156 replies to this topic

[Grayson]

After a rather lengthy period, Autosport's new site is coming out of Beta tonight!

 

We've had almost 7,000 separate pieces of feedback about the new site since launching the Beta, and we've tried to take as much of it on board as possible. The new site does significantly more than the old one (especially when it comes to things like integrating calendars, schedules, points, etc. into the series hub pages) and we've got a lot more planned for the relatively near future such as feature-filled driver pages.

 

We've also implemented a fresh new look and design across the site, as well as a full refresh of the entire user experience. This is particularly noticeable on the homepage, where we've enhanced the look of the top picks at the top of the site and reorganised the layout of the rest of the stories below. I know that this will take a bit of getting used to as the old homepage was in place for over a decade, but we're confident that most readers will prefer it.

 

The imagery across the site has also had a big update - there's high resolution photography on all of our news stories and features. Anyone using our new site during the long Beta phase will be aware that the old images didn't look good enough when they were blown up to the new larger sizes and was probably sick of seeing these with a caption promising that we'd eventually update them to proper high resolution images.

 

For now, the old site will continue to live at classic.autosport.com but we're hoping to be able to switch this off as soon as we've replicated the final bits of functionality on the new site.

 

Please keep your feedback coming by using the red feedback tab on the new site. You're welcome to raise any issues, problems or bugs here in this thread if you want an answer or a discussion, but using the feedback tab ensures that our whole team will see your comments for further discussion.

[Goma]

I appreciate all the hard work put on the new site and the passion behind it. Congratulations!     

[jcbc3]

It's a right old mess.

IMHO, of course.

[babbel]

"My autosport" is broken after the changes. I know I could be one of a the few remaining users but it would be nice to have it fixed or have a statement that it will go away soon anyway.

[KWSN - DSM]

It is a mess, we will all meekly fall in to line which will register as 'success' at the Autosport Home Office. Of the 7000 pieces of feedback seem very few were actually implemented.

 

[FredrikB]

It's a right old mess.

IMHO, of course.

 

Well here's for you.. http://classic.autosport.com/

[Grayson]

"My autosport" is broken after the changes. I know I could be one of a the few remaining users but it would be nice to have it fixed or have a statement that it will go away soon anyway.

 

Damn. The move out of Beta wasn't expected to break My Autosport. It's all based on code that's been patched and built on top of code that's at least 10 years old (I think the original My Atlas code is still in there) so it's something that seems to break whatever we do.

 

We've got a new form of customisation planned for the homepage - this is one of the things want to build to improve on the functionality of classic.autosport.com .

 

 

It is a mess, we will all meekly fall in to line which will register as 'success' at the Autosport Home Office. Of the 7000 pieces of feedback seem very few were actually implemented.

 

 

Actually, the most common requests have been implemented. The "News, opinion and analysis" area was totally redesigned after people said that they wanted the return of the three column (F1, MotoGP, other) format from the old site - it's not pretty much the opposite of what it was when we originally launched it. We've also made significant changes to the news article layouts, the fonts and text sizes, the race control panel and the series pages. We've also run focus groups with Autosport Plus members (if you're based anywhere near London or Birmingham, you may well have seen an invitation to join us for one of these) to try to get some much more detailed feedback and implemented as much of that as we could as well.

 

Unfortunately there's not much we've been able to do to address the 5% or so of feedback which says, "the site was perfect as it was, you shouldn't change anything whatsoever" without ignoring the other 95% of our readers' feedback...

[babbel]

Damn. The move out of Beta wasn't expected to break My Autosport. It's all based on code that's been patched and built on top of code that's at least 10 years old (I think the original My Atlas code is still in there) so it's something that seems to break whatever we do.

 

We've got a new form of customisation planned for the homepage - this is one of the things want to build to improve on the functionality of classic.autosport.com .

 

 

It's just missing some prototype / scriptaculous files, shouldn't be too hard to fix! I guess I'll build a new "my babbel" anyway

[KWSN - DSM]

I do not say everything was honky dory before, I am saying that what you have launched is unfortunately not a good website, it is designed with poor functionality mirroring what thousands of other sites are doing these years, all of them are wrong though.

