Come Try Out Slashdot's New Design (In Beta) 1191
Slashdot's biggest redesign effort ever is now in beta
and you're invited to help guide it. This redesign has been shaped by feedback from community members over the past few
months (a big thanks to those of you who participated in our alpha testing phase!), and we'd like your thoughts on it, too. This new design is meant to be richer
but also simpler to use, while maintaining the spirit of what Slashdot is all about: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Read on for the details of what's included, or read this
blog post. Update: 10/02 19:16 GMT by T : Since this post went live, we've been reading through the comments below as well as your (hundreds!) of emails. These are all valuable, as we continue to implement our current features into the Beta. Keep 'em coming; we love the feedback. Please keep in mind that this is called Beta for a reason; we've still folding in lots of improvements. One important thing to bear in mind is that the images are optional: check out the Classic mode by clicking on the view selection widget (just above the stories) on the Beta page.
What's in the Beta?
- Cleaner, simpler homepage design with option to view stories in three different layouts (Standard, Classic and Headline View)
- More community-promoted content in the All Stories view
- Improved profile pages to give you a snapshot of other community members
- Better, more prominent filters to view stories in different dimensions
- Easier browsing of popular topics straight from the main page.
Please keep in mind that this is a beta and some features are not yet available or fully baked. For features not yet available, you'll see a "Coming Soon" bubble if you hover your mouse over those areas of the site. Here are a few key areas we are still working on:
- Sign up
- moderation
- story submission
- replying to comments
Update: 10/01 20:54 GMT by S : For those of you who would rather browse Slashdot without pictures, click the icon at the top right of the story column, and switch to Classic View.
One request (Score:5, Interesting)
all that shit on the right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Get rid of it. After a bit of scrolling it's wasted space (and it's still wasted space for lame content before you scroll)
EVERY redesign has haters... (Score:5, Interesting)
But I really do think the pictures are too big. They get in the way of the page's continuity. I kinda like the small icons we have now. If you want other icons, or even images, that's cool -- but these are as big as the stories, themselves. Overkill, IMHO.
Re:Link broken? (Score:4, Interesting)
There aren't any slashdot devs anymore, remember the CmdrTaco designed much of the original himself. This is clearly a styling to match dice.com, which means that it's likely their own devs were moved over to a project to perform this particular stylesheet murder.
Re:Wasted space (Score:4, Interesting)
The images will prevent me from reading Slashdot at work. The plain text layout one of the reasons I can read it here without setting off alarms.
Of the images on the page:
Some guy's head [fsdn.com] adds no meaning or context to the story.
A video game guy with a gun [ooyala.com] means I better block images or I'll be unable to read Slashdot at work. Which means probably never given my lack of time at home. That sucks because Slashdot is very relevant to what I do. Just today I sent the Microsoft Azure story to our director. I would hate to have to create a separate work account that filters out stories about games.
Cross-posting from my comment in the Journal Entry (Score:5, Interesting)
Original comments are here [slashdot.org].
tl;dr:
"There are at least four glaring problems with how you've redesigned the comments:
1) You're wasting at least 33% of the usable screen space for comments. ... ... ... ...
2) You've dropped the visual cues as to how far down in the thread you are.
3) You moved 'load more/all comments' to the end of the comments! WTF!
4) You've removed the ability to filter on moderation rating in the story.
Also be careful with moderation changes and
You broke my ability to track my own comments and responses to them.
Overall this is much much worse."
What's the problem that the redesign fixes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Link broken? (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't worry - those gaps will soon be filled with Ads :(
Re:Link broken? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's what a window manager and web browser are for. It is not for some web designer to decide for me how wide my text "ought" to be because he blithely assumes I have the web browser maximized on a tiny 1024x768 screen. Maybe I've got the web browser at about 800x600 - on a 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 monitor.
Ugh. I've remained with D1 classic mode over D2. The 2.0 design was foul, but this is beyond unusable and unreadable. They kept me as a daily reader due to D1 (I almost got my 1024-day achievement for it!). If they drop D1 in favor of what "classic" means in this redesign, I'm out. I'll see you guys over on HN.
Or to put this in terms the /. UX redesigner can understand:
Hands off my workflow,
wannabe UX gurus.
And sometimes too much
whitespace just ends up
looking stupid.
Also, black-text-on-white
is more readable than
black-text-on-grey,
which is unreadable.
If I wanted your stupid
color scheme, I'd turn down
the brightness on my
monitor.
Your UX is bad, designer.
And you should feel bad.
Re:collapsable comments (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a good point -- thanks.
Debate club (Score:5, Interesting)
The new style is like every other mainstream site because it's coming from a long publishing tradition. Things are set into columns, the columns surround by pictures in a way that's both easy to READ and eye-catching. The newspaper tradition does not expect the reader to insert their own comments within their carefully layed out columns.. Slashdot's format begs the reader to WRITE something. At Slashdot the comments are the content, take the focus away from them and it will rapidly devolve into just another link farm..
Put another way, if the active Slashdot commentators liked the traditional feedback formats of newspaper publishers then there would be no reason for Slashdot to exists. Sites like the BBC would keep the eyeballs on their own site. The comment system is Slashdot's "value add", without it, it's toast. Make it look like a traditional comment system that's normally provided by the real news sites and people will just comment directly on the real news site.
There's a reason people like me came here in the late 90's and are still actively commenting, it's not support for Slashdot in the way one supports a football club, it's support for a genuine alternative to the traditional publishing meme. One that has the ability to turn a story into a conversation, which is something I think is desperately needed to counter the undue influence of the incontestable propaganda statements known as "opinion columns" that dominate the MSM, particularly in the US.
Re:Low Res (Score:4, Interesting)
I do web development for a living. The 1024 x 768 market share is small enough these days that I use 1280 x 768 as my current minimum target.
You are also tossing out all the people that do not brows full screen. Like me. You choice, but what exactly do you get for eliminating all those people?