UX Magazine Misses the Point
UX Magazine launched it’s beta site the other day and I have to say they’ve missed the point. For a magazine that’s about user experience they sure haven’t done a very good job with the home page.
So what’s the problem? The layout!
The design is very well done, unique, and one of the best I’ve seen. The concept is great. But the user experience suffers with the layout.
The layout on the homepage is confusing, it’s hard to tell what’s what. What articles do I want to read? What category do they belong in? Where should I go next to find the information I’m looking for?
My advice. Just click one of the three buttons up top. Design, Tech, or Strategy. The rest of the layout is simple.
Cameron Olthuis is the Founder of
Hi Cameron. You’ve got a good point and I agree with the fact that it will probably be easiest for most people to click straight on the section (or even easier to subscribe to the feed). The decision of going for this type of frontpage was a conscious one. We have had mostly positive feedback but even we question our own reasoning for going in that direction. Here’s the reasoning:
We understand that people visit such sites less and less because of RSS and aggregators. We actually want to promote this behaviour. What we wanted to achieve was a striking frontpage/first impression that urged the user to explore. We also wanted to move away from the long scrollable structure. Maybe something new yet a bit familiar. Something that gives them a bit a reason to visit the site. At the same time we wanted something which could work well for the diverse demographic we’re targetting. Maybe in the process develop a way of displaying information which just works well.
We’re not there yet…
There’s certainly a lot of of stuff to do and we admit that the frontpage needs a lot done (clearly label the sections, show more content, etc..) before we’re 100% happy with it, but this is first and foremost an experiment so we’ll go with the flow, challenge certain preconceived ideas (even our own) and see how people react. We might completely rethink this in 3 months, and start from scratch, or maybe we’ll tweak it until it just works. We’ll see.