I just logged onto one of my favorite tech news sites, Gizmodo. The name might sound familiar to you as they were the ones responsible for leaking images and video of the iPhone 4.
So they’ve redesigned their site, which was in need of a good redesign, but as the aesthetics may have improved ten fold, the usability really took a dip below functional. Here’s just a few things I noticed after browsing for 3 minutes and getting lost.
1. Off the bat, why would you cover up the first stories of your page with an advertisement? Honestly now. There are at least three better places to put your banner advertisement on the site that wont interfere with my experience. Say, above the logo, on the left or right margins of the page, somewhere I won’t be clicking or want to be reading, but will still notice.
2. Where do I look to first? The section with the tiny thumbnails and lots of text or the sidebar that has the same headlines, sans the thumbnails? Alright couple things here… I hate reading on the web. But I love browsing for things that I want to read about. Having a paragraph of text next to a 190x107 thumbnail isn’t going to make me want to look deeper into the story. Sell me on the visual, win me over with your words.
Then there’s the twitter-like sidebar that doesn’t scroll …. or does it? I guess it does but there’s no scroll bar to let me know how far up or down i need to go to find headlines that are different from the ones that already appear in the other section! Ugh! How frustrating and unnecessary this is! It’s like Android phone users that keep their clock widget at the same time as the one displayed in the toolbar! Come on! Thats valuable screen real estate, give me something worth looking at!
3. Your site is all about aesthetics. Its not about getting the tech news out there to your readers. I think Jason Chen got a hard on when he saw how much better this redesign looked than the last piece of crap designed site you had, but the usability sucks. Remember Digg? Well if you don’t, you’ll be joining their ranks unless you make some much needed changes. And frankly, Digg is doing a nice job of listening to their remaining members to try and fix the usability of their recent redesign.
