Gawker's new layout



  • Faked iframe sidebar that requires frantic swiping on a touchpad to look up and down, sluggish scrolling, eternal loading loops.

    Gawker have managed to outdo YouTube and DeviantArt in the art of taking a perfectly functional website and destroying it for the sake of being Web 3.0 or whatever it's called this week.



  • It's quite appalling. At least there's /classic and you can ignore the side bar, but lets count the ways this fails:

    • It took me a full minute to realize I had to scroll the right side bar to see more content
    • Reimplemented scrolling on the right side bar, sluggish with a mouse
    • Hover tooltips that stick around when scrolling the right side bar, impossible to see what's there.
    • Clicking on the right side bar requires that you wait a minimum of 5 seconds for the "content" to show up in the left main pane
    • 50% of the time for me, the content never actually shows up.
    • The system now hides more comments than ever

     In short, it's horrible. I loved the simplistic old look, could see at a glance what stories I want to read and which ones I didn't. I can't do that anymore.

    So a layout update that was supposed to make the site faster and easier to navigate made it slower, harder to navigate, and sometimes flat out broken. Great job.

    Edit: The real WTF is this forum software. How the hell do I get bullet points showing up properly???



  • @JamesKilton said:

    The real WTF is this forum software. How the hell do I get bullet points showing up properly???
     

    By not using Chrome.

    Fixed your stuff.



  • @nexekho said:

    Gawker have managed to outdo YouTube and DeviantArt in the art of taking a perfectly functional website and destroying it for the sake of being Web 3.0 or whatever it's called this week.
     

    I agree with Youtube, but what's the deal with Deviantart? I always found the new design one of the cleanest and most easy-to-use ajax sites on the net right now. Most of the UI metaphors are well known, don't conflict with the browser UI and are consistent throughout the site. They also employ ajax in a smart way such that the parts of the page that are actually relevant to the visitors are loaded first. When I wanted to view a picture, I often had it fully shown before navigation and even ads(!) had finished loading.

    I don't seem to be very representative though, since apparently people keep complaining about the new look. Since I'm kind of interested in the field of UI design, I'd honestly like to know what exactly are the big flaws in the new design. Again, this is out of curiosity and not in the interest of flaming :)

    Disclaimer also: I'm talking about the PC version. I haven't used the mobile version yet and can't say anything about it.



  •  All I know is that I run last year's games effortlessly, but Twitter is appalingly slow.

    I second the positive vote for deviantart, though. They're all Web 2.0.3.41r2 build 46318, but they're very speedy, and I guess that's what counts.



  • You'll get over it. (Actual Fark headline! Hah!)

    Of course the real WTF is anybody reading those shit-journalism sites in the first place. I was kind of hoping the password theft would shut them down, but I guess nobody really cared about it longer than 3 days.



  • I don't read Gawker sites because of the terrible journalism. Now I can say I don't read them because of their terrible layout too.



  •  Fun fact: If you have a wheel mouse (silly question, I know), you can scroll the side bar by moving the pointer over it and spinning the wheel. Incidentally, this also seems to be the only way to scroll that thing back up. Yay!



  • Fun fact: If you have a wheel mouse (silly question, I know), you can scroll the side bar by moving the pointer over it and spinning the wheel. Incidentally, this also seems to be the only way to scroll that thing back up. Yay!

    Except because it's not a real iframe - only a DOM element that accepts input - it scrolls by a fixed amount rather than what you expect. It seems any amount of up or down scrolls approx. 25px meaning if you have a multitouch touchpad which is awesome because it allows you to scroll at any speed it takes roughly 40x as much scrolling to achieve the same result. A single flick should move me a screenful, but instead I move 25px.

    I don't read Gizmodo much but this new layout just astounds me and I thought I'd share.



  • @PSWorx said:

     Fun fact: If you have a wheel mouse (silly question, I know), you can scroll the side bar by moving the pointer over it and spinning the wheel. Incidentally, this also seems to be the only way to scroll that thing back up. Yay!

    You can also move your cursor on the sidebar and use up/left & down/right keys to move up/down one item at time. Or actually, you can use left & right anywhere for that, but up & down only work when cursor is in the sidebar.



  • @Buzer said:

    You can also move your cursor on the sidebar and use up/left & down/right keys to move up/down one item at time.
    I hate how Google messed with key navigation on their instant search results pages.

    I would be perfectly okay with the blue arrow jumping over results if they had left scrolling alone. But since they didn't, I turned off Google Instant just so I could use my arrow keys to scroll normally.



  • I'm sure nobody will be even the slightest bit surprised at how well it falls back without Javascript.



  • @dhromed said:

    @JamesKilton said:

    The real WTF is this forum software. How the hell do I get bullet points showing up properly???
     

    By not using Chrome.

    Fixed your stuff.


    Chrome
    • Handles bullets
      • Just fine
        • if you know
          • HTML


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