Welcome to our latest design update, Ars 9.0!

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Edified

Ars Scholae Palatinae
902
Subscriptor
"Always" since the new forum launched, yes.

The user font settings thing people are finding is for your forum account, it wasn't intentionally buried, nor does it relate to the front page. I don't know how/if it affects the front page comments, it might.
I've been using Browser Zoom 80% for reading articles on my desktop. Two issues
  1. The article max-width becomes very small (max-width:48rem => 5.2inches on a 27" screen, I typically split left/right)
  2. The comments ( iframe font-size:62.5% ) then get very very small- so I have to toggle browser zoom back and forth to go from article to comments. Browser zoom is per FQDN so it's a real mess across tabs.
I can't think of any reason why article font-size and comments font-size shouldn't be identical or at least within 15%.
 
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12 (12 / 0)

MrScruff

Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
183
This does not spark joy.

My feedback's negative but I'm not going to be an ass when it comes to the delivery, for what it's worth.

What really irks me is that I have to scroll the height of my monitor to traverse from the headline to the actual article now. I like the pictures, sure, but I'm here for the text.

I also don't love the amount of real estate "Most Read" gets. There's also something about it that makes it difficult to avoid the eye being drawn to that side of the screen since the right half of my monitor is pretty much blank otherwise.

The text of the article is somehow both too big and too compacted. I'm primarily a desktop user, which means viewing in landscape, and all I see is darkness outside the narrow strip of article.

Moving to the next page of the comments section doesn't scroll back to the top of the page anymore.

Blocking certain topics sounds nice and is appreciated, but blocking with more specificity would be even more appreciated. Even I have days where I'd rather not be reminded about Elon Musk (former known as a genius) and X (formerly known as Twitter).

Honestly, when I checked my phone this morning I thought the whole site was broken. Ars has also earned the dubious honor of being the first site where I had to reduce my zoom. I generally love what you folks do, but this feels like a real swing and a miss.
 
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30 (30 / 0)

macchinario

Smack-Fu Master, in training
87
Wow, it's horrible. The grid view is truly awful and seems to be stuck in dark mode. Thank god there's a list view that resembles the past version... This feels like it was designed (badly) for mobile first, and desktops as an afterthought.

I hope Ars follow the Sonos page and doesn't pay any bonuses for the redesign, it's really broken.
 
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7 (9 / -2)

nimelennar

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
10,034
is it possible to change the behavior on the mobile Neutron homepage so that when I click on an article, it takes me directly to the full content instead of first showing a long excerpt with a link to the full article? I’d prefer a single-click to access the full article
Oh, hey, didn't notice that. Yeah, that's annoying, and another deal-breaker with Neutron.

Even "click and click again" to load the full article would be usable, but all that does is toggle between showing the first few paragraphs and hiding them. Instead, you have to click, scroll, find the "full article" bottom, and click again, which is less than ideal.

But hey, there's the comment button I asked for. Just not actually visible when I'm scrolling post checking if there's new comments on an article I'm following. Can that please be moved to the non-expanded view? On mobile, at least, there seems to be plenty of room for it.
 
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4 (4 / 0)

HeadPlug

Ars Centurion
259
Subscriptor++
Redesigning is hard, and pleasing users is next to impossible; that being said, there's only 2 stories per page on mobile(Firefox Android). Please fix this as soon as feasible🙏
1000088333.png
 
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31 (31 / 0)
Okay looks like things are getting tweaked and I'm liking the improvements to the new UI on desktop. Classic view is a bit too large, but Grid and List view are more dense. Personally, I don't like grid view, but that's a me problem. List view is looking nice. Can now see more than 2-3 articles at once.
1727896819166.png


I think the article title, byline, and image are too big when starting to read an article, and there's too much white space around them. It was nice to be able to read the first few paragraphs to see if I wanted to continue reading without scrolling. I know that comes across as nit-picky, but every scroll requires re-finding where you were in the article.

1727897125660.png


Also, I think the max text width is set too narrow for desktop. It looks like it's been set to the classic "80 characters max per line of code" coding standard, which is too narrow.
 
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16 (16 / 0)

Cow Towner

Ars Scholae Palatinae
619
Subscriptor
Default text size, on a desktop, is WAY too big. Article says it can be changed but font size in profile-settings affects just the forums, not the main site. I do not see anywhere else to change the default size.

This has probably been answered at least 50 times but I cannot read almost 700 messages to find the answer and I also cannot find a way to search comments for just one article, not everything that has ever been written in the last 500 kiloyears.
 
