[cheald]

(I'm the tech lead at Mashable and on this project)

Our analytics and testing have indicated that there's a direct correlation between how visual (versus textual) our presentation is and how well it performs. Personally, I prefer a much more linear and text-heavy presentation (I spend all day on HN!), but our core audience is apparently different from me. Over the past couple of years, our audience has grown to be much more general and less tech-oriented (as I'm sure many HN readers have noticed), and the new design was done with that in mind.

I didn't like it at first, but it's grown on me. The article pages are much more "traditional" in terms of presentation, as well, which helps (and yes, I know you can't see them right now; sorry!)

[meritt]

Keep an eye on your ad revenue because you have a serious case of information overload at this point and the well-padded banner advertisement went almost entirely unnoticed for me. Advertisers will see that consumers never click nor react to their ads (Unless it's a CPM media buy and they don't get to see stats...) any longer and will eventually seek higher performing placement.

[cheald]

We absolutely will be. We're trying to find ways to integrate advertising in ways that are less obtrusive than normal; we're readers, too, and hate obnoxious ads as much as the next guy. We do direct ad sales rather than through a middleman, so we have some leeway in how stuff is presented, and we work with our advertisers to make sure that everyone is happy.

At the end of the day, advertising pays the bills, so we have to figure out the right balance there. Initial feedback from our advertising partners has been very good, though, and we'll be watching it closely, because...well, we like being able to pay rent. :)

[humbyvaldes]

My basic beef with this is that I dont think design should behave like water (take the shape of its container). I like visual presentations, just not this one.

[cheald]

Can you elaborate on this a bit? Web presentation of dynamic content tends to be rectangular by nature; do you mean the "static breakpoints" responsive design style rather than the "fluid layout with breakpoints" design style?

We went the fluid route to try to accommodate as many screens/devices/orientations as possible without wasting a ton of space; a more rigid design is definitely sharper (and frankly, would be easier to produce), but we're gunning for a design that works on just about any screen size or aspect ratio, and found that rigid designs weren't cutting it.

Totally fair if you don't like, it, though. What would be the first thing you'd change?

(I don't lead design, so it's not my call; I'm just curious)

[humbyvaldes]

Speaking in general terms… IMPO responsive design is flawed with the same paradigm flaws of "print design ported to the web". The one size fits all approach, in the case of print to web did not work. And I think the beta design has these issues in the "web design ported to mobile". Print, web and mobile design have characteristic that do not port over to each other. Have you see the new usatoday.com they seem to have the opposite problem, mobile design ported to the web.

Speaking to the redesign… I agree with what others have said… what am I supposed to look at? Everything on the page is calling my attention. When I scroll up and down, I'm not sure if I missed a box. It also seems that the page should be flipped, larger squares on the left, smaller on the right.

In contrast with the current design, when I scroll down, I immediately know if I missed a post when I visited 2 hours ago.

To be honest, if your traffic/engagement numbers go up, who the hell cares :)

[gisikw]

Some of the behavior of the site varies based on whether or not you're on a touch device - we're keenly aware of there being different usability concerns between desktop and mobile devices. But your point is well-taken. If there are specific areas where we're preserving a particular desktop-esque or mobile-esque paradigm at the expense of UX, it's probably something we need to address.