I visited The Verge this morning to be greeted by a jumbled mess of text, columns, sticky columns, etc. I listened to The Vergecast podcast where they discussed spending two-years redesigning this website with the “future of the internet” in mind. Maybe I am too old, or maybe I just am not immersed in the Tik Tok, twitter part of the internet, but WTF is this mess of a website? Everything is harder to find, text everywhere that I don’t care about, yikes.
This site is so bad that I must be missing something profound…
There’s more discussion in the mainstream media thread, but I actually don’t mind it, at least compared to the old site. Most importantly, unlike 99% of news site redesigns these days, it actually has a chronological feed. That alone forgives a lot of sins.
My first impression was positive as well. I love that everything is in linear order now so you can scroll down for older stories. The little tweets for minor news item to the right seem like a decent idea to me as well.
I don’t like the black background at all, but I imagine a lot of people like dark themes so they will like it. And the new logo isn’t great.
I guess what I specifically don’t like is that with the old design, it took me a couple of seconds to figure out if there was something interesting to read. Now I have to scroll and read things to figure that out. Maybe that is their intent, to keep me on the website longer, but perhaps I will grow accustomed to the text walls…
I don’t mind the new design other than the background color changes from black to bright white when you click on an article. They need to implement a consistent color theme, or better yet a dark mode.
The only reason I don’t ignore the site completely is that when I click on an article, the awful black background goes away and there’s a wonderfully normal white background. Phew!
Absolutely hate it. Just a tossed salad of text and tags and crap, I guess this is what Twitter or whatever looks like and people have gotten used to it? Now if you’ll excuse me, that cloud looks like it’s up to something and I have to set it straight.
I seem to remember the old site being unreasonably heavy. If they cleaned up their tech debt and made the site more responsive I can forgive a lot of things. For me it isn’t a site I browse and just go direct to linked stories anyway.
The kibda weird 2 column layout is pretty clearly intended to make it more mobile-native. On mobile, it still feels a little information-sparse, with too much design and not enough text, but it stacks the columns pretty deliberately. I assume they want to make a mobile home screen you can kind of infinite scroll/timeline browse through, and it does seem like it might work for that.
I feel like most people Google for an individual topic then end up directly on the article page, so I have doubts that this will help, but maybe it will make the front page stickier for people who do visit.
OMG it’s sooo bad. I’m this close to removing the site from my “Open these news sites in tab” morning link, but I’ll give them a few weeks to fine tune this unreadable mess.
I understand redesigns always catch flack. Every magazine redesign I was ever involved with caught hell from readers. Ditto most website redesigns. There’s a resistance to change. You see similar bitching posts to this one every time the social media sites change their feeds too.
But in the name of Crom, as a The Verge reader since the site’s launch, and as a person with a few decades of experience in media design, I can say this design it three-fold horrible. It’s ugly, it’s harder to read, and it’s harder to identify individual articles.
I mean, they’ve saved themselves the trouble of actually rewriting the articles that are really nothing other that regurgitating news from other sources – now they just write a quick paragraph summary and link to the original article or tweet. This is actually a positive change with regard to driving traffic to original news sources – but the visual treatment is terrible, with no headline and a bolded lad sentence which might be a headline and might just be the first sentence bolded.
How is THIS a thing during the launch week of a major redesign?
The new logo/masthead is a bit yuck imo, and the home page layout is a bit… off. However the content layout is fine in an article, endless scroll inside an article is now better.
The switch between black and bright white is jarring to say the least. Hopefully, they will soon harmonise the theme and make it user controllable.
Apart from that, chronological is how I browse most sites. I simply go back as far as the last time I read. So it’s a good way to present the articles. The layout does feel a bit busy to me. But it works.