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9 (9 / 0)
Wow, it's horrible. The grid view is truly awful and seems to be stuck in dark mode. Thank god there's a list view that resembles the past version... This feels like it was designed (badly) for mobile first, and desktops as an afterthought.
It doesn’t appear to be mobile first. It is responsive. Since it is trying to dynamically lay out everything or whatever, I bet the software just needs more tuning.
 
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-1 (2 / -3)

Deeviant

Smack-Fu Master, in training
68
Subscriptor
Can somebody explain to me why "fully responsive" design means that all "modern" websites look like crap on desktops?

If there is no way to use old design, I'll not be visiting ars anymore.

Edit:

Oh, it looks you can go back to something like the old design, if you're a subscriber? So let met get this straight, Ars destroys the default format, then requires a sub to revert to original? Pass.
 
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2 (12 / -10)

gman003

Smack-Fu Master, in training
71
I'm not sure if you fixed the bug, or just posted enough articles for the one with the stray ampersand to be pushed out of the feed, but RSS is loading again. Thanks! And I'm glad the comments bug has been fixed. Ars comments remain some of the best on the 'net, they're a big part of why I come here.

They've been said already, but my current pain points:

1) No distinction between visited/unvisited stories in any list view. I sometimes fall far enough behind that stuff falls out of the RSS feed before I read it, so I use that to catch up.

2) The header still feels very large. Previously, the headline+image+navbar took up maybe half my screen height, now it's about 95%. On one article, I get literally one line of body text before needing to scroll, and even that's cut off. It's a sad state when I can read more of the article in the RSS preview, than on the actual site, without scrolling.

3) Can you widen the margins a bit, on the article views? I know better than to ask you to make the text 100% of the screen width, that would be unreadable. But I think you can go from 25-30% to 40%, maybe 50%? I find that right now, they're too narrow, it causes too many line breaks and too much scrolling. Even just make it a user preference, once you get those working per-device.

re #2: I think the fast solution would be to unstack some elements - move the image caption to the side, put the subheader and byline on the same line, do something with that green... whatever it is, the 2-3 words and icon above the main headline?

I would also see about scrunching up that site header. When you're deeper down the page, it's perfectly fine, but it occupies a lot of height when you're all the way at the top. If you kept it in that collapsed mode constantly, I think it would still work great, while not pushing article text below the fold. Or even just default the page to scrolled down just below it? Or even past the entire header, if they came from the front page or RSS. Presumably they clicked on the article because they were interested by the headline, which means they don't need to see the headline again!

(If I were designing this site, I'd actually try to responsively move the header bar to the side, above a certain resolution. But that's a more involved change, not something you can rush out while in triage mode.)

I'll try the site out on my tablet later, see if there's any particular pain points there. Overall, I am liking the new design, it just needs some more iteration.
 
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7 (7 / 0)

dansoton

Seniorius Lurkius
22
Subscriptor++
Not much does anymore. Split the screen. Why have one browser window when you can have two side by side with twice the readability?
I have side monitors for that! My main monitor is single focus to avoid distraction. Hence full width browsers.

I find it much better than having multiple browsers up in front of me and trying to encourage ADD, but maybe that's just me.

All that to say, I'd love to see more of the article to be able to read it much easier.
 
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6 (7 / -1)

mdrejhon

Ars Praefectus
3,122
Subscriptor
With my terrible image editing, this is something I think would work much better on widescreen desktops:

While a probably niche view, this brings an idea:

I also have a 45" monitor as one of the screens I view Ars on. I wouldn't mind attracting more of the power user audience by a "Jumbotron Layout" view mode as an additional layout beyond Desktop Layout.
  • Televisions
  • Ultrawides
  • 4K and 5K displays
  • Certain people who prefer 100% OS DPI and browser DPI on large 1440p and 4K displays
Some people use their 48-55" televisions on their computer desks to view web content too from time to time. This may be a niche audience, like only 1-5% or less, but they might be subscriptor/geek overweight, a desirable audience to attract.

Pros/Cons about too many layouts in web developer guidelines:

Although web developer guidelines says too many modes can be hard to maintain, I currently have a specific lineitem small-change request about the Desktop View. If the existing Desktop View has to remain unmodified (unlike my suggestion), perhaps this new "Jumbotron Layout" view would be where some of my requests could be satisfied (instead), as a compromise.

