The Next Web is one of the better designed tech publications, imo. Nice update.
UPDATE: I'm not a fan of the way ads are presented, to be honest. Occasionally when visiting the site, the content slides to the right and a giant, near-full screen ad is presented. It feels more disruptive than a traditional popup.
Oh man, I love TNW as they write good stuff and they were instrumental to the launch of my previous company, but this redesign albeit "nice" is a bit of a custerF.
It looks flashy, and it actually reminds of Wired, but as far as readability is concerned, there are now so many moving parts, I don't even know where to start looking, nvm trying to zoom-in on the text when everything gets rearranged and 1/5 of the screen gets taken by header and social buttons.
I am just one person, and I am sure they are keeping tabs on the metrics. Would be curious to know what the metrics say in 2-3 weeks, about the readership and the length of stay on the site (or more important, % of visitors that read to the bottom of the article)... or maybe non of that is important, as long as users spend countless minutes figuring out where to click, thus making it look like page views are longer and making the pages more appealing to ad agencies.
TBD ?
@kirillzubovsky Hi Kirill, we're closely monitoring the engagement in the new site in our analytics set up(s). That is including tracking both the performance for our ads and the performance of our users. As we've literally launched in the last 24 hours it's hard to tell what we see in our numbers yet. But we have multiple metrics that definitely provide input on how other visitors will interact with the new canvas ad unit.
What definitely is for sure that we don't make changes on the site that just make us look good to ad agencies!
I like it! Looks really clean and professional now... which goes to say how you don't even think about how something looks when you enjoy reading it, but then they do a re-design and BAM - love it even more. :)
Liking the update, but the jquery [news story item] scroller that's directly to the left of the scroll bar is a little janky. Caused me to accidentally click on a story I didn't want to read, instead of one I actually wanted to read. Would suggest putting a delay on that function
Great job. It is good to see media companies focusing on UI / UX.
I'm also curious to see how Canvas Ads will perform -- and what kind of impact they'll have on readers. The traditional adversiting model is definitely broken, so this could be interesting.
Kudos.
I feel the action of scrolling up/down while scanning left/right isn't that intuitive. Perhaps because I'm so accustomed to scanning continuous content vertically (I blame you, Reddit).
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