video game cakes, Michael McWhertor's NASA/science news stories and Bashcraft's Japanese pop-culture gossip stories that have barely anything to do with video games (if anything whatsoever), and a myriad of pieces that show that not even the most base level of fact-checking or proofreading was done on them because it's more important to be first than to be good, I'm looking forward to it!
 
Absolutely Horrible. Guy/Team that designed this template needs to be fired and black balled by the entire design industry. Anyone with half an ounce of sense could tell you if you want to "Spotlight" a handful of articles, just add headline block like Engadget. Putting the meat of your content in a tiny area comprising maybe 15% of viewable real estate is beyond moronic. Hopefully this crash and burns hard and the people seriously do lose their jobs over it, because they obviously lack basic reason and logic and do not deserve to be employed beyond unskilled laboring.
 
I just deleted my Kotaku bookmark after seeing the redesign, and I know I wasn't the only person I know to do so. Happened to Digg as well, and I haven't been back there in months; I even deleted their iPhone app.
 
Hey you know what, it's actually nicer in Safari (I'd been using Firefox). Lots of the janky feel I was getting while loading articles and clicking the scroll buttons is mitigated by actual animation in there. I'm all for graceful degradation and progressive enhancement, but I think this probably degrades a little TOO much in non-Safari browsers, and I can't imagine Safari (and/or Chrome) makes up a majority of the site's browser share. Maybe this'll be tightened up in some of the additional work Totilio claims has yet to be done.

Not that this really addresses any of the actual IA issues I have with it.
 
stephentotilo said:
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.
Click to expand...
I think its safe to say that's where most of the complaints are coming from. Conceptually, I just don't think this was a good idea. What's wrong with scrolling down a page of items? Nothing.
 
stephentotilo said:
Folks, I know some of you will hate Kotaku no matter what.
(*Snipped*)
With any luck, you will soon be able to go back to complaining about us only for our content.
Click to expand...
There was a time when I frequented Kotaku for my news. The main reason that I stopped going to Kotaku when I got my account here approved was because I was sick of having my comments tossed aside without a care because I did not suck up to the editors for a star.
 
Tathanen said:
Hey you know what, it's actually nicer in Safari (I'd been using Firefox). Lots of the janky feel I was getting while loading articles and clicking the scroll buttons is mitigated by actual animation in there. I'm all for graceful degradation and progressive enhancement, but I think this probably degrades a little TOO much in non-Safari browsers, and I can't imagine Safari (and/or Chrome) makes up a majority of the site's browser share. Maybe this'll be tightened up in some of the additional work Totilio claims has yet to be done.

Not that this really addresses any of the actual IA issues I have with it.
Click to expand...

I don't think the primary issue is java, animations, or performance. It's that 80% of the page is dominated by a single article you probably don't care about, and everything else--including the "news scroll" aspect most people visit the site for--is relegated to the remaining 20%.
 
Big problem is that sidebar scroll, at least on my laptop, is both too fast (when you want to scroll to see articles one by one, it scrolls too much for a very small touchpad finger movement) and too slow - when you want to quickly get back to the top of the list, or the bottom, it takes forever. Which brings another issue, if you try to do two finger scroll quickly/repeatedly to scroll though the list faster, the main content starts scrolling bit by bit.

Other problems:
- The three finger touch scroll for the top/bottom of the page always scrolls just the main content, even though you intuitively expect it to scroll just the sidebar when your mouse pointer is over it. Feels very weird.

- No indication as to how far is left to scroll on the sidebar, as there's no scrollbar of any kind.

- On the ipad, it's simply not possible to scroll the sidebar, so you're stuck with however many news articles is there when you first load page.


This is all on macintosh with safari.

I think they can do some javascript trickery to fix the first problem, but the 2nd problem is most likely not fixable, as they are not adhering to a normal page scrolling design.
 
We wanted to make the front page lighter and simpler to scan, while also emphasizing big feature stories that we've written. The fact is that we spend a lot of time creating cool, original articles for Kotaku - but sometimes they would get lost in that long, long blog scroll. This way, we can splash them as big as we want! And not sacrifice load time.
Click to expand...

lol. Maybe they shouldn't just post a truckload of shit articles. And yeah, the page is a hog and load times are longer.


just use http://www.gameboar.com/ if you really need to read kotaku
 
That right "nav" is atrocious.