Automatically responsive mode [DONE]:

Sometimes I use iPad 85% zoom or 115% zoom on a per-site basis to force it to load a preerred layout (two column layouts in tablet landscape mode), so it even adapts to the zoom ratio in Safari when viewing my blog. Thankfully Ars does this now; thank you! So everytime I rotate my iPad, I see Desktop layout in landscape, and a Mobile layout in portrait. This didn't work before, but Ars has improved this iPad screen-rotation experience. Obviously, this upgrade is overlooked with the perceptual downgrades of change, but some elements has improved on the iPad, as there used to be a lot more horizontal scrolling necessary on the iPad, and that has now been fixed.
 
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0 (0 / 0)

Web Madness

Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
101
Subscriptor
The other significant change is that Ars now uses a much larger default text size. This has been the trend with basically every site since our last design overhaul, and we're normalizing to that.

I keep thinking about this rationale for the loss of information density and the thing that keeps popping into my mind is the classic parental adage: "If all you friends jumped off a bridge would you do it too?"
 
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16 (18 / -2)

---

Seniorius Lurkius
2
Subscriptor++
The grid view is terrible on mobile. I’m all in for larger font sizes but why reduce the images to a tiny circle with a thick outline that makes the image indecipherable? Why not include the teaser? Why add so much space under each article around the comment bubble? Not only that, there’s more space above than below it…

None of this makes sense. Have you heard of Gestalt principles? Apparently not otherwise you wouldn’t need this clumsy horizontal bar to separate articles.
And apparently nobody has tested any of this as it’s seriously unusable.

Also cannot say that any of the other layouts is much better. List view at least uses proper images but suffers from the same space waste especially on the comment bubble.
Classic tries something but uses much too wide margins on the teaser text and suffers from the same sins with respect to the comment bubble as the other layouts just hides it better as the teaser is long AF. Not my cup of tea but at least I can respect it.
Neutron star is an interesting idea but lacks in execution.

Never have I been more happy to use an RSS reader.
 
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4 (4 / 0)
Alignment of text is messed up. Look how wide the banner image is and look how narrow the text column underneath is.

The banner scales to multiple window widths but the text just gives up once you go beyond a certain width.

Maybe I
Should f-
ormat my
response
into a mu-
ch easier
to read la-
yout like t-
this? Does
this give y-
ou an idea
how much
I "like" the
new desi-
gn?

1727897735734.png
 

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11 (14 / -3)

Jeff S

Ars Legatus Legionis
11,175
Subscriptor++
On a desktop with a 16:9 aspect ratio display, about 60% of the screen is unused whitespace. I would like for the 'responsive design' to respond to the fact that I have a wide screen, and allow the text to reflow to fill most of the screen (a small whitespace margin at each edge would be fine and might help with readability, but right now about 60 percent of my horizontal screen space is just empty when reading articles - just huge empty blocks of space; that is, 30% empty space to the left, article text takes about 40% of the space in the middle, and another 30% empty space on the right of the text).
I got to thinking more about this. I realize that, allowing the text to flow across the entire widescreen might result in kind of weird formatting - like, shorter paragraphs that are one long line, or one long line and 1 word on the line below, and lots of these.

I don't remember exactly how the old layout dealt with this, but it occurred to me that simply widening the current column slightly (it feels a bit too narrow) to maybe 45 or 47% of the screen width, and then having a second column of text, with about an inch of whitespace between them, so you have a two column layout of text on a wide screen display, might provide a pleasant reading experience and make good use of available screen real estate.
 
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-2 (0 / -2)
I have side monitors for that!
So do I. And some others. What I do is devote the left to VsCode, split generally into three vertical sections, and the right into one more torn-off code tab taking up 1/3 of the display and the right 2/3 for browser -- generally for documentation. Taking up the full screen, text is unreadable. My eyes have to move too far between lines. However most sites format like Ars now does to avoid this.
While a probably niche view, I also have a 45" monitor as one of the screens I view Ars on
Niche? This is Ars. I have a 65" TV above and slightly behind the two primary monitors for background things. There's also two to my left mounted on the ceiling for testing other devices, a laptop display, and sometimes an iPad since that can be used as a display on a mac. A wall-mointed half-rack thrown in there. My husband only has four monitors. On one wall. The other wall has a plasma above a CRT for emulation. I am sure others here have far more absurd setups.
 
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-1 (1 / -2)

mDuo13

Ars Centurion
299
Subscriptor
So far, I haven't found much to like about the new layouts, on my mobile phone.

Classic, Grid, and List show far too little without scrolling from the front page.

