Face-lift going down
You might have noticed that the layout of GC.com has been changed. I’m wondering if that was a good idea.
I kept rubbing my eyes, but that didn’t seem to help. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It has been a while that I’ve seen such a result. And I don’t mean this in a positive way. What a waste of effort and space! The readability and usability of the site didn’t improve, in the contrary.
Yes, one needs (or better said wants) to squeeze as much info as possible on one page. But that doesn’t need to imply that it should result in the current messy look at all. Let’s take a random example: the quick view profile page.
It’s far from clear what the focus nor the purpose of this page is now. I used it for a having an quick overview of the things I’ve logged, as the title indicates. But the right hand pane is so dominant that I’m not sure anymore. What’s the use of having that pane so big anyway? Is all the info in there needed over there and/or not duplicate? Why is there so much whitespace? That’s also the case for the navigation menu on the left hand side. It occurs to me that the ‘design’ was done by someone with a 22” or 24” wide screen monitor without considering that not all people have such a whopper.
In both cases, on can fit the same in much smaller space without even jeopardising the oh so precious advertisements. This leaves much more space to the rest of the information. That also includes Greasemonkey scripts which look really look crushed now, if they are still working anyway.
The evil grumpy old man in me might even think that one did all this in order to thwart them. One states “With the latest release of Geocaching.com, we have modernized the site to allow us to move forward with future projects in an effort to better address the needs of our users. In doing so, some third-party tools, such as GreaseMonkey Scripts, may no longer work because of changes to the underlying structure of the site.” Is that what one understands by better addressing the needs of the users?
Sure, one does ‘regret’ things, but wouldn’t it be more (user) friendly towards the users of gc.com, the developers of the add-ons and their users if one warns in advance that changes are due. It’ll enable those developers to adopt their tools accordingly in time which would prevent a lot of frustrations. There aren’t that many major Greasemonkey scripts after all, so what’s the obstacle?
January 13th, 2010 at 11:38 am
One answer to all your questions : “Hey , we’re citizens of the US of fucking A. We can do whatever we want.”
January 13th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
I don’t like the layout, I think they tried to make things structured and what not with all the tables, but your right – it doesn’t help!
GRrr. I admit – the website wasn’t very user friendly, but so far the only changes I see are cosmetic (and I don’t like it)…. I need to go poke around some more.