And I wouldn't put the bulk of the blame on the designer, i'm guessing Denton was driving the bus on this as the whole goal is to maximize page views. Granted the designer can always bail on a job but I've worked with enough clients that simply override decisions and recommendations.

Either way, I'm done with them and any sites that are designed for max page views over readability.
 
stephentotilo said:
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.
Click to expand...

Actually, now that the site seems to be loading faster to me, it might grow on me. I like that I can scroll the bar, click an article and that it loads on the left hand side without reloading the entire page.

My biggest complaint is still how there is literally no blurbs of the article on the bar on the right, and having ability to scroll the bar faster would be nice.

I only usually read your articles and McWhertor's. Plunkett is garbage and I don't like Crecente's attitude. He is way too snarky. You and McWhertor and genuinely like-able, imo.
 
stephentotilo said:
Folks, I know some of you will hate Kotaku no matter what.
Click to expand...

Let me be perfectly honest with you in regards to Kotaku if you're actually reading posts here. I genuinely cannot fathom why you left MTV for Kotaku. I get that MTV isn't necessarily game-oriented and maybe that was a deciding factor for you. If it's all the same to you, and a paycheck is a paycheck, then say no more, I'm in a similar situation. I've enjoyed a lot of the pieces that you've written over the years and the care with which some of them were written, but I haven't become a dedicated follower of yours or anything like that, if that makes sense.

Kotaku deserves every single bit of negative reaction that it gets. They have unabashedly published intentionally-misleading headlines, published headlines/articles with very key details absolutely wrong, only to edit and change them later without so much as a notice mentioning that they were wrong. They routinely make fools out of themselves with pre-event speculation (with the NGP press conference being a very good and recent example). They've been known to run rumors as fact. Despite your presence, they have been slowly drifting over to posting articles/content that have nothing to do with gaming at all. All it does is serve to waste screen real estate. Even you're doing it. That's just stuff I thought of off the top of my head - they got a rap sheet a mile long. I don't mind telling you that to me, Kotaku is the preeminent example of what is wrong with the state of video game journalism. I don't visit it anymore, and it's a real shame, because I enjoy reading your work.

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.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, the intention of any redesign for a website is to make things better, not worse. I've tried two different web browsers with some of the Gawker Media sites, and my mouse has literally no idea what section of the page I'm trying to scroll down. Not optimizing it for some computer screen sizes is really just not acceptable. That should have been taken care of prior to the launch of this stuff as it just makes people not want to go back. Condensing all of the content save for one giant headline/article into the sidebar over there brings up a number of potential issues, not the least of which is the potential for Kotaku's Bullshit Headline Syndrome to work overtime to get people to click on them. You have to scroll down quite a bit just to find anything that isn't the giant headline. I don't know what all has been posted on that site and if I had just logged onto it without knowing what Kotaku was, I'd wonder if I had actually stumbled onto a game site at all. And honestly, the whole "click to get to any details of the next article" thing really reminds me of what sites like 1Up were doing a few years back with their stupid Top 10 lists where they had one thing on a page, and you'd have to click through 9 through 11 of them just to see all of them. The whole thing smells like a way to generate more ad revenue without actually having a lot more ads on the page.

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

With any luck, I'll be able to go back to not caring about Kotaku at all.
 
I don't know whats going on under the hood with this redesign but it runs like shit on this computer which can run effin Crysis at high detail without much issue. Scrolling is all jerky, the way the page freaks out when you click on another headline is horrible. I hate the way the browser scrollbar only moves the left half of the page, it looks like it's busted or something. Really, everything about the design is incredibly offputting. I mean the previous design was no masterpiece, but at least it didn't make we want to immediately leave.

As for them reinventing the blog, it kinda didn't need to be reinvented. Joystiq will be continuing to get the majority of my precious clicks for the forseeable future!

Steven, while we have your attention... You know it's bad, don't you? I know you probably have to get behind this redesign because it's a probably a big thing for Gawker and stuff, but come on. If you aren't convinced, go to Joystiq. Scroll down past the twenty news stories on the front page and scan the news, see whats going on in the world of video games. Now go to Kotaku and try and get the level of of information out of it. See?
 
My problem with the redesign is, the old design let you read a paragraph and see a picture of each story without having to click in to see the entire thing. It made for a great way to scan new gadget or gaming news, and if something looked interesting I could click on it and get the full info, maybe make some comments.

The new format shows only headlines and the occasional picture (every headline doesn't show its picture). So, it's a hell of a lot less useful. And that's not a bug, it's obvious that it's the entire design.
 
