After carefully considering all the feedback we received about the new MountainX.com, the Xpress Web team has new ideas for improving the functionality of the site. We have recently been occupied with some new projects, but the new year will yield more time to progress forward with our design.
We ask for your feedback for this preliminary mockup presented below. This is not a final design, but it does demonstrate our thoughts on how we can build a better structure for our homepage. With this new presentation, we are aiming for a simplified interface that will help our users discover the content and sections of our site that interest, while more carefully distributing the additional types of information we have to offer, such as events and tweets.
We are excited for what the new year holds for our website and our users. A big thanks to our users for their constant support, patience, and invaluable feedback, which has been crucial to our ongoing development process.
Let us know what you think in the comments!
We ask for your feedback for this preliminary mockup presented below. This is not a final design, but it does demonstrate our thoughts on how we can build a better structure for our homepage. With this new presentation, we are aiming for a simplified interface that will help our users discover the content and sections of our site that interest, while more carefully distributing the additional types of information we have to offer, such as events and tweets.
We are excited for what the new year holds for our website and our users. A big thanks to our users for their constant support, patience, and invaluable feedback, which has been crucial to our ongoing development process.
Let us know what you think in the comments!
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Less onscreen clutter and more user friendly comment function.
By D. Dial
12/19/2011
Yes, it's different. But is it better? For me, it's too busy ('cluttered') and seems confusing. And what about posts? That function seems to have deteriorated significantly.
By Dionysis
12/19/2011
I'm confused. What is the difference between the highlighted articles at the top with no header, and the ones under the "news" section?
That question aside - on the left, move the sidebar banner ad down, and to agree with everyone else, de-clutter. You have a great menu to events, classifieds, etc. but then you have them on the main page in the side bars as well. Seems a little redundant.
Finally, purely aesthetically, not a bog fan of the colour scheme. But that's nitpicking. :)
By JPostlet
12/19/2011
Nice job of rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.
I see at least 3 links to Food. Three sets of classified links and two of most everything else. One is plenty.
Take the events and the classified off the front page period unless you are promoting that for sales. If you are stop it.
Pretend this is a newspaper with many pages. All you need on the front are the top stories and a table of contents.
By Christopher C NC
12/19/2011
Yeah, I would prefer to see classifieds somewhere other than your homepage. And aesthetically? Less cute is good, frankly. But that's just me.
Mainly, I am still bothered by the reduced user-friendliness of the comment threads. This used to be a fairly active community discussion spot - now it's just a handful of us, and I think the redesign is to blame.
By Barry Summers
12/19/2011
The old format seemed to be far more user-friendly and less cluttered. Why not stop screwing things up and just back to what wasn't broken to begin with?
By bill smith
12/20/2011
While I am making suggestions.... Half the twit feed seems to be about blogwire posts or articles already on the front page. The FB recommend box is again another link to existing articles. None of this is new content. This is a confederacy of redundancy. This is not a nukular power station where all this redundancy might be appropriate in case of a meltdown. It is simply annoying. Cut it Out!
By Christopher C NC
12/20/2011
I concur.
Why have all the multiple links to the same stories ... too busy, and no where near as "user-friendly" as before.
By LOKEL
12/20/2011
The width of the actual useful page should be consistent in full and partial screen.
The Hot Topics promoted reader activity, if anyone's wondering where the posting went. The same was true of actually listing the letters (with the no. of comments) on the main page. Ditto listing the movie titles. As it stands now, I almost never even see the letters.
By Ken Hanke
12/20/2011
I like this publication, but for the life of me I just do not see that any of these changes are even remotely an improvement. In fact, as posters note, it actually is a degradation of the user-friendly format we've known for so long.
Why is this even being done? Nothing indicated anything was broke, so why tinker with it? Reminds me of the time Coca-Cola 'retired' its traditional formula in favor of 'New Coke'. We all know how that turned out.
By Dionysis
12/20/2011
Reminds me of the time Coca-Cola 'retired' its traditional formula in favor of 'New Coke'.
Yes, but that was a deliberate scam aimed at both keeping Coke drinkers, and luring in Pepsi drinkers, which at the time was much sweeter than Coke.
By Barry Summers
12/20/2011
While I'll agree that much of the problem with the site has to do with aesthetics. Like others have said, it's just too cluttered. Blogwire, tweets and advertising take up half the page, while now it's difficult to even find the actual contents of the newspaper. Beyond that however, the design of the site is only half of the problem. The old site was never the fastest, but now there's a lag that makes scrolling through the pages difficult. Plus, none of the pictures ever seem sized correctly. Not just in how the rise up above paragraphs, but those odd double thumbnails that show up at the top of stories among other things. I don't know the first thing about the technical side of web design, let alone the time it takes and the difficulty, but to me it seems like the small things need to be taken care of before a new redesign. And I say this as someone who writes for the paper and understands that the future of the Xpress lies in its ability to draw readers to its online presence.
