A new layout
Here’s a link to the new Daily Kos front page design, if you haven’t seen it yet. Note that clicking on that link will not alter your current default.
As Daily Kos’s Jason Libsch reported the other day, the new design is being rolled out and assigned randomly to a portion of users, so you may find that this new design has become your new default. It is still a work in progress, and currently you can easily switch back to the old design, though I assume at some point the old design will be retired.
I do sincerely hope, however, that Daily Kos doesn’t retire the option to use the old comment mode — I have serious usability issues with the new comment mode, which buffers the comments instead of loading them all at once.
Reasons for a new look
In Jason’s article, he explained that Daily Kos has come to view its familiar blog style — with stories appearing at the top and then moving down the page like people on an escalator — as passé and not adequate to highlight all the various types of articles and activities which Daily Kos wants to promote. Also, Daily Kos wants a design that better accommodates folks using mobile devices.
So the new layout presents a lot of sections, more akin to a newspaper or magazine. There’s a section (actually more than one) where you can find news; another section (actually more than one) where you can find Community diaries; a Trending section for the diaries that get a lot of recs; a section for Election articles; for Prism articles; for petitions; for comics; etc. Blogging hasn’t really gone away; rather, the entire front page has become conceptually more like the old sidebar: a place divvied up into sections, some of which act like escalators while others are more stationary.
Old and new
Some of the criticism regarding the new design (see for example comments like this, this, this, this, this, and this in Jason’s diary) is surely because the old design, which was developed for non-mobile screens, is visually very simple: basically just two vertical groups. By contrast, the new liquid design, which expands into multiple columns if it’s not confined to the narrow screen of a mobile device, is an assortment of vertical groups, horizontal groups, some grids rendered with large images, some grids rendered with small images, one grid containing large blue rectangles, and one object that is unlike any other — the little round image of Markos.
Things that are different naturally draw the eye’s attention — which can be intentional, such as with Markos’s picture — but also unintended, such as the occasional large, blank white spaces on the new design which appear when a Community diary which lacks a cover image is rendered in a large-image grid.
Here’s a sketch I made the other day of the old and new designs, side by side. The rectangles represent images or buttons and the squiggles represent text. In this sketch I copied the new layout as it looked on my device — a monitor with Daily Kos opened in a somewhat narrow window, which resulted in two columns. Note the simple, homogeneous two columns in the old design and the rather more complex (cluttered?) look of the new design:
Making the new layout more user-friendly
Markos has proved his chops over the years (decades!) at developing and improving this website. To longtime users, the latest changes may seem rather radical, but this redesign, like past ones, is certainly not a rash decision. It makes sense to try to better highlight all the different types of articles and activities and to better accommodate mobile.
At this point, while the new design is still being developed, Daily Kos is asking for feedback. So here are my suggestions for some tweaks to improve the user experience. I’ve also included some sketches to illustrate my suggestions.
I’ll use the comics section as an example. I might enjoy the currently featured political cartoon, but I’m honestly not likely to scroll all the way down, down, down the new layout to see it. Nor am I likely to bother to navigate there via the pancake menu. So, with the new layout, I’m not very likely to look at comics on Daily Kos — or other stuff residing far down the page. My behavior can be viewed as lazy — and it is — but that’s a common human tendency, and I think designing for laziness provides a great opportunity for some improvements.
(As an aside, humans also have a tendency, perhaps derived from eons of hunting and gathering, to follow the crowd — to look in the part of the forest or field where other people are finding good stuff, or seem to be. So it makes sense that one of the criticisms I saw regarded the absence of the rec counters in the new layout. I don’t have a strong opinion on this one way or the other, but I think dropping those counters on the front page is an interesting experiment.)
If each section were collapsible — like the sections are on the old design’s sidebar — that would shorten the journey down the page. For example, most of the time I’m not very interested in polls, so I would usually keep the Civiqs section collapsed. I’m sure the site could easily remember which sections I have expanded and collapsed, and restore that layout when I return to the site — thus presenting an experience that is calibrated to each user’s individual tastes.
There’s another way to reduce travel time: use thumbnails throughout instead of big pictures. If Daily Kos is fond of using lots of large pictures — perhaps they help to attract new users? — then perhaps [Switch to thumbnails] could be an option for us longtime users.
Below, I’ve sketched out how these suggestions could make Daily Kos less visually cluttered and more user-friendly. In this example, the user has collapsed all of the sections, except for one. First I show how this might appear on a screen which has room for two columns, and then how it might appear on a mobile device which can handle only one column.
Wide Screen
Mobile