The main news timeline is promising though, but greatly needs visual codes for differentiating and qualifying content.
It's great to focus on the content while not putting technology asides, but your publishing tool is also of strategical importance. It's great to have rethought the general way of showing information, but this is, to me, clearly half baked.
Comparing that with your submission title (for whatever it means, it evokes technology), makes me think you have a problem here.
Second, I agree that some parts of the UI are overkill. Keep in mind that it has been designed for tablets and phones though: "(...) built primarily for the devices closest at hand: tablets and mobile phones."
The title of this post is taken from the text the link points to. From the text itself: "Developers and journalists, sometimes one-and-the-same, sit next to each other in the Quartz newsroom as we continually iterate and experiment."
I'm simply happy to see someone trying something new.
This actually highlights one of my pet peeves: that web pages need special "mobile enhanced" versions. 90% of the time, a "mobile web page" is just worse than the original. I have to ask: do the guys designing these "mobile" web pages actually use tablets or smartphones? Because what part of "mobile" means "ruin the usability and make sure a lot of awkward javascript-emulated touch gestures are involved"?
Another news site that's gone full tilt tablet UI is pandodaily, but at least their site renders correctly and is mostly usable (both not optimally so) for a desktop/laptop user.
Are the costs just too high to support two presentation layers such that shops will bet on mobile/tablet users over all others?
I've seen a bunch of Quartz articles coming up in the variety of aggregators I use. Unfortunately, they don't load.
Pro-tip: You're trying to get me to spend time reading your content. If I have to mess with my browsing setup to do so, I'm going to skip your articles. And I do.
One comment - when I look at the top bar (side note: the automatic slide is jarring and unnatural IMO), I see titles like "Low Interest Rates". That makes me think of spam/advertisements.
Another one: "The Next Crisis"? Again, makes me think of spam.
I honestly just don't know what I'm looking at on this site. However, I think with some work, this could be interesting.
Also, you're probably not their target audience. For someone who reads business news, those "spammy" topic titles you talk about are all things e.g. a Wall Street Journal reader is familiar with and cares about.
RE: mashable, to each their own, I personally like the layout; I thought it was pretty simple. 3 columns, more detail as you go left to right.
Though I do agree on the sidebar overdose. I dislike that.
As an aside, I just bought a subscription to Bloomberg Businessweek on my iPad (first newspaper subscription ever) and I have to say I'm impressed. Quality long-form writing, covering business and Wall Street without the conservative slant of fellatious tone of the WSJ. Very recommended.
Submitted to news.ycombinator about ten hours ago, the qz.com "Check your US tax rate for 2012-and every year since 1913" might show a little bit more of the kind of interactive blah responsive blah storytelling multifluidic blah they aim to do: http://qz.com/37639/check-your-us-tax-rate-for-2012-and-ever...
The content is good - and not content I’d seen anywhere else. More of this will keep me coming back.
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Link to the hn thread on that article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946820
OK, that was a bit snarky, but this site's design definitely feels too "clever" and, weirdly, looks like something that might have escaped from a time tunnel to 2006. Since then, everyone has got into the whole minimalism thing, and web design has generally been better for it.
The financial crisis that recently engulfed much of the world wasn’t just a cyclical decline or a correction or even a bubble bursting. It was a breaking point. And its shockwaves exposed a fundamentally changed economic order with new leaders and ways of doing business.
Our coverage of this new global economy is rooted in a set of defining obsessions: core topics and knotty questions of seismic importance to business professionals.
I hope the writing in their articles is more straightforward.
I did notice, however, that the header will drop back down when choosing another link or scrolling back up to the top of an article regardless of whether it's the top of the scroll area. This seems more like a bug than anything, not something intentional to the UI.
tl;dr it's the content, stupid.
Quartz is a fairly new site with a small dev team. The site has had some kinks, but it is slowly coming together, and I think it has a lot of potential.
Code might help it get some data, evaluate them, present them in addition to the gist of the story.
But without the plain text, and without emphasis on the plain text, it's not news: it's a lightshow.