By Justin Souther
12/20/2011
I wonder how much of the technical problems that some of us readers are having is because the new website is designed for newer faster computers? I don't know if that's the case, whether the new website uses up more RAM or whatever is required for slicker graphics, etc. I just know that my 3 yr. old laptop never has these problems viewing the old MX...
By Barry Summers
12/20/2011
Barry, does it seem apparent to you that their intent is to effectively quiet the comment-ers here?
By bill smith
12/21/2011
Reminds me of the time Coca-Cola 'retired' its traditional formula in favor of 'New Coke'.
"Yes, but that was a deliberate scam aimed at both keeping Coke drinkers, and luring in Pepsi drinkers, which at the time was much sweeter than Coke."
True, but as you may recall, it took quite a long time before it emerged that it was just a marketing strategy. The initial public response was based upon the belief that Coke had actually discontinued its original recipe. I see a bit of an analogy between that time (when people were frantically buying 'old' Coke) and choosing the 'Old MX' now.
By Dionysis
12/20/2011
"I wonder how much of the technical problems that some of us readers are having is because the new website is designed for newer faster computers?"
Good question, but I bought a new computer three months ago; it has a one terabyte hard drive, 4GB RAM, a AMD dual core processor and is blazing fast (with my DSL connection), yet the problems still exist.
By Dionysis
12/20/2011
I'm grateful to Xpress for seeking out innovations and feedback. But like many, I've been a little baffled by how recent redesigns have impacted my experiences as a reader and participant.
On the one hand, I still go to Xpress all day long to find out what's going on in my community. On the other, the site makes me feel like it's ultimately funneling local news down a rabbit hole that I can't follow, as much as I want to.
Like Barry, I miss features that would help me know which articles were getting engaged and which were alerting me that someone had responded to engagement. The aesthetics of the new design are a little problematic to my eye, but that matter is subjective enough that it's really not my main worry.
My main worry is how MountainX's vast online archives seem to be in disarray. It's one thing to worry about the home page; it's a much bigger thing to worry about what happens to the content after it leaves the home page ('cause that's where it's all going, in short order).
At present, vast sections of past Xpress reportage, as they appear online, are broken to the point of discouraging both reading and engaging. Important content appears to have virtually disappeared: from whole articles to key sub-headlines to pictures and documents galore. With it went reader-friendly formatting, in many cases. That was all within easy reach for years, but now it's effectively gone.
That said, it's probably all still archived somewhere, and will hopefully reappear one day.
And I can't imagine the complexities of the job that falls on those who have to continually bring old content into new designs.
But if Xpress' online archives become effectively broken and out-of-reach, we'll lose a pretty big community bedrock of local news, so I hope this matter will become part of the fix too.
By Jon Elliston
12/21/2011
As a former insider at Xpress, would you say there is a concerted effort to 'sanitize' the comment section?
By bill smith
12/21/2011
I think its super-awesome how you sometimes have to hit 'reply' or 'comment' several times before getting any kind of response from the system.
How long do you think it will take to completely lose everyone who isn't on facebork?
Is that the point?
I really cant think of a better example of how the Xpress model clearly prefers style over substance, made more aggravatingly egregious by the 'style' hardly even being stylish.
Bring back the old, fire programmers, and re-hire the few actual journalists you used to employ.
By bill smith
12/21/2011
I find myself clicking onto the old mountainx.com format whenever I go online. One of the things I really like about the old format is the way all the content from the latest issue is laid out in the left margin with a short description of each article in each section. I tend to read the hard copy first and then go online to see if there are any discussions going on (and you can see if there have been any comments made right there on the home page.) In the newer format there seems to be less of a thorough visual encapsulation of the latest issue.
By Lisa Watters
12/21/2011
Me too. It's an easier way to access content. I enter that way and open articles in new tabs.
Had to go over to the Miles building with a check today and I picked up a paper copy to read while eating lunch and there was plenty I had missed online.
I do understand that the old engine was pretty hackable, but I only hacked it by accident and I changed all the pictures back when I saw what happened to the front page.
Promote discussion, please.
By Jim Shura
12/21/2011
Another example: here's a pretty interesting (to me) discussion going on about the new format which I only found by going to the old site and seeing which stories had a lot of comments. If you go to the new site you'd have no idea at all that this discussion was going on.
By Lisa Watters
12/21/2011
The "new" new design still does not work for me. If I ever complained about the old format, I'm sorry. It seems a model of clean functional design now. When I read a hardcopy or the old format I find I missed much of the content trying to read the new format.
The increased scrolling caused by redundancy alone is annoying. Too much clutter, too much advertising...it's difficult to find the actual news. I thought maybe I was getting to be an old fart resistant to change but it seems I'm in good company here.
By ashkat
12/22/2011