The site has not, to date, made me a Dairy Queen Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard (Medium Size, Extra Reese’s Cups). This is a FATAL flaw. Please correct.
More realistically, the complaint about large graphics and the sidebar might be what set me off on the new design. I first saw it on my work laptop, which (like most 13-15" laptops) is 1366x768–approximately the same resolution as a lot of cellphones nowadays, but still getting what I assume to be the “desktop” site arrangement. There, the sidebar, article images, and scrolling header are ENORMOUS in comparison to the text in between all that, making the site feel like a lot of loud, bright colors with very little visible content. I’d say this doesn’t matter much, but again, I think that most laptops sold these days still use that shitty, shitty resolution, so perhaps it’s worth considering. My 1680x1050 at home is definitely better in terms of making the site feel less claustrophobic.
I’m a little turned off by how busy the top of the page is. I feel overwhelmed by giant ads and the big scrolling article highlights. I like the rest of it, aside from the color scheme, once I get past the loud header stuff.
The scroll bar at the top is way too effing huge. On a default browser size (I’m running on a 2560x1440 monitor, and the browser is roughly 60% x 60% of that) all I see is the gigantic scroll bar, dropdowns, two ads, and the title of the first actual text blurb in the list, as well as a “follow Qt3” header but none of the buttons underneath.
I come here frequently enough that the graphical story bar thingy up top is pointing to content that I saw when it was posted, but the new stuff I have to work to see.
Add that to the fact that the forum thing has another layer of clicking necessary to get to the actual forums, and my general inclination is to say “fuck it” and simply bookmark the forum page instead of the homepage.
The ads are the same size they were before. It’s a standard banner-ad size. Interesting that folks feel they’ve gotten bigger. I agree that a little bit more design / space management would help with drawing the user’s eye to the content.
They need to make the “zoom” version the high res, and let the browser scale down the normal version. It seems done in a way that the normal version is the one upscaled.
Maybe they don’t have a higher resolution version.
You sure about that? I was just playing around with my browser window (Firefox in OS X) and if I shrink the browser window the ads and many screen elements shrink too, leading to some better looking dynamic layouts (still not good, but when the graphics get smaller elements pop up and I can see a bit more of the page). Oddly, re-expanding my window doesn’t re-embiggen them. It definitely seems like graphic elements are zooming up if I have extra real-estate, which is not at all what I would like to happen.
The big menu buttons at the top of the site (games, movies, forum) should take you somewhere when you click them. You shouldn’t have to wait for the menu to pop up (it shows up almost instantly, but I have to process the options) and pick a secondary option. That’s too much time and too many clicks, and there’s no feedback when I click on the buttons themselves. (Actually, there’s also what I think is a bug here. Clicking the button leaves the menu always open (although I have no visual feedback to explain it. Then I can bring up other menus. If I click on one of the menu buttons a second time, the menu disappears and there’s an orange box around the menu option. I assume this is not intended.)
The first thing that annoyed me about the new design. Clicked on forum and though, is the link broken? Is my network down? What’s going on.
Also, just a heads-up that a fair amount of stuff on the mobile version of the site is still being optimized or outright fixed. Please keep the feedback coming, but be sure to let us know when an issue is particular to using an iPhone or whatever.
So, now that I’m home browsing on IE 10 on a 1080P monitor:
The big scroll bar up top is just as annoying
There’s a huge annoying as shit popup telling me my browser is out of date (maybe it is?) and suggesting I click to download the latest one which, if I want to use IE, they suggest I use IE 9. WTF? Did you take the front page code from a canned package that’s doing a bad browser check or somesuch?
The big splash graphic telling me the untrue facts in #2 doesn’t seem to have a way to close it or otherwise make it go away, rendering the front page completely unusable.
Mouselock, I had some reservations about that popup, and it was happening on one of my IE8 test browsers because I was running in compatibility mode for some reason. I’ll see about making sure it’s removed. But we put it there because there were problems getting certain features to work with IE7 and below. The intention was to keep people with really old browsers from seeing everything fall apart.
Also make sure that for the ‘screenshot’ banner top part of the page you spend time to make those good (the Saint’s Row current one is cool etc). I think Critical Distance does that quite well most of the time (so you got a place to compare that part against).
Please simply remove the “user-scalable=no” part. This attribute should only be used for apps that do their own zooming, or for games that need ultra-fast responses. Without it pinch-zooming should work on mobile devices. More on the viewport tag.
I guessI should give less flippant feedback :) So the only time I hit the frontpage is by accident on my way to the forums. It used to be that I could very easily look at the top few articles as there was nothing on the page clamouring for my attention, and if I was interested in the articles I’d read them. Now the site has big blocky white-on-black text so everything jumps out at me. The large banner pushes the articles down so I can see less, and the articles themselves take up more space, so I have to scroll much further to see if there are any articles I’m interested in. Except I want to get away from the horrid white-on-black ASAP, so I don’t.
Maybe I am now down with modern webdev - actually I’m definately not down with modern webdev :) But that’s my gut reaction to the page.
EDIT: I’ve just checked and even when I fullscreen the browser window, the “preview” for each article barely fits on one page. I’d definately prefer something smaller. And when the page comes up I can see the headline and most of the image but no preview text for the first article - I have to scroll down to see anything worthwhile. Just awful.
Modern webdev has “evolved” to satisfy a generation of kids who’ve grown up with everything flashing and beeping in their face in order to get their attention. Me, I like old fashioned web dev with high information density which assumed I had enough brain cells left in my age-addled, alzheimer ridden cranium to actually know the pertinent bits of info when I see them, even if they’re not flashing, re-tweeted, and embedded within 70 gratuitous video clips.
(In all seriousness, one of the things I liked about Qt3, even the front page, was that it was high signal to noise. The new front page drastically decreases the signal for big, splashy, pretty noise that I’m not overly fond of. It feels like IGN coughed up some dough to help Tom make it to the “big time” or something. :/ )
Hmm… it’s definitely possible I was stuck in compatibility mode. I’ll try to check that tonight. Though regardless of anything, I think the pop up ought to be close-able instead of being a “You shall not pass!” type of barrier which it currently seems to be. The forums are fine on IE 7, right? Currently the pop-up roadblocks people from even getting there, even if they have a really old browser.
Ideally instead of the pop-up you’d check for really old browsers and revert to a more basic page. Assuming you’re generating the page from static back-end content (and that you were with the previous page as well) this shouldn’t be a whole lot of extra work.
Regarding complaints about the big banner – perhaps you could try downscaling the entire top part (banner height, title font sizes and icons) by 30% or so? The site is indeed rather top-heavy right now. The top section does look good, it just needs to be somewhat smaller to bring it more into line with the article text size IMO.
I’m sure we could argue about this all day, but I think the current trend in modern webdev is to cleaner, simpler designs with less flash, more open space, and bigger fonts/graphics. It makes it much easier to develop a site to be responsive (vary appearance based on browser width), not to mention just being much easier to read. The new front page has none of that.
If you look at some of the examples at Built with Bootstrap, you’ll probably recognize some of the common themes that are becoming popular today.
The new front page tries to incorporate a few of the elements (large graphics, scrolling header, category dropdowns) but misses on a lot of the rest (design is very busy, lots of extraneous elements, overly dark with a lot of “glowy” graphics).
