TIME for Progress?

Sometimes progress is bad. Take, for instance, the redesign of TIME's website Time.com.

Time.com is where I typically go for my news. They're less sensational than I found CNN to be and their articles are of a significantly higher caliber, since the writers produce simultaneously for print and web media. Unlike CNN, the articles are not updated throughout the day, so you don't get nonsensical duplicated sentences nor references to some official whose name is never situated (with a profession or a locale or anything) because that sentence was clipped on an update. The articles hold together and feel professional.

What I liked about the old Time.com was that you could quickly scan the homepage and see what was new - and thus quickly make decisions about what was worth reading. The slideshow of 5 featured articles was great. I could watch that and have a good idea what was what without even drilling down and reading the articles. The list of "new" stuff to the right of the slideshow was similarly accessible.

All that changed on Monday. The slideshow is gone, and the 5 featured articles are now 3 - only the first of which gets a picture. The "new" stuff section ("Latest Headlines") is smaller and no longer indicates when an article comes from the Associated Press rather than TIME's staff (AP writers don't have a clue what to do with English grammar, so I often eschew reading their reports). The layout is borderline garish. Design things to gripe about:

• In the first screenful of the site there are:
  • 7 different font sizes;
  • 2 different font colors;
  • 2 different font faces; and
  • 4 different font weights (counting italic as a weight, which is technically incorrect).
  
  
• There are 5 different sizes of photos - these appear in all columns.


• The three columns are the same width, but you wouldn't know it to look at them because the elements they contain vary in size so much.


• Each chunk in each column is of a height unrelated to those in the adjacent columns. There's never a place you can draw a line all the way across the page and feel like you've moved into a new section. Hence it looks like a disorganized mess.


• There's even a chunk that spans two columns, seemingly without any good reason. (That's the "New in Brief" chunk.) That forces a huge mess of white space below the featured article chunk. Ugly.

This is all with an ad blocker running, I should say - I can't imagine how bad it must look if you can actually see the ads.

Why do I mention all of this? Because the cacophony, which looks like something a kindergartner would produce, makes it nearly impossible to scan the page to see what's new and worth reading. I see it and my immediate reaction is "yuck!" I want to navigate away from the page. Kind of like I walk into Hecht's and want to run back out the door. Too much visual clutter. The old design may have looked - well - old, but at least it conveyed information in a way that was clear and concise and without excessive visual clutter.

Here's an opinion that matches mine, from a design professional. Here is one that disagrees (from another design professional). Obviously, some of this is subjective. But the fact that I thought for a moment that the CSS didn't load when I opened the page for the first time on Monday (because it looked so disorganized) should clue someone in that something is wrong with the site.

"Proof" that the new design makes me miss things: until I saw Austin Ramzy's blog post this morning about the milk scandal in China, I never knew that he'd posted an article on the same yesterday. That's kind of important to have been lost in the clutter on a redesigned website.

I wish they'd asked for feedback, first.

[Update] Two and a half weeks after the redesign of the front page and the main article pages, the new design still hasn't been pushed out to all of the sections of the site. Just click on the Elections section and see how it differs! Ridiculous.