Thanks a lot, apsurd, I agree with a lot of that and if that's the overwhelming feedback I'll reconsider.
I just dislike how images look to the left of the text on Digg, Reddit, etc. so I wanted to try and break out of that a bit. But if it's unreadable it's unreadable.
I'm sorry, it's unreadable. It was in fact the first thing that struck me as I entered the site.
Anyways, I highly recommend some books on cognitive ergonomics - it's a bit odd that we have a bunch of UX guys running around who don't even know what the term means.
It's generally understood that, for western countries anyways, people read content from top to bottom, left to right. When trying to present something in a skimmable, easily parsable way, you must stick with this format.
The somewhat flaky nature of your thumbnailing is also distracting. When presenting a list, the list must be consistent - and right now it is anything but. Behaviour and location of information radically differs between thumbnailed vs. non-thumbnailed entries.
No offense, but the move away from the top-down list seems driven more by an attempt to be different rather than any perceived gain in usability.
No offense was intended - I was more referring to my experience with UX guys who don't know the basics of cognitive ergonomics - I did not mean to imply that you did not yourself.
Nonetheless, the main page is a pretty gigantic violation of basic cognitive ergonomics tenets, and IMHO trades way too much usability for what I perceive as mere prettiness.
Also, I'm very skeptical of the usefulness of the thumbnails altogether - the thumbnail communicates nothing (usually it's a screengrab of a wall of text) and doesn't tell me anything about what I'm about to visit.
> IMHO trades way too much usability for what I perceive as mere prettiness
I don't disagree with you. I'm going to try and find the time to add a toggle b/n list view and grid view so the user can save their preference. Then if it seems that most use the list view, I might just make that the default.
> Also, I'm very skeptical of the usefulness of the thumbnails altogether
Thumbnails of designs are a pretty standard convention with "design gallery"-type sites (http://cssremix.com, http://www.unmatchedstyle.com, etc). It's meant to do nothing more than give you a small idea of the site you're about to visit. The only alternative would be listing the site's title or URL and that certainly wouldn't be any more helpful.
I just dislike how images look to the left of the text on Digg, Reddit, etc. so I wanted to try and break out of that a bit. But if it's unreadable it's unreadable.