New site design

[Lones1]

Of course he is, they are up because you now have to click fifty times to find what it used to take one or two

More clicks = more ad revenue

True, but a lot of the traffic is people coming back to see if it's really true. Has this disaster really happened? Also to check out this forum and read the comments etc. All the clicks count so even if you only view the forum it counts. But once it is finished and this abomination is finalised, the count will drop dramatically I should think, unless they give us back the spoilers, fix the mobile thing and the download time. They really do have a lot of issues to correct, and I'm not sure they can.

 

[manolo]

You're reversing things Stefan. You should be happy people actually come and visit your site and enable you to generate money, we should not be seen as the lucky ones who can visit your site for free.

It is kind of offensive when Stefan has said those things...

 

[manolo]

Cycling is truly one of the only sports where the result is so dramatic and unknown that the lead-up to it is what matters, and not necessarily the winner.

I stopped reading VeloNews because they put the picture of the winner on the front page, unavoidable, within minutes of the race finish. You can't even get into their site without seeing that one piece of information, which to me (and by the looks of it, many of us), kills the buzz.

CN was diffrerent, and I read CN daily without worry that I would find out something I didn't want to know.

Well said.

 

[manolo]

No, you didn't ignore the spoiler issue, you just didn't budge... people like participatory viewing. You've never had a friend say something along the lines of "Don't tell me the Arsenal-ManU score, I've taped the game and am waiting to watch it"?

For many of us, those live reports are our only option to in effect "tape-it" as only the TDF (and this year the Giro) get much TV coverage. And in a compliment to your live reporting staff, I often liked their coverage better than the TV... I may not abandon the site, I may use it less.

Another case for having a spoiler-free tab or page we can go to read the live coverage without ruining the experience we love.

 

[manolo]

Don't you get it? You guys have brought an a la carte restaurant and turned it into McDonalds!

Oh, man, I would have never thought of this way to say it, but, I agree!

 

[manolo]

if you are gonna do spoilers can a page with all the live feeds on it be setup somwhere.. http://www.cyclingnews.com/live for instance.. not a hard job to have a basic page with links to all the current and prior live feeds in a list.. then at least people have a page they can bookmark...

Such a simple solution!

 

[manolo]

... staff members who clearly are not savvy in public relations: Rule No. 1, do not show frustration in public.

Absolutely. If you seem rattled, you don't seem like you're in control. If you respond in frustration you'll seem hostile and not responsive. You alienate your readership!

 

[manolo]

I suggested: "Have you considered a link to a full index of live race reports? - this would address the spoiler issue - I could go directly to the live report page and avoid the headlines announcing the winners... I want to catch up progressively and not know where things are presently until I have digested everything in between.... the old site... allowed me to do that.

What about an index page of stories and race results without the blasphemous headlines? I'd go there first, because that's how I want to receive the info. I don't want to find out who won stage 6 when I haven't read the full story on stage 5."

I asked for a direct link to the news editions (only section on the homepage without a direct link). Daniel suggested http://www.cyclingnews.com/news which is better than the spoiler page... if they can give me a couple of workarounds to avoid the spoilers I might be back.

This is the way to go! I love this! Thanks! If this happens please post it here in this thread, since I'm not visiting CN at all except the forums! Thanks!

 

[manolo]

What a time to do this a couple of weeks before Tdf...

Whuf! Exactly! I hope we have spoiler-free options by then! Everything else, what the hell, I'll find somewhere else!

 

[manolo]

The spoiler issue is the final one for me. If we get a work-around then it was worth it.

I'm with you!

 

[manolo]

If they had asked for people to beta test the website (in the real world) they would have got the idea without a PR blunder. No one looking at the Ver 1 of the site on Tuesday would have said they liked it...that's for sure.

So true! Thanks!

 

[onegear29]

Results > Only top 10 listed??!!

It's maddening enough that there's spoilers in the results titles but now all the results for races like the Tour de Suisse seem to only go 10 deep in all categories?! Maybe I'm missing some new fangled navigation to see the full results?

Either way I hope the web team read these posts and address all the issues since they took their contact page down and in the meantime I'm defaulting to other sites...

 

[yourwelcome]

If we get a work-around then it was worth it.

Speaking of work-arounds, I owe some thanks to the bikeradar gurus driving the website change. I've now discovered the free Firefox ad blocker and it absolutely rocks!

