It's not designed for readability, it's designed for less density of information. It's easy to do that by putting space everywhere, but the real challenge is keeping the same kind of information density while making it more readable. Really disappointed by their redesign.
It's not even less density of information. It's less information period.
The previous design showed headlines and the first sentence or two of each article's lede. The current design just shows the headline. That's just broken, especially in the era of deceptive headlines.
It seems like the wrong success metrics are used here if this isn't an experiment. If they used something like "more clicks on articles" this change could appear positive from their end since people now have to click the articles to actually see if they want to read it.
Techmeme remains the best tech-focused news aggregator. Their sister sites Memeorandum (political news) and Mediagazer (media news) also deserve a spot in your bookmarks.
One of their best features, which Google has moved away from, is linking to multiple news sources for each story.
If you view the new Google "News" from a desktop browser with a narrow width (well, narrow for these days--1024 pixels, so I can actually have other windows on my screen), the "content" takes up about a third of the page. The other two thirds is wasted.
Even within the "content," tremendous amounts of space is wasted, and less information is present than before.
- Everyone runs their browsers maximised don't-cha-know...
I really don't, yet I've been noticing over the past few years my browser window width has been steadily getting wider to accommodate modern website design.
I blame touchscreen PCs. Less dense UI is better when you need to navigate with a fat finger. As Windows becomes more focused on touch, people using it will demand that the web becomes so too.
I agree, they went too far on the whitespace / card thing. A subtle change in layout could have make the thing a little easier on the eyes while retaining enough density.
I came up with some CSS to remove the fixed header at the top and increase the information density on the page, permanently applied using the Stylish browser add-on:
One issue is that it looks like the density was partly adjusted in order to allow for larger images alongside the story, and then some level of cruft was added to fill the area alongside.
It's not designed for readability, it's designed for less density of information. It's easy to do that by putting space everywhere, but the real challenge is keeping the same kind of information density while making it more readable. Really disappointed by their redesign.