* Scrolling to the end of an article jolts you back into the main feed.
* Reading progress meter is too small and out of view. Should be able to feel the progress from peripheral vision.
* Titles in list view are squished and difficult to read quickly.
* Article preview text is almost always useless. If you insist on having something here, consider 3 highlight bullets.
* Top-level navigation is now even more prominent on desktop when I venture a guess that less than 5% of users ever touch it.
Yeah seriously, what on earth is this. What if I want to scroll back up and read some tidbit earlier in the article? Well, it actually _navigates_ you away, so you have to hit the back button - can't just scroll back to where you were, even though it doesn't seem like you navigated at all. It's fucking confusing and it takes control away from me that I have on literally every other website. And there's no indication that it's going to navigate you away besides a little check mark.
Who the heck thought this was a good idea?
All this gave me was "something in the annoying X button overlay is moving", which was useless and also worsened the impact of an already bad overlay.
That's absolutely insane! Who had this idea?
A few years ago I found that every time Slate did a redesign I absolutely despised it and felt they'd ruined everything. Then in a few weeks I'd get used to the new layouts and feel happy again. Then they'd redesign and I'd hate the new design and wish for the old (new) one back.
So the rule is: "All redesigns will be hated in the short term and accepted in the long term."
I have a feeling this one will be no different :)
I couldn't agree more.
- Stats show readers leave the site after reading an article... those dumb readers...
- Ey! Let's give them more articles before they leave!But the page interactivity is poisonously bad.
- There's a share bar at the bottom which collapses distractingly on first scroll.
- The share bar is hover-sensitive, and 'expands' by changing what's under your cursor from a menu icon to a Facebook share link. I'd call "change under cursor" a dark pattern, especially for a social share link.
- The share menu icon looks like a "go to top of page" button, which lead me to click it accidentally. Even if you notice the hover event and scroll over to its new location, it animates as a button but does nothing!
- There's an in-page 'X' to close back to the TechCrunch homepage, which is odd. And it's an overlay that scrolls downpage with you, which is annoying - especially since it sits on top of images.
- It's got an animation on the X to show how far you've read, which is distracting and pointless. When you hit the article bottom, it does a dramatic and annoying transition to a checkmark.
- If you scroll down too far, the page closes. It takes you back to the homepage. Scrolling moves within a page, and should always be reversible by scrolling back. Instead, they put a damn redirect on a scroll event!
- And in 'dark patterns' territory, there's content below the bottom of the scroll event! You're actively baited into triggering a terrible mechanic I've never seen anywhere else.
I've got an adblocker enabled so perhaps the right-hand side is supposed to be littered with ads? Either way the readability factor has been thrown out the window, thankfully FireFox's reader view comes in handy again.
( Not trolling, really curious about bad UI design that aren't readily apparent to me. )
Then I scrolled down to the bottom and now I agree.
Edit: also don't like the variable pop-in from the top that goes away at some point while you're scrolling.