In Grid mode I'm not sure what's going on with some articles having circled header images and some having full rectangles, and the blurb not being present for about half the articles, but I would prefer more egalitarian treatment of them.

List mode is getting close to what I want, but it's still too spread out with the header images being too tall and the comments count/link occupying too much space. The net effect is that on my (6.6") phone the first list item occupies about 70% of the available space, which is far too much.

Neutron Star is promising, but I miss having small article images (they helped make an article recognizable in case I couldn't remember if I saw it already) and I HATE HATE HATE that I have to click a second time to actually read the whole article after I expand it. Worse, the link to do so is a pretty small "...read full story" link right next to the next headline, so it feels like it'll be really easy to tap that instead. If I were on a device with a keyboard maybe that would be fine, but on a phone, this is the one place the design actually needs more margins/space. Though, I'd much rather sidestep the problem entirely by making it so that tapping on the article in Neutron Star mode took me to the full story in the first place.

The text size seems fine on mobile. On desktop it might be an improvement since I usually had the site set to like 130% zoom on desktop anyway.
 
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jranson

Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
183
In Grid View here. Showing a short list of most-recent articles to the left of the Feature Story while showing the older articles in the classic grid, seems unintuitive to me. Those newer stories, while above the fold, appear less prominent because they have a smaller and less substantial card than what is used for the grid stories. So it's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that, as I visit the site many times per day, I should be looking at this small list of small cards for all of the newest stuff. I think it would be nice to have an option to grid all non-feature stories with the same card style, like Ars did up until this morning.

I appreciate the larger article body font, but it might now be overly large, even for the default. While you are using a size of 20px (the same as NYT), the typeface you are using makes text appear larger than on NYT articles. 18px might be a better default for your selected typeface.
 
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0 (0 / 0)

GimletGiblet

Smack-Fu Master, in training
1
Complete revamps of software is always an exercise in bravery. First, best of luck! As a user-who-is-a-Software-Engineer-IRL, I view my role as not to question the change but rather to recognize and recommend.
So, second, I recognize that this change is necessary for multiple reasons. I’m sure that long-term this will help reduce maintenance, etc., and that once I get used to the changes I will appreciate it.
Finally, I recommend that (as others have mentioned) the layout of List view be modified. I don’t like only being able to see one article (or less!) at a time on my iPhone 13 Mini. I see that this has already been changing throughout the day, and that’s great! I just would wish that the images would be smaller or off to the side, and it would be just about right.

Also, the article here mentions:
You can, of course, change it to suit your preferences.
regarding the font size, but it doesn’t seem like that’s available to non-subs, at least on mobile. Am I missing something?

Regardless, thanks for pushing out quality content, and again, best of luck with the redesign bugfixes, etc!
 
Upvote
5 (6 / -1)
Sorry to say the new design is a downgrade on both mobile and desktop.

The whole point of flexbox, which grid seems to be, is to let the cells reflow to whatever width I set the page to. And it kind of does that, but tops out at 3 wide! Come on, let the grid flow! It also has gigant margins, and I have a 16:9 screen on desktop, not an ultrawide. FAIL. To make things worse, why is there a list at the top of the grid? Get rid of it.

Continuing on desktop, List mode is a downgrade over old desktop ars due to comically wide margins, made even more narrow by the "most read" box. Only 4 stories fit on the screen heigth-wise - old ars could fit 7! Remove the "most read" box out of list view (it messes up the formatting), cut the heigth of those images by 30%, and the "dense list" mode should be the default, as it's closest to what you had before.

Neutron star is a density improvement over old ars, but it looses inline icons for... glyphs? and is locked behind a paywall. That's probably the most usable mode on mobile right now.

The gigant margins are particularly punishing on mobile - they wast about 20% of the screen width in stories and almost 25% in comments. They need to shrink, or better yet, disappear. Reader view is currently necessary to read stories on mobile.
 
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20 (20 / 0)

Vulcan_r

Smack-Fu Master, in training
67
Subscriptor
So why the hell did it go live while you knew that?

Fucking amateur. You shouldn't be proud of this.
Jesus dude, calm down. It wasn't a known bug until after launch, because something unexpectedly broke when they pushed it to live. They fixed it almost immediately. Why the vitriol?
 
Upvote
28 (32 / -4)

mdrejhon

Ars Praefectus
3,122
Subscriptor
Niche? This is Ars. I have a 65" TV above and slightly behind the two primary monitors for background things. There's also two to my left mounted on the ceiling for testing other devices, a laptop display, and sometimes an iPad since that can be used as a display on a mac. A wall-mointed half-rack thrown in there. My husband only has four monitors. On one wall. The other wall has a plasma above a CRT for emulation. I am sure others here have far more absurd setups.
I was actually viewing it from an Analytics perspective. Whether Google Analytics or Cloudflare Analytics or whatever stats-collecting engine used...

