Gawker Watch: Withdrawing New Features
We, along with many others have been watching the world’s reaction to the new Gawker designs with great interest, and — more pertinently — we’ve been watching for Gawker’s response to the responses. Well, today I’ve just spotted what seem to be a couple very clear pullbacks from the new design:
- They have added an actual scrollbar to the right column. While the area was scrollable, it’s easy to guess that the lack of a visible scrollbar mis-led a lot of people into thinking that the half a dozen or so visible stories were the only ones available, despite the fixed “see more stories” link at the bottom. Back in the day, AOL users didn’t know how to scroll at all, but still today I don’t think it’s unreasonable for users to expect a scrollbar when there’s more content to be seen.
- Relevantly, they have pulled the “sticky footer” from the bottom of the browser window altogether. I applaud this, as sticky footers interfere with a browser’s natural “page up” and “page down” commands, but somehow without them the new design feels less thoughtful and innovative. They were trying for a somewhat app-like experience, and removing the sticky footer backs off from that significantly.
Has anything else changed?