 

There have been many posts from us here, giving our input on what we liked and did not like in the Beta version, we had the option to give input there which I did, we have had the option to give input here which I did.

 

It is obvious that there a a lot of conceptual differences in what constitute a good site between me and the Autosport design and development team, in my opinion the version you have launched is not an improvement, it has many of the same faults and issues you see across the internet which may validate you and your conceptual take on this in your eyes, I see it differently and think you missed a chance to make something kick....

 

As I have stated before I am not going anywhere, the new version is not going to make me run for the hills but it is not having me clap my hands either.

 

I continuously amazed over how very valid concerns and observations raised by posters here much smarter than me are completely ignored, which as was evidenced in the Testing threads to the direct and immediate detriment of Autosport. Users go where the functionality they had and lost is still freely available, as a business you should take note of that since you presumable want to keep users around and not see them go visit the neighbors instead.

 

[HP]

I do not say everything was honky dory before, I am saying that what you have launched is unfortunately not a good website, it is designed with poor functionality mirroring what thousands of other sites are doing these years, all of them are wrong though.

 

There have been many posts from us here, giving our input on what we liked and did not like in the Beta version, we had the option to give input there which I did, we have had the option to give input here which I did.

 

It is obvious that there a a lot of conceptual differences in what constitute a good site between me and the Autosport design and development team, in my opinion the version you have launched is not an improvement, it has many of the same faults and issues you see across the internet which may validate you and your conceptual take on this in your eyes, I see it differently and think you missed a chance to make something kick....

 

As I have stated before I am not going anywhere, the new version is not going to make me run for the hills but it is not having me clap my hands either.

 

I continuously amazed over how very valid concerns and observations raised by posters here much smarter than me are completely ignored, which as was evidenced in the Testing threads to the direct and immediate detriment of Autosport. Users go where the functionality they had and lost is still freely available, as a business you should take note of that since you presumable want to keep users around and not see them go visit the neighbors instead.

 

It's around 15 years back when i said that Internet itself is broken. It's hard to build something noteworthy upon a broken system. The original usage did what it was designed for. No complaints. But since then things have been built upon it, layer by layer, adding more and more complexity. So the entire system scales badly.

 

One of my early discussions back then was about intellectual rights. The protocol was designed for sharing of information, which it serves well, but privacy and IR were not that important then. Now we deal with a broken system, we get shoved down content (mainly ads) on many sites that nobody really wants, neither the site maintainer nor the user, nor our world environment. It's insane.

 

We need a Steve Jobs who reinvents the Internet,

 

As to the Autosport design itself. I prefer the old looks better. Neither is perfect, what bugs me most on the new design that when I open the page it looks like dozens of other sites. I looks so similar to a popular news network site, so that I have look twice if I am really on Autosport. Oh well, Autosport missed an opportunity to give us a winning game changer .

[JHSingo]

Not a great fan of the new site I have to say. It probably works well if you're using an iPad or whatever, put otherwise it just looks quite messy and unorganised. It's all over the place, whereas at least the old site was more ordered.

 

Maybe I'll get used to it in time, but not a fan at the moment.

[Grayson]

 

One of my early discussions back then was about intellectual rights. The protocol was designed for sharing of information, which it serves well, but privacy and IR were not that important then. Now we deal with a broken system, we get shoved down content (mainly ads) on many sites that nobody really wants, neither the site maintainer nor the user, nor our world environment. It's insane.

 

We're trying to tackle this by offering an ad-free environment to Autosport Plus members.

 

Others are trying to tackle this by using ad-blockers. This solves the problem for the user who no longer has to see ads anywhere they go on the internet, but it doesn't solve the problem of how the websites they're visiting will be able to keep the lights on...

[SophieB]

Are the photos in the galleries smaller than they were in the old version? I really like that you can now see all the pictures at a glance, but they seem so small?

[jcbc3]

Well here's for you.. http://classic.autosport.com/

Unfortunately, we are told that will be turned off, sooner rather than later.

