from Hacker News

TechCrunch redesign is terrible

by abeaclark on 3/14/18, 4:56 PM with 24 comments

• by chasingthewind on 3/14/18, 5:10 PM

  It doesn't appeal to me particularly on a first glance but I have a rule I call the "Slate.com Rule of Web Site Redesign".

  A few years ago I found that every time Slate did a redesign I absolutely despised it and felt they'd ruined everything. Then in a few weeks I'd get used to the new layouts and feel happy again. Then they'd redesign and I'd hate the new design and wish for the old (new) one back.

  So the rule is: "All redesigns will be hated in the short term and accepted in the long term."

  I have a feeling this one will be no different :)

• by abeaclark on 3/14/18, 5:09 PM

  Worst parts:

  * Scrolling to the end of an article jolts you back into the main feed.

  * Reading progress meter is too small and out of view. Should be able to feel the progress from peripheral vision.

  * Titles in list view are squished and difficult to read quickly.

  * Article preview text is almost always useless. If you insist on having something here, consider 3 highlight bullets.

  * Top-level navigation is now even more prominent on desktop when I venture a guess that less than 5% of users ever touch it.

• by ng-user on 3/14/18, 5:08 PM

  Viewing on a vertical browser is awful... there's two columns - one on the left-hand side about 60% of the view port which contains every little piece of content and the 40% remainder on the right-hand side is completely blank white space.

  I've got an adblocker enabled so perhaps the right-hand side is supposed to be littered with ads? Either way the readability factor has been thrown out the window, thankfully FireFox's reader view comes in handy again.

• by fenwick67 on 3/14/18, 5:05 PM

  Don't scroll down too far or the article will disappear, FYI (yikes).

• by ogig on 3/14/18, 5:05 PM

  Woa, that's some title editorializing.

• by hprotagonist on 3/14/18, 5:14 PM

  The joys of RSS readers: I basically don't know that a site has redesigned itself until they make a blog post about it or i have to click through because the RSS post is truncated.

• by justboxing on 3/14/18, 5:06 PM

  Someone care to list things that they find terrible?

  ( Not trolling, really curious about bad UI design that aren't readily apparent to me. )

• by BjoernKW on 3/14/18, 5:10 PM

  Reading this on a mobile device at first I thought: “Why? It’s not that bad.”

  Then I scrolled down to the bottom and now I agree.

• by Yhippa on 3/14/18, 5:08 PM

  Mystery meat navigation all over the place. Inconsistent scrolling behavior on mobile. I do like that the articles are mostly uninterrupted text and legible.

  Edit: also don't like the variable pop-in from the top that goes away at some point while you're scrolling.

• by orastor on 3/14/18, 7:31 PM

  It really is a shame, I don't understand who this appeals to. Maybe it looks good on a mobile phone screen?

• by lnx01 on 3/14/18, 5:07 PM

  Can you elaborate a bit on why you think it's terrible?