I unsubscribed to Kotaku last year. Nice folks and all. It’s just their coverage became too esoteric for my liking and not as fun or game-focused as they used to be (same goes for Joystiq).
In any case, Kotaku launched a redesign yesterday. From a usability perspective, it’s horrible. Like a return to frames. Or a flash site that makes you scroll within frames as opposed to the entire browsing window. It’s bold, I’ll admit. But web users like scrolling. And this has unorthodox use of it. So my guess is traffic will decrease.
Either way, what do you think? And while we’re on the subject, what are some of your favorite gaming websites?
joystiq, infendo and gamespy
i miss fargo on gamespy- his WoW comics always cracked me up.
And all that site does is scroll. The left side scrolls using the wheel, the right side scrolls using a wheel. If you look at it from the angle of where things are headed (think tablets) then the design makes perfect sense. The content is endless, you never reload pages. Just scroll and scroll and scroll.
Ok, I take the tablet thing back, it works like complete crap on an iPod touch so I can only assume it is just as bad on an iPad.
It wasn't just Kotaku, all sites that are part of Gawker got the same redesign. It's garbage & loads terrible on IE6 which I am still using at work
Naah, I'm not a big fan of any of the Gawker sites. As for gaming news:
Infendo (of course)
OfficialNintendomagazine.co.uk (good for UK centric news)
and occasionally ign
But I follow a fair few games journalists/publications on Twitter, so I rarely miss the news 😉
Infendo used to be my favorite until they started posting a bunch of weird stories unrelated to video games.
Like this one.
I hated the redesign. I haven't been back since it went live. Hope they see what a mistake they're making.
everyone on their facebook page and in the comments is saying how much they hate it. i thin kit is terrible and i will not go there til they fix it. i unliked them on facebook too.
its not user friendly at all and the comments are a terrible mess. why did they feel it was necessary to mess up a good thing?
I don't really read Kotaku anymore. Most of my gaming news these days is coming from Game Informer and Infendo.
I read all my news via Google Reader so it very rarely matters what the site itself looks like…
Just like LuigiHann I get all my news through Google Reader. Though I tried the new redesign and found it awful.
I read joystiq and infendo via google reader (most of the time). I used to read 4cr but something changed over there. I tried gonintendo for a while but I never got into it. I find it interesting that you are posting an article about bad web design when you guys forced us to read infendo's posts with the left advertisement bar for while (that was annoying).
I hate scrolling. IF I could, I'd never scroll. The sites I design (or at least try to) never show a single scroll bar. It's way easier for the user to see where everything is without scrolling, in a single, compact page, through which you can click forward to sub-pages.
User-friendly-ness to the max!
And instantly accessible for tablets too.
That said, I like sites clean and without too much fuss. Infendo is one of them. Although endless scrolling tires me… and my mighty mouse (with the friggin' anti-scroll ball) ;_;
Yeah, it's completely broken on iPad.
Giantbomb (mainly for the podcast and videos), joystiq, IGN, and sometimes Gametrailers
ScrewAttack has good videos but the site isn't well designed and there are a lot of ads before videos
My favorites are Infendo (duh!), IGN, and yes, Kotaku…
And yes, I hate the re-design. It just doesn't work on my browser, the left-side content column takes forever to reload, and it is difficult to navigate because there is no short paragraph after the title. Given Kotaku's tendency for whimsical titles in their articles, this makes it very difficult to decide which one to click on. But the "classic" view is not far from the way it was before:
kotaku.com/#!classic
So, you get to choose more than one view if you want, which is good.
I never liked Kotaku. The news articles are usually way too short. And you always end up having to visit another site to get more info. It's like they design the site to make you click on the featured news stories but once you do, you find out that you pretty much read everything on the excerpt on the front page. I can't believe the Kotaku staff gets paid for doing a half-baked job. Most of the time, they have these little picture album thingies where you click one picture after another. I mean c'mon.
And the fact that you have to go through an audition of sorts to voice an opinion at those gawker sites blows chunks. Since you end up with a lot of people thinking alike. Screw that.
These are the sites I visit for gaming information:
Nintendo Life
Gamasutra
PSXextreme
Infendo
GoNintendo
ComputerAndVideogames
Cubed3
I have read Kotaku every day for about two years. I stop by everyonceinawhile over here at Infendo.
Kotaku has been getting steadily more and more interesting, fun to use, easy, every positive adjective, over the period of time I've been visiting. Their most recent version was the best of all, imo: a long scroll of pictures, big articles, small articles, big pictures, small pictures, popular at the top — I liked everything about it. It was unique.
Then this happened and it's just a pain stopping by.
This may be the one thing that gets me to stop visiting. The new page, I understand the reasoning, but man there is nothing about it I like as a user.
I was never a big fan of Kotaku, but that redesign is god awful. I can't figure out how to navigate the thing. Whoever thought of that needs to be fired asap. I'm not a huge fan of scrolling, but that is a horrible design. And for most gaming sites, scroll makes sense.
I agree this design is AWFUL! Will delete it from my list of favourites.
Wow, it is so…meh.
I remember when the Kotaku homepage was filled with vibrant pink and neon green. Now it's all white and indistinguishable from a piece of paper.
A piece of paper that scrolls in an awkward manner.
Oh, and to contribute to Dustin's idea that it perchance looks better on a different display as opposed to a typical 1024 x 720 or 800×600 display, it looks even more awful on a Netbook (1024 x 600).
Occasionally visited kotaku but I haven't done so since the new layout went live. Some of the vg sites I frequent as of late are infendo, vg tribune and my nintendo news
I see what they're going after. It functions for me the way they intended, but like anything new it will take some time to adapt. It's fairly different from the other gaming sites I visit that's for sure.
My 5 favorite sites:
infendo
gonintendo
nintendo life
nintendo everything
nintendojo
I know that's a lot of Nintendo. It is what it is.
I only really frequent infendo joystiq and ign. most others are blocked at work.
I hate the new Kotaku design. I also hate Kotaku because whenever i check there (which I can't do anymore at all with the new interface) there was always a handful of really stupid articles not about gaming at all, or they were just praising Apple and saying bad things about Nintendo.
My favorite gaming sides are Giantbomb, Infendo, Gonintendo, Joystiq and sometimes 1up. I also really like Nintendo3dsblog, though it's not a huge site.
Ok I was directed toward that Gawker site to follow a story and damn, the whole scrolling and new design is seriously f-ed up.
I can see now that they designed it for iPhone users. Where you use a damn finger to interact with that site. So that leaves 99.99999% of their potential readers out in the cool.
Seriously, whoever thought of that design needs to be dragged into the street and shot (I'm just quoting Garfield here… no need to get the vapors over that one, m'kay?)
Yeah I stopped going to all the Gawker sites due to the change total ass clownery.
Now a days we want to make our life more easier than past. If game will be live to us that means if online its nice…….so be a gamer on online .