[Knowlesy]

Another touchscreen optimised site. *sigh*

 

Why must they all have such baffling layouts?

[ensign14]

 

Actually, the most common requests have been implemented.

 

 

Live chat?

 

We've also run focus groups with Autosport Plus members (if you're based anywhere near London or Birmingham, you may well have seen an invitation to join us for one of these) to try to get some much more detailed feedback and implemented as much of that as we could as well.

 

 

I didn't.  *hmpf*

[KWSN - DSM]

I am going to ride the new version effectively now, no need to wait until classic disappear since disappear it will. What I do not care for is all the pictures rather than ordered lists, guess that is what is being referred to as touch screen optimized.

 

This one give what I call a direct, easy and intuitive glimpse of the stories, I click I read.

 

 

This is the exact same if in the F1 selection, pictures across, each needs to be read and understood then clicked to read.

 

 

I get that with chubby fingers on a pad or a phone, you need more than a thin line and I have the chubbiest fingers imaginable - But this is one of the places where I think the visual should be different between the site depending on the media used.

 

We can not all get what we want, just because a grumpy old Dane like me want something done differently there could be arguments to why that is not the case, I do not think the internet is broken more that the internet is like life itself, imitating what everyone else is doing, calling it progress and improvement.

 

Steve Jobs were not inventing anything he just sold it as if he did, so we just need someone like him who can make it acceptable to have sites which beats everyone else in functionality, wow factor and ease of use factor.

 

As Grayson says above, they need to keep the light on, they have adds paying for that or they have us pay for not having them. This is natural, I just not convinced the new version will entice more eyeballs on the site, those of us in the testing thread saw how we flocked to a site giving the test timings in the same way we used to get them from F1.com and Autosport - So my thought process would not be 'what is the current design philosophy' it would be 'what will users like, and add to number of visits'.

 

The broohahhh over the new Forum layout is gone, I use it on a daily basis and everything works as it should, same will happen here we jump up flustered and annoyed then we use it and little energy will be spend on it some months from now.

 

[Risil]

First of all: congratulations on shipping the final release!  

 

Criticism:

 

Those big squares look a bit messy and the little ones are difficult to read. Would've preferred something a bit more headline-y.

 

Lower-hanging fruit:

 

- Your feedbackify button is overlapping the MotoGP news on Plus

 

- The images in the Windows 10 style NewsMosaic/Newsaic at the top get brighter when you hover over them. However most of them are still much too dark when you do hover over them.

 

- The blue squares with photos of your feature writers inside them don't look good. I really have to strain my eyes to make out the visages of Dieter Rencken and Ben Anderson.

[KWSN - DSM]

And should go

 

Forums ==> Forums

 

Not

 

Forum ==> Forums

 

[KWSN - DSM]

Live chat?

 

 

I didn't.  *hmpf*

 

Think I did and thanked not thanks.

 

[FredrikB]

Unfortunately, we are told that will be turned off, sooner rather than later.

 

Mkay..

 

I see the point in a new site making it responsive/adaptive and all that. And it might be better when your on a smallish screen. But on a pc... Well, not an improvement right now.

I guess i will get over it 

[SophieB]

Oh, on an ipad, you can't make the text any bigger by just dragging the text out with your fingers like you can do for just about any other website. Some of the writing on the front page is pretty small to read on a phone/tablet.

[JHSingo]

I see the point in a new site making it responsive/adaptive and all that. And it might be better when your on a smallish screen. But on a pc... Well, not an improvement right now.

I guess i will get over it 

 

Yep. I only use the website on a PC, and it looks very messy.

 

Seems to be the way most websites are going though, unfortunately.

[milestone 11]

Oh my goodness me, what an unmitigated disaster on a PC. Totally disillusioned by this so called, yet another, upgrade. Teruth be known, were I to understand half of what he says, the poster HP makes a more than valid point. "The internet is broken", nothing, absolutely nothing, and certainly not reserved for Autosport, works as well as it did a few short, three, years ago. I despair.

