My first-glance reaction was "eh, they cleaned it up, looks fine". I'd like a slightly wider text column, but it's not a big deal.
But the page interactivity is poisonously bad.
- There's a share bar at the bottom which collapses distractingly on first scroll.
- The share bar is hover-sensitive, and 'expands' by changing what's under your cursor from a menu icon to a Facebook share link. I'd call "change under cursor" a dark pattern, especially for a social share link.
- The share menu icon looks like a "go to top of page" button, which lead me to click it accidentally. Even if you notice the hover event and scroll over to its new location, it animates as a button but does nothing!
- There's an in-page 'X' to close back to the TechCrunch homepage, which is odd. And it's an overlay that scrolls downpage with you, which is annoying - especially since it sits on top of images.
- It's got an animation on the X to show how far you've read, which is distracting and pointless. When you hit the article bottom, it does a dramatic and annoying transition to a checkmark.
- If you scroll down too far, the page closes. It takes you back to the homepage. Scrolling moves within a page, and should always be reversible by scrolling back. Instead, they put a damn redirect on a scroll event!
- And in 'dark patterns' territory, there's content below the bottom of the scroll event! You're actively baited into triggering a terrible mechanic I've never seen anywhere else.
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.
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.
> * Scrolling to the end of an article jolts you back into the main feed.
Yeah seriously, what on earth is this. What if I want to scroll back up and read some tidbit earlier in the article? Well, it actually _navigates_ you away, so you have to hit the back button - can't just scroll back to where you were, even though it doesn't seem like you navigated at all. It's fucking confusing and it takes control away from me that I have on literally every other website. And there's no indication that it's going to navigate you away besides a little check mark.
This is the first time I've ever been upset that a page loaded too fast, because a slow redirect at least would have showed me what happened. Instead, I spent several seconds absolutely baffled and unsure how to get to the article. Since no sane person would ever put a page redirect on a scroll event, I figured it had to be some kind of overlay!
I'm not a huge fan of progress meters generally, since I hate in-page animations. But if you're going to have one, the thin bar growing left to right seems like it can't really be improved on. The point of motion actually shifts, so I can judge progress without ever focusing on it.
All this gave me was "something in the annoying X button overlay is moving", which was useless and also worsened the impact of an already bad overlay.
Why not keep current article in top and load main feed below, heck they can even hide it till you scroll back to where it 'should be'...but back button to get back to it? Fuck that, I'll just use a different site for tech news.
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 would generally agree, but this business of scrolling to the bottom and being navigated away I’m in no way going to get used to. I would modify your principle to cover aesthetics, but not key browser functionality. I’m going to get used to a new UI, new colors and design philosophies, but I never get used to scrolljacking, and some other anti-functional “features” on sites.
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.
25 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 70.4 ms ] thread( Not trolling, really curious about bad UI design that aren't readily apparent to me. )
But the page interactivity is poisonously bad.
- There's a share bar at the bottom which collapses distractingly on first scroll.
- The share bar is hover-sensitive, and 'expands' by changing what's under your cursor from a menu icon to a Facebook share link. I'd call "change under cursor" a dark pattern, especially for a social share link.
- The share menu icon looks like a "go to top of page" button, which lead me to click it accidentally. Even if you notice the hover event and scroll over to its new location, it animates as a button but does nothing!
- There's an in-page 'X' to close back to the TechCrunch homepage, which is odd. And it's an overlay that scrolls downpage with you, which is annoying - especially since it sits on top of images.
- It's got an animation on the X to show how far you've read, which is distracting and pointless. When you hit the article bottom, it does a dramatic and annoying transition to a checkmark.
- If you scroll down too far, the page closes. It takes you back to the homepage. Scrolling moves within a page, and should always be reversible by scrolling back. Instead, they put a damn redirect on a scroll event!
- And in 'dark patterns' territory, there's content below the bottom of the scroll event! You're actively baited into triggering a terrible mechanic I've never seen anywhere else.
Edit: also don't like the variable pop-in from the top that goes away at some point while you're scrolling.
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.
* 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.
That's absolutely insane! Who had this idea?
Yeah seriously, what on earth is this. What if I want to scroll back up and read some tidbit earlier in the article? Well, it actually _navigates_ you away, so you have to hit the back button - can't just scroll back to where you were, even though it doesn't seem like you navigated at all. It's fucking confusing and it takes control away from me that I have on literally every other website. And there's no indication that it's going to navigate you away besides a little check mark.
Who the heck thought this was a good idea?
All this gave me was "something in the annoying X button overlay is moving", which was useless and also worsened the impact of an already bad overlay.
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 :)
I couldn't agree more.
Then I scrolled down to the bottom and now I agree.