Shiloa said:
I do..?

Sorry, I must come across obtuse but I don't see what's so bad about the place. I mean, is there a single gaming website that people on here don't whinge about?
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Kotaku is quite famous for misreporting or mistranslating information so they can make stories out of it. One of the main reasons why people dont like the site.
 
I realize it's totally expected for people to freak out over design changes on a web site

But seriously, this is really really bad
 
Oh yeah, and I work for a big game developer, and guess what, we've got a huge email thread today about how horrible this design is (that no, I didn't start), where people are discussing alternative gaming news sites that are easier to navigate to quickly get the information.
 
I've tried reading a few articles on a couple of Gawker sites and it simply isn't a pleasant experience. It feels like work just finding an article you want to read, the navigation is illogical, buttons don't work like they should and the comment system is a joke.

I visited Kotaku only occasionally but I visited Gizmodo and Lifehacker regularly, and I don't like what has been done to those blogs.
 
Dreamwriter said:
My problem with the redesign is, the old design let you read a paragraph and see a picture of each story without having to click in to see the entire thing. It made for a great way to scan new gadget or gaming news, and if something looked interesting I could click on it and get the full info, maybe make some comments.

The new format shows only headlines and the occasional picture (every headline doesn't show its picture). So, it's a hell of a lot less useful. And that's not a bug, it's obvious that it's the entire design.
Click to expand...
This is my problem. I'm not sure if it was their intent to leave only the headlines, forcing a person to open the page to see if they're even interested in the article. No more scanning for me. :-/
 
We have different views of the site. Kotaku wasn't a step down from MTV, for me it was a step up. It got my work in front of many more gamers.

As readers of the site have seen, we publish stories we believe are of interest to gamers. For some time now, that has included stories that are not explicitly about video games, though they likely have something to do with the culture around games or the types of things we believe gamers care about. Some of our stories are for the hardcore Xbox user, others for the PC gamer, others for the person who doesn't know gaming but could use an explanation from people with gaming expertise about some gaming-inflected aspect of our culture. I'm a gamer and I find that breadth of content interesting.

I've been at Kotaku for two years and have not seen our team intentionally write misleading headlines. We strive to operate with transparency -- with speed as well, but we take accuracy seriously.

You complained that we hyped the NGP launch. My recollection of the months leading up to the NGP launch was that we broke the news that it wouldn't support a disc format, that we broke the news that it had as much RAM as the 360, and that third-party publishers were sizing it up as a portable PS3. Prior to that, we broke news about the hardware specs of the 3DS. Sometimes I worry that our best work was lost in the never-ending stack of stories we run. Hopefully if you drop into Kotaku in the future you'll see that one of the ways the new layout can serve us and you better is to highlight those big important pieces about which we are most proud.

I appreciate your feedback and am only disappointed that you seem to see so many negatives in a site where I see so many positives.
 
stephentotilo said:
We have different views of the site. Kotaku wasn't a step down from MTV, for me it was a step up. It got my work in front of many more gamers.

As readers of the site have seen, we publish stories we believe are of interest to gamers. For some time now, that has included stories that are not explicitly about video games, though they likely have something to do with the culture around games or the types of things we believe gamers care about. Some of our stories are for the hardcore Xbox user, others for the PC gamer, others for the person who doesn't know gaming but could use an explanation from people with gaming expertise about some gaming-inflected aspect of our culture. I'm a gamer and I find that breadth of content interesting.

I've been at Kotaku for two years and have not seen our team intentionally write misleading headlines. We strive to operate with transparency -- with speed as well, but we take accuracy seriously.

You complained that we hyped the NGP launch. My recollection of the months leading up to the NGP launch was that we broke the news that it wouldn't support a disc format, that we broke the news that it had as much RAM as the 360, and that third-party publishers were sizing it up as a portable PS3. Prior to that, we broke news about the hardware specs of the 3DS. Sometimes I worry that our best work was lost in the never-ending stack of stories we run. Hopefully if you drop into Kotaku in the future you'll see that one of the ways the new layout can serve us and you better is to highlight those big important pieces about which we are most proud.

I appreciate your feedback and am only disappointed that you seem to see so many negatives in a site where I see so many positives.
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Kotaku's one of my go-to sites for news, and I enjoy reading it, but I have to agree that the new look isn't all that great. I didn't like it when it was applied to i09 a couple of days ago, and I still don't like it now. It might grow on me, but for now... I just don't like it.
 
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