[rsherb]

On my computer I don't like the new site at all, but on my phone and tablet it's a better experience for touchscreen and an improvement on the awful Autosport mobile site I stopped using a long time ago (even on my phone). I guess it was inevitable and I was just ignoring the beta site in the vain hope it would always stay beta!  It's just a sad reflection of the way the internet has gone mobile - websites entirely designed for touch screen mobile devices but when viewed on a desktop environment they end up looking huge, less efficient with space/layout and less easy to use.

 

It's a shame both interfaces (desktop optimized and mobile optimized) can't be kept depending on preference or which device we're using, but I guess that would require quite a bit of extra work both on publishing updates and proof reading.

 

On a computer, where I typically have a large hi-resolution screen and a very precise input device (mouse controlling a mouse pointer), the new site wastes the top two thirds of the screen with huge (dark) photos/headlines, which are actually harder to read and instantly take in, and then needs me to scroll down almost immediately to see as much information as the old 'classic' layout. On a mobile device with a smaller screen, I'm used to scrolling to see anything more than a few photos and a few lines of text anyway, so the interface isn't such a negative...and the news articles are easier to select with a finger than the 'classic' interface.

 

I'll no doubt get used to it eventually, although that's not the same as liking it. When using my computer I doubt I will ever like it, the same way I don't like the multitude of mobile optimized websites it now looks like.

 

 

Thanks,

Rob

[jhodges]

I'm another long-time user that doesn't like this at all. My key feedback from the beta was that the old site allowed you to see everything (on PC) immediately. Now I have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll some more to get a snapshot of the day's events. I work in e-commerce so I understand that this is the standard but I am disappointed nonetheless.

 

Any chance you can keep the old-look site live for those of us that prefer it?

[Kristian]

That's pretty terrible to look at (I'm on Chrome/Win 7 at the moment). I'll look on my tablet later. 

 

I like to be able to go straight to a site and see at a glance what new stuff is interesting - you cannot do that here. you need to scroll down halfway. Then the rest just doesn't seem laid out very intuitively. And why does everything have to have a picture with it? Its just too much....

[ensign14]

And should go

 

Forums ==> Forums

 

Not

 

Forum ==> Forums

 

 

It should go "Fora", but I'm fighting a losing battle on that one...

[KWSN - DSM]

It should go "Fora", but I'm fighting a losing battle on that one...

 

According to my friends at webster:

Full Definition of forum

plural forums also fo·ra play \-?\
1
a :  the marketplace or public place of an ancient Roman city forming the center of judicial and public business 
b :  a public meeting place for open discussion 
c :  a medium (as a newspaper or online service) of open discussion or expression of ideas

2
a :  a judicial body or assembly :  court

3
a :  a public meeting or lecture involving audience discussion 
b :  a program (as on radio or television) involving discussion of a problem usually by several authorities

[fZero]

Another website ruined with horrible tiles with huge pictures. Who in their right mind thinks this is good design?

 

These sites are so damned hard to read. Just Awful.

[043Max]

oh, welcome to the scrolling future.....scroll scroll .....

 

hope the classic stays live, why let it go?

Edited by 043Max, 16 March 2016 - 18:46.

[Group B]

Have to agree with others that it's pretty messy on a PC. I'll try my phone later see how that works.

[blackhand2010]

Yeah, I appreciate the work that must have gone into it, as well as the compromises required between desktop, mobile and tablets, but I'm afraid it looks like digital vomit, and doesn't really entice me to spend my hard earned on a subscription again (though, to be fair that's also down to content). 

[043Max]

I was curious... I saw suddenly the "Register for free and get extra stories" button. I clicked, checked the options, and was really trying to go for the free version with more extra stories, the old banner to buy a subscription after 10 stories the last year(s?) bothered me, I am an oldie. Loved Atlasf1 4ever and so on, and things changed. But more stories for free?

 

Oh wait, name, this that. ....