 

[Darren]

New website

I was a initially disappointed that the new site was just the same as bikeradar.
It seems to be improving though & developing it's own style.
I have been a big fan of cyclingnews.com for about 3 yrs now & hope that you guys can keep developing it with the constructive feedback so it will again
be the best cycling website available

 

[Fiftygig]

I too have bookmarked the forum and am bypassing the main page until I am satisfied that sufficient user friendliness has been restored, or decide to leave altogether (clock is ticking). I will only check the main page occasionally to see if our concerns have been acted upon. Clearly not yet...

Even if its not the full live race report that you want to catch up on before knowing the result, its nice to be able to only see the result when you click on the summary race report. Reason? As quite a few people have stated, if you miss a couple of days, or you want to look at results of another event first, you don't want to feel the let down of having your suspense ruined. It gives me that disappointed sinking feeling: "oh well, I know the result now, might as well not even read the report!".

Today I got my results from the UCI website and have been going to the actual race websites for reports - The tabular format of the UCI results is at least easy to read, and all the digits in places > 100 are visible! Although I haven't quite found a workaround to the CN spoilers, a couple of times I at least managed to see results before I saw a headline. If I make any progress, I'll post.

CN If you do provide a workaround for us that give us a way of seeing live reports before spoilers, can you also do the same for the summary race reports? Like others have stated, no problem at all with me if this is not on your 'front page'.

If you don't want to do this, well, as you can see from 700 odd complaints, you've got rocks in your head!

 

[hugh w]

Mmmm, vanilla! Just like all the other vanillas!

One nice thing about the formerly information-dense news pages was I could review a lot of stories, most of which I was only casually interested in. Now, to read each news story requires a click back from what I'm reading, click the link to the next story, and wait for a page load. I'm just not going to click on lots of stories, based on their headlines. Look, one page with all the news was a great read. I would scan *all* the stories -- many turned out to be interesting, but I would never click on them based on a headline.

It's funny reading the responses from the wounded dev team. Sorry to hurt your feelings, folks. But, you're not going to talk me into liking the site! And you keep referring to how much you wanted to impress advertisers! LOL! While your readers are flaming you like this, what are your advertisers thinking?

Honestly, CN now just has the same information density and layout as all the other sites out there, so you gave up your competitive advantage. Why should I choose CN now? It's all vanilla.

You didn't understand why people liked your site! And you insult us with these pathetic protests how much advertising you're going to sell now!

 

[Bala Verde]

Bala Verde,

Start lists are being worked on as we speak. As soon as they're ready to deploy we'll make an announcement on the forums.

Thanks

Daniel

Thanks for your quick reply! Good luck with the further dev of the new site (and I don't mean that ironically). It's a tough business, IT...

 

[titan_90]

I think it's telling that they have stopped responding to our feedback all together. Simply because they don't give a s**t about our concerns and never did. They got what they want, the cyclingnews.com domain name. They have stated one of the main reasons for the redesign was so they can amaze potential advertisers with shiny things and pretty colors.

 

[frankrevi]

User interface design

To John, Daniel, Greg, and Stefan (and Future Publishing):

I'm an IT and web professional and run an ad-sponsored site, as well as a long time CN reader. I've spent some days with the new site and read all 72 (and counting) pages of this post before commenting. I appreciate all of your time, energy, expertise, and good will in redesigning the site and genuinely participating in this thread. I hope you will find my feedback useful.

I appreciate the need to redesign the site from the back end, I've been there (I am there...). I appreciate the need to be a viable commercial business, that's a good thing, and treating sponsors right is important.

These need to be clearly distinguished from the user interface design. This thread is really only about the user interface design and information architecture and how it relates to your users.

When posters say they want the old site back, what they want is the user interface from the old site. When you hear this 700+ times in three days, this is not just the typical user resistance to change that will blow over quickly once the dust settles.

The ratio of people who have a given opinion to those that take the effort to contact their political representative is typically taken to be 100:1; I'd guess your situation is similar.

What it means is that design considerations very important to your users have been lost.

In fact the posts on this thread, if you discard the outrage and bad manners, and normalize for resistance to change per se, show quite a coherent set of major substantive objections that you would do well to address strategically. Cribbing and editing from scottsmack (post #411 - worth rereading):

----------------
A few themes clearly stick out in the 72+ pages of criticism:
- Simplicity of content access and navigation
- Spoilers
- Live reports
- Simplicity of content access and navigation
- Depth of content (and again, easy access to that depth)
- Loading speed
- Mobile access
None of these are simply trivial design issues; they are critical to the utility of the site and access to its valuable and unique content. The redesign should have identified these as key objectives essential to retain and attract users. In the sit-forward medium of online, function needs to lead form.
----------------

I reiterate that none of these are trivial fixes, and would require wise design and good implementation to properly resolve. The problem is not going to go away with a few formatting changes and a little div rearrangement.

