Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, announces a slightly new look for his cult favorite site.
Since the September launches, I’ve heard a lot of reactions to the user interface, and the results have been mixed. The usability and functionality are generally appreciated, but the aesthetics are, just a bit too often, reviled.
“It’s hurting my eyes” goes the woeful refrain.
While I’m all about having the impact of memeorandum felt, I don’t really want to hurt your eyes.
So the redesign you see is aimed at just that. No major functional changes, just a general reduction in rate of eye injury.
I’m happy to see this update to the look and feel of the site. I’ve given Gabe my honest opinion many times that the previous design was hurting traffic - the first impression of many visitors was negative and they often fled the site before realizing how important Memeorandum is to the blogosphere.
I would personally have gone much further in the redesign, but its a good start and its certainly a cleaner layout.
Colors are always hit or miss; but if you have a large screen the layout is worse than before, much more scrolling required.
I really, really like the redesign, although I agree with Axel - the left-hand column seems to be smaller now, which means more scrolling.
Nice and cleaner. Maybe the site deserves a better logo too.
Subtle changes do wonders
I agree that this has not gone far enough - by miles. For me, the redesign has tidied things up, but the design is still pretty arbitrary. The colurs are dirty, the text is all over the place, there is no sense of rhythm or design unity.
Why oh why don’t Memeorandum throw the gauntlet down and hold a design competition. I for one would definitely enter.
As with many of the sites you cover (although not all of them - I have to say that I am very impressed with Newsvine) we reckon there are a number of usability issues as well. We’ll be user testing a number of sites - including the big boys like Flickr - over the next few weeks and I’d liketo find somewhere to post the results…
Oh, great idea Tim! Gabe, do it, do it, do it!
I didn’t spend much time on the old site, but I wouldn’t be touting that as a re-design or claiming it doesn’t hurt your eyes. Yuck. Whats with the non anti-aliased uppercase italics in the headers? Looks like 1997 geocities sites all over again. Not 1996 geocities cause it *does* have rounded corners.
Must be a slow day in W2 land if Mike can write up a minimal cosmetic change on tech meme and Pete Cashmore has time can comment on it
Flattening the logo and changing the colour scheme would do wonders. It’s better, but it’s still fairly horrible.
Also, the right column needs to fixed. It should to be (re)organized and have neat features added to it.
A design compo - now there’s an idea.
Memeorandum was redesigned?
*/me wonders if my computer has entered alternate universe/
Wow, I guess my powers of observation are really waning as I age!
its still that ugly, that i would never use it just for that reason. competition? count me in.
You know it’s funny, I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what Memorandum looked like before the change. RSS has totally changed the way I surf. If I see a post on Memorandum (or TechCrunch) I like in the RSS feed, I click it and without even looking, click the corresponding link to the site with the article. Sorry to all the web designers out there but, on my end, RSS is making web aesthetics obsolete.
well, we will just design custom css for feedreader users then …
looks like there are more readers than relevant site, so thats probably the long tail of webdesign then …
Scott,
Yeah, and it’s a really, really slow day when Pete comes back again to respond to your comment.
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