I then went on to try and check the privacy link, and I got a big Ooops page, like here:

 

But I tried the word classic in the urwl, like so (after some great hints for the word "classic" over here) :

 

And suddenly I got some Hallmark thing and it started about some “Us”, “We”, “Our” and a long document.

 

My question is, is this still a broken link and more importantly, with all those changes going on, will the free registration require/give the same "privacy" rules etc. as a payed one?

 

Arr, just bitching. I don't really care, but wait untill the link is fixed before registring-eh-ering-abing-a-dang.

[wllsfjrch]

Possibly a slightly odd complaint, but the big thing for me is that a lot of time I use the website, I might not necessarily have found the time to watch every race I'd wanted to. Life gets busy, and I usually have some (less important) races recorded for watching later in the week. With the old layout - news grouped by racing series - it was fairly easy to avoid all news on GP2, for example. You got used to roughly where on the screen it was going to be and could take steps to avoid glancing there. Now, with all the news appearing in one section, it's impossible to avoid spoilers. Unless you want to click into every series apart from the one you don't want to see the result of. I'm probably not going to be bothered, meaning that when the season gets underway properly I'll probably just avoid the website in general unless I've not got any unwatched races sitting on the DVR. Which is hardly ever. That will probably make me question whether remaining a subscriber is worth it. But I'd rather an unspoiled GP2 or BTCC race than risking seeing the results while looking for news about other series. I guess it's just a product of the 'have to know everything instantly' world that we live in now.

 

Overall I'm sure there's some great new features on the site, but having everything in a list, with sub-sections, was damn near perfect. Plus, like others have mentioned, I'm getting weary from all the scrolling we seem to have to do on every website nowadays.

Edited by wllsfjrch, 16 March 2016 - 22:54.

[KWSN - DSM]

Possibly a slightly odd complaint, but the big thing for me is that a lot of time I use the website, I might not necessarily have found the time to watch every race I'd wanted to. Life gets busy, and I usually have some (less important) races recorded for watching later in the week. With the old layout - news grouped by racing series - it was fairly easy to avoid all news on GP2, for example. You got used to roughly where on the screen it was going to be and could take steps to avoid glancing there. Now, with all the news appearing in one section, it's impossible to avoid spoilers. Unless you want to click into every series apart from the one you don't want to see the result of. I'm probably not going to be bothered, meaning that when the season gets underway properly I'll probably just avoid the website in general unless I've not got any unwatched races sitting on the DVR. Which is hardly ever. That will probably make me question whether remaining a subscriber is worth it. But I'd rather an unspoiled GP2 or BTCC race than risking seeing the results while looking for news about other series. I guess it's just a product of the 'have to know everything instantly' world that we live in now.

 

Overall I'm sure there's some great new features on the site, but having everything in a list, with sub-sections, was damn near perfect. Plus, like others have mentioned, I'm getting weary from all the scrolling we seem to have to do on every website nowadays.

 

I bookmarked 'Autosport' as http://www.autosport.com/f1 - Then you go straight to the F1 section and do not get all the noise about other series.

 

[wllsfjrch]

I bookmarked 'Autosport' as http://www.autosport.com/f1 - Then you go straight to the F1 section and do not get all the noise about other series.

 

 

 

Fair enough, but if you follow a lot of series and are interested in seeing the latest news about Indycar, BTCC, GP2 etc, but specifically want to avoid Formula V8 3.5 for example, then it becomes a bit of a pain.

[Kristian]

Another website ruined with horrible tiles with huge pictures. Who in their right mind thinks this is good design?

 

These sites are so damned hard to read. Just Awful.

 

And the beta had been up since June! Its crazy. I've just looked again on my home computer (which is admittedly slow), and it took 18 seconds to fully load. By comparison, BBC took 3 seconds, NewsNow 4 seconds, and Facebook 5 seconds. Its unacceptable. By comparison, Classic Autosport took 4 seconds. I then tried the new Autosport again to see if it was a caching issue, and yep 18 seconds again.   

 

I gave up my subscription in December, and now I'm just finding myself naturally going to Newsnow instead of Autosport first for my stories (Autosport used to be my first site of the day, 100%). No reason to come on first at race weekend now either as the Live has gone.  Sad really, but hey at least the forums are still here. 