There are many good specific suggestions in this thread, and I have a number of them myself, that would help in the larger task. Personally I agree that the old UI would benefit from improvement, and there are a couple things in the new design I think are good.

But the larger issue is the point: The new user interface design
1) is missing many of the best attributes of the old
2) fails to meet best practices of any number of design experts and references
3) has lost the CyclingNews brand identity
4) has alienated a large part of your core user base

All of these problems could be solved with a followup user interface redesign project. Yeah, that's big pill to swallow, but here we are.

I'm guessing you four are in a tight spot (because you seem to care about CN and your users) between your users and good design on the one hand, and Future publishing on the other. I'm guessing Future Publishing cares nothing for the above issues because market segment aggregation and other factors are part of their plan for buying CyclingNews anyhow. I'm also guessing that the new UI was pretty much ported over from BikeRadar or someplace with no real high level design attention.

It would be great if you could convince Future Publishing that CyclingNews captures a unique and separate demographic from BikeRadar and their other properties, and is thus worth preserving for commercial reasons. And that a user interface redesign project is well worth the money. Please do that. I'm sure an analysis of web stats and other data would support that idea.

At least, I hope you may learn from this that users are not simply an amorphous mass of "consumers" that can be treated as a bubble on a powerpoint slide.

Or, maybe I'm learning that we are.

 

[Lones1]

Okay, no-one is listening, we get it!!

If anyone wants to read the results of the Tour de Suisse in a proper format try this link. They don't do live tickers from what I can see, but they sure beat the double spacing, half the number missing mess on this site.

http://www.roadcycling.co.nz/Results/tour-de-suisse-results.html

 

[morephyous]

Review of products such as the Antares should follow the past format like how James use to write it. Price and rating/specs at the bottom.

Should also be a way of listing it without clicking on the flash.

 

[bikewrench32]

I have never posted a comment here before, but I dislike the new site design so much, that I feel I have to comment. I can't navigate this site, and the race results pages are very hard to read. Terrible, terrible change. Cyclingnews is no longer my home page as of this morning.

 

[slyrider]

Okay, no-one is listening, we get it!!

If anyone wants to read the results of the Tour de Suisse in a proper format try this link. They don't do live tickers from what I can see, but they sure beat the double spacing, half the number missing mess on this site.

http://www.roadcycling.co.nz/Results/tour-de-suisse-results.html

As much as it irks me to do this (i.e. tap into a kiwi site being an Ozzie), I think our trans-Tasman brothers have their cycling shoes firmly clipped into their pedals. Looks like it could be the go, as there doesn't seem much point heading to the main page here. Just chews bandwidth.

I've left this debate for a couple of days and I reckon there's been about 5-10 pages of thread development per day in the process, since my return. Hot issue...

Wonder when the penny will drop? Drawing people in here rather than to the main pages, is not a very useful way for a web-news site to progress.

 

[Lones1]

As much as it irks me to do this (i.e. tap into a kiwi site being an Ozzie), I think our trans-Tasman brothers have their cycling shoes firmly clipped into their cleats. Looks like it could be the go.

I would rather see a small Kiwi set up make good than the publishing butchers that brought this site. More power to the Kiwi's I say. After all Cyclingnews started out as a small Aussie set up. I wish them luck, with enough support they could be the next leading cycling site in a few years.

 

[nmwildog]

Okay, no-one is listening, we get it!!

If anyone wants to read the results of the Tour de Suisse in a proper format try this link. They don't do live tickers from what I can see, but they sure beat the double spacing, half the number missing mess on this site.

http://www.roadcycling.co.nz/Results/tour-de-suisse-results.html

Thanks for the link, I'm also looking for anyone else's ideas on somewhere else to go. I haven't been back to what used to be cyclingnews since this thread was at 17 pages(I used to visit CN 3 or 4 times a day), just checked back in to see if the 'powers that be' had made any efforts to assuage the outrage. It's going to take me some time to read the 55 more pages of disgust. Hopefully there will be more good suggestions about somewhere else to find out news. I have had CN as my home page for over 10 years but I absolutely abhor the "new look". Almost as much as the seeming total disregard for the opinions expressed by the vast majority of longtime CN viewers. We'll see in a few weeks whether all those writing in have the intestinal fortitude to back up their talk and stay away. I for one am following the lead of others and bookmarking the forum so I can see if any progress is made without participating in the mess they've made of my favorite site.