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Gawker’s Gulp Moment: Big Redesign Is Driving People Away

24 points by andre3k1 16y ago

harisenbon 16y ago
It drove me away. Besides the horrible readability of the site now, my main method of news surfing (middle clicking on anything that looks interesting, and then going through each of the tabs one by one) no longer works on gawker sites. I never realized how enslaved I was to gawker (kotaku and lifehacker to be precise) until I stopped reading them. The amount of free time I have now (to waste on HN) is astounding.
tingley 16y ago
Silver lining: I discovered m.gawker.com.
- saurik 16y ago
  Unfortunately, I discovered this by trying to find an article I had once read (about the effects of caffeine usage) by doing a Google search on my iPhone and then clicking the link, which detected I was on an iPhone and redirected me to m.gawker.com (or m.lifehacker.com or something like that), throwing away the hash URL and putting me at the root of the site. As there is no safe way to do a 302 redirect with a hash URL this strategy is doomed to fail.
- jameskilton 16y ago
  Aye, and I thank Penny Arcade for that one. Even so I only hit kotaku once or twice a day now instead of practically leaving it up, which is probably good for me.
- joezydeco 16y ago
  It's the oddest thing. I thought the gawker redesign was specifically targeted at the iPad. When I opened it up on the iPad, I got the WAP-like text interface.
lurchpop 16y ago
Part of the catastrophic drop may have been google referrals. I've noticed in the past with old sites if you do a dramatic upgrade on them, google recoils a bit and starts re-indexing. i've seen search referrals take up to six months to completely rebound. The big shocker here is if google hits their homepage, it's met with a big "fuck you". I knew they were doing "shabang" but didn't realize they had zero fallback for no js.
SeanLuke 16y ago
The SiteMeter graph is telling. But the Quantcast graphs, on which this article is hanging its hat, say nothing at all. The author appears to have misinterpreted the graphs without first looking up the concept of "overfitting".
- mono 16y ago
  The SiteMeter graph is irrelevant too as they didn't add the SiteMeter.js.
fleitz 16y ago
The most important lesson that can be learned from this is: split test everything.
dasil003 16y ago
Weren't the sites down for a while too due to JS problems?
AdamTReineke 16y ago
If you tried RSS and were frustrated with the previews of their posts, try their full feed: [Gawker site].com/vip.xml
patrickk 16y ago
Nice hack to get the old Lifehacker and Gizmodo back: http://ca.gizmodo.com/ http://ca.gizmodo.com/ or http://uk.gizmodo.com/ http://uk.gizmodo.com/ Works exactly the same for lifehacker. The new design, apart from it's disorienting scrolling behaviour, it's also very inefficient in terms of using screen real estate well. Impossible to quickly scan articles and determine which ones are worth reading. Fortunately you don't even need to see the ugly redesign.
aneth 16y ago
Could this also be related to how data is reported to Quantcast? Many of what used to be page loads are now AJAX requests - and the page loads on Quantcast may have recovered after they added API calls on notify Quantcast.
evandavid 16y ago
The new layouts for both gizmodo & lifehacker seem quite buggy to me (Mac, latest Chrome). Most obviously, there is a grey line that tracks its way up the screen as I scroll past 'the fold'. And I agree with earlier posters: user test before release (qualitative), and split test as part of the release (quantitative).

24 points by andre3k1 16y ago

It drove me away. Besides the horrible readability of the site now, my main method of news surfing (middle clicking on anything that looks interesting, and then going through each of the tabs one by one) no longer works on gawker sites. I never realized how enslaved I was to gawker (kotaku and lifehacker to be precise) until I stopped reading them. The amount of free time I have now (to waste on HN) is astounding.

tingley 16y ago

Silver lining: I discovered m.gawker.com.

saurik 16y ago
Unfortunately, I discovered this by trying to find an article I had once read (about the effects of caffeine usage) by doing a Google search on my iPhone and then clicking the link, which detected I was on an iPhone and redirected me to m.gawker.com (or m.lifehacker.com or something like that), throwing away the hash URL and putting me at the root of the site. As there is no safe way to do a 302 redirect with a hash URL this strategy is doomed to fail.
jameskilton 16y ago
Aye, and I thank Penny Arcade for that one. Even so I only hit kotaku once or twice a day now instead of practically leaving it up, which is probably good for me.
joezydeco 16y ago
It's the oddest thing. I thought the gawker redesign was specifically targeted at the iPad. When I opened it up on the iPad, I got the WAP-like text interface.

lurchpop 16y ago

Part of the catastrophic drop may have been google referrals. I've noticed in the past with old sites if you do a dramatic upgrade on them, google recoils a bit and starts re-indexing. i've seen search referrals take up to six months to completely rebound. The big shocker here is if google hits their homepage, it's met with a big "fuck you". I knew they were doing "shabang" but didn't realize they had zero fallback for no js.

SeanLuke 16y ago

The SiteMeter graph is telling. But the Quantcast graphs, on which this article is hanging its hat, say nothing at all. The author appears to have misinterpreted the graphs without first looking up the concept of "overfitting".

mono 16y ago
The SiteMeter graph is irrelevant too as they didn't add the SiteMeter.js.

fleitz 16y ago

The most important lesson that can be learned from this is: split test everything.

dasil003 16y ago

Weren't the sites down for a while too due to JS problems?

AdamTReineke 16y ago

If you tried RSS and were frustrated with the previews of their posts, try their full feed: [Gawker site].com/vip.xml

patrickk 16y ago

Nice hack to get the old Lifehacker and Gizmodo back: http://ca.gizmodo.com/ http://ca.gizmodo.com/ or http://uk.gizmodo.com/ http://uk.gizmodo.com/ Works exactly the same for lifehacker. The new design, apart from it's disorienting scrolling behaviour, it's also very inefficient in terms of using screen real estate well. Impossible to quickly scan articles and determine which ones are worth reading. Fortunately you don't even need to see the ugly redesign.

aneth 16y ago

Could this also be related to how data is reported to Quantcast? Many of what used to be page loads are now AJAX requests - and the page loads on Quantcast may have recovered after they added API calls on notify Quantcast.

evandavid 16y ago

The new layouts for both gizmodo & lifehacker seem quite buggy to me (Mac, latest Chrome). Most obviously, there is a grey line that tracks its way up the screen as I scroll past 'the fold'. And I agree with earlier posters: user test before release (qualitative), and split test as part of the release (quantitative).