It’s been a busy day in the office, but I finally stumbled across TechCrunch’s new website design. Holy crap are parts of it really bad. Let me go through some things that popped out to me starting at the top of the page, which is arguably the most important for a website of any function:
Hopefully, you all see the same problem I do – there is way too much text content right in front of your face upon entry. In an article published in 1997, Jakob Nielsen noted the importance of headers, sub-headers, bulleted lists, color, and other techniques to make web pages more easily scannable as most people do not read every word on the page. This heading is not conducive to fast scanning at all as the font size and coloring used are not providing enough contrast.
One of my favorite aspects of TechCrunch is CrunchBase, a database of companies, people and topics on the content they create. Previously, CrunchBase boxes were located at the bottom of each article such that when you were finishing reading, you could easily explore more about that particular company or topic. Let’s take a look at the current location:
Not only is the new location for the article’s CrunchBase out of the immediate viewing area, it’s currently directly underneath an advertisement and above the day’s top posts. On the off chance a reader does look at that column, the formatting and styling of the CrunchBase is so similar to the top posts and other sections it hardly stands out. They even removed the old icons for the individual CrunchBase. If TechCrunch would have changed everything about the old CrunchBase design but kept the old company/topic icons for each CrunchBase, it would be significantly better. Overall, this location and styling hurts the reader’s efficiency.
Lastly, TechCrunch produces A LOT of daily content that people want to then share with their friends, families, co-workers, etc. Notice the new sharing techniques:
In this new design, you have to hover to get access to any of the sharing functions. The whole point of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn providing share widgets is to speed up the time it takes users to share the content they are currently viewing with their friends. This design does the exact opposite. Also, for a media outlet so tech focused, they failed to re-include Google’s +1 button, which was already in place on the website’s old design.
While there are some nice features to the new design, such as the share functions staying fixed as you scroll down a page and more consistent styling across the Mobile and Gadget sections, the negatives out-weigh the positives for me. Which reminds me, speaking of design consistency:
I implore you TechCrunch, make some changes to this new design before you start losing readers.
