Hm. It's obviously a more modern design, and I guess the increased focus on categories makes it easier to read news relevant to said category. The redundancy of some sections (e.g. 2x Sport sections with basically the same content) is a bit frustrating since it feels like wasted space - as though the content was forced into the layout, rather than the layout properly supporting the content (though sometimes compromise is inevitable, so eh).
Not wild about how links to other stuff are put before the articles are actually finished. Feels like an attack on my attention span lol.
I do miss a couple of things in the old design, which I doubt will be making a comeback:
- I liked each feed (main feed on left and center, secondary feed on the right) being a single column. I think it makes it much easier to skim through rather than darting both across and down on two columns. Having (essentially) three columns total also feels a bit like I'm being yelled at for attention.
- The varying "priority" of posts was something I appreciated. The new layout seems to have a 2-tier system, but the old one had something like four (?).
As a contrast, comparing this to SBS' news page (on desktop) and they have a 2x2 for the big stories at the top, but then multiple single-columns for each category, with a clear visual anchor using the heading + image combo keeping each category visually distinct. I find that much easier to quickly skim through to find news that interests me. In this new design I feel like I'm spending a lot more time just moving between things I want to look at, rather than actually looking at them. I'd guess partly this is a side effect of the probably-more-mobile-friendly design, which is a bummer for me because I read on a PC far more often than on a phone ):