[Kristian]

So this is what a new, non-logged in visitor (so not ad free) sees now when visiting the site on a high res PC/Chrome without scrolling down.... 

 

 

ONE news story. Just one. And this took an age to load! 

 

On the old site...

 

 

That is nine news stories, plus a lot more menu options that don't need extra clicking. 

 

I dread to think what was spent on the designers for this, but I really fail to see what the value for money is. 

 

Edit/Disclaimer: I don't want to be all moany and old fogeyish, and if genuinely your analytics showed that most people accessed through phones and tablets and this is seen as the best format for those, then fine. Although keeping 'classic' would be wonderful for PC users. But I can't see that happening. 

Edited by Kristian, 16 March 2016 - 23:47.

[KWSN - DSM]

Fair enough, but if you follow a lot of series and are interested in seeing the latest news about Indycar, BTCC, GP2 etc, but specifically want to avoid Formula V8 3.5 for example, then it becomes a bit of a pain.

 

Ehhh no... or at least not as far as I see it. I land on F1, then when I want to see a specific series I select 'More Series', select the one I want and shy away from the one I do not want.

 

[Withnail]

I think it looks great! Well done, team!

[schumi4ever]

Guys, why is there so much craze to optimize the same website to work across multiple devices? The site works great on my mobile and tablet, but it just looks garish and horrible on my laptop. Would it be so hard to see what the user agent is, and redirect to the mobile/non-mobile website like Facebook and others do?

 

I understand that there are budget issues, and you save a lot by keeping one single website, but please don't alienate your existing desktop users at the cost of wooing more mobile users.

[Withnail]

Guys, why is there so much craze to optimize the same website to work across multiple devices? The site works great on my mobile and tablet, but it just looks garish and horrible on my laptop. Would it be so hard to see what the user agent is, and redirect to the mobile/non-mobile website like Facebook and others do?

 

I understand that there are budget issues, and you save a lot by keeping one single website, but please don't alienate your existing desktop users at the cost of wooing more mobile users.

 

Thing is, the mobile / tablet / laptop / desktop boundaries are blurring all the time. Mobiles and Tablets are getting bigger (eg the iPad Pro), And laptop and desktop screen size varies from tablet sized to huge - and more and more laptops and desktops are becoming touch screen. So having different versions for mobile / tablet / laptop / desktop isn't the way to go - you need something that's fully scalable for screen size, and works well for touch screen and non-touch screen at all screen sizes. It's tricky. But I think Autosport have made a really good go of it. I think the new site is so much cleaner and more engaging than before, and I've found it super-easy to navigate.

[ensign14]

So this is what a new, non-logged in visitor (so not ad free) sees now when visiting the site on a high res PC/Chrome without scrolling down.... 

 

 

 

ONE news story. Just one. And this took an age to load! 

 

That is nine news stories, plus a lot more menu options that don't need extra clicking. 

 

Yeah, but remember, every single person in the entire world accesses every single website that exists or has ever existed on an ipad.

[Bloggsworth]

It wasn't broke, so they fixed it...

[Grayson]

Are the photos in the galleries smaller than they were in the old version? I really like that you can now see all the pictures at a glance, but they seem so small?

 

Hmm... That's something for us to look at. I hadn't realised that there's no option to see the images in the same spec as they are in the old galleries.

 

 

 

Those big squares look a bit messy and the little ones are difficult to read. Would've preferred something a bit more headline-y.

 

 

- The images in the Windows 10 style NewsMosaic/Newsaic at the top get brighter when you hover over them. However most of them are still much too dark when you do hover over them.

 

Rather than try to find a compromise between the modern, image led look and the headline-y text based version that you're talking about, we decided to do both.

 

Just below the main headline block and the latest news, features and F1 calendar we've replicated the site's traditional three-column structure. All of our latest content is broken down into F1, MotoGP and everything else just like it always was.

 

We've had a lot of comments about the darkness of the headline boxes