Generic statistics analytics engine (without filtering subscriptors vs non-subscriptors) would probably have told Ars staff that 99% are viewing from mobile devices as aggregate, including people who search from Google and people who aren't subscriptors.

But the registered Ars audience and the paying Ars audience is almost assurdely geek-overweight, and big screens are probably not nearly as niche among subscriptors, the ones who loiter, the ones who commentator, the ones who already are subscriptors, and the ones who might be considering subscribing, the geek audiencepool that Ars prefers to recruit from, etc.

Even though subscriptors may still view from mobile 90% of the time, it's still less than 99% of a generic Analytics. This drilldown subscriber-layout-preferences data is very valuable to redesigning a site. The niche statistical differences of paying people start to pay for the bills.

I don't know what data Ars has, but I have been caught off guard by the statistical bias between members and non-members, since due to privacy reasons, generic Analytics data is not broken out in this granular level, and sometimes audience-attracting optimizations miss this. For this reason, separate analytics passes (within the confines of Privacy Policy) to get aggregate data from subscribers (differences in layouts used by subscribers vs non-subscribers).

____

Little Known Analytics Accidental Statistics Bias Anecdote (Creating Desktop Degrades):

Even 90% mobile vs 99% mobile means 10x more subscribers using desktop layout than mobile, so sometimes the tiny digits pays the bills surprisingly. It may not be that extreme for Ars, but it can be that extreme for certain desktop-gaming websites (aka geek-heavy websites), which is a capital example of Analytics bias accidents where registered members are more likely browsing from desktop sites percentage-of-time than the unregistered.

Deciding what kind of new-membership to attract is also a different redesign deciding factor. One example is (for me) look at how nicer (holding nose, barfing)... FoxNews layout looks is compared to CNN layout is, even though I prefer CNN (by a gigantic margin), although I prefer the "bias-detecting" Ground News app (boring layout, although due to bias-busting, even more important than layout to me).

ArsTechnica happens to be one of the few I bypass Ground News on. Now, one new worry I have for Ars is that the new layout (might?) attract more future subscriptors of the wrong kind of audience, because of (potential?) overreliance on generic Analytics data and how it's telling us (some big number) 90%+ or 99%+ visitors are now mobile and not filtering to how geeky/lucrative/etc the non-mobile audience is...

I run a geek-heavy blog and realized a potentially bias-inducing Analytics behavior (and amplified by important accessibility needs) as an insight from this, to make sure I don't blindly follow only the Analytics generics. Management sees generic analytics, and orders prioritization on mobile themes at the cost of desktop themes, causing [unexpected ugly effects / downgrade / enshittification / preferred-word] of some of my favourite tech sites elsewhere on the Internet...

So I learned to, to do supplemental research on the aggregate data of prosumer-use, in order to compensate for this accidental generic Analytics bias. Obviously a bit migeration from a dying geek pool where there seems to be no new subscriber signups, to get more subscriptor market is needed, but I think there's still plenty of more not-yet-paying geeks to recruit from too. Creating a Goldilocks from this is very tough, so I'm giving Ars a lot of slack here;
 
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4 (4 / 0)

dansoton

Seniorius Lurkius
22
Subscriptor++
So do I. And some others. What I do is devote the left to VsCode, split generally into three vertical sections, and the right into one more torn-off code tab taking up 1/3 of the display and the right 2/3 for browser -- generally for documentation. Taking up the full screen, text is unreadable. My eyes have to move too far between lines. However most sites format like Ars now does to avoid this.

Niche? This is Ars. I have a 65" TV above and slightly behind the two primary monitors for background things. There's also two to my left mounted on the ceiling for testing other devices, a laptop display, and sometimes an iPad since that can be used as a display on a mac. A wall-mointed half-rack thrown in there. My husband only has four monitors. On one wall. The other wall has a plasma above a CRT for emulation. I am sure others here have far more absurd setups.
See my original proposal, the article body would still be in a fairly narrow column, but it would just move up to a 2-column layout for those who do fullscreen their browser.

For those that don't, like yourself, then it would continue to be 1-column, with most below the fold sadly.

Edit: For those interested who can't find my original suggestion:

proposed-view-on-5k-monitor.png
 
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6 (7 / -1)
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