The Top 3 Reasons Gawker's New Design Is a Disaster | Hacker News Reader

The Top 3 Reasons Gawker's New Design Is a Disaster

concertwindow.com

5 pointsdgurney5 comments

The site's right-hand list only scrolls when I use my mouse's scroll wheel. This list has no visible scroll bar (the window's scroll bar has been hijacked to scroll ONLY the left-hand side).

They took the part of the site that should be the primary way to discover what the site has to offer, and turned it into a frustrating mess that behaves in unexpected ways and artificially restrains movement. What better way to minimize the time visitors are willing to spend on your site.

Just when we thought the era of epilepsy-inducing website design was over.

  {
  background-color:  ick;
  font-size:  too big;
  margin-left: way too much;
  margin-right: way too much;
  padding:  not quite enough;
  focus: none;
  }

The way the new design constrains the user is what bothers me most. Having a page that scrolls off the screen makes the content seem much more "deep" than it really is. I think they chose this design to appease the tablet crowd.

Yeah, good point about the scrolling - that choice had to be tablet-driven. Maybe some of my discomfort with the new design is because I'm not used to tablet-style scrolling on my laptop (ie. the content moves but I don't feel like I'm moving down the page). I wonder how this page feels on iPad Safari?

Are we looking at the same site? I see a clean, readable page. The navigation is kind of wonky, but the site is far from a disaster.

Maybe it's because I use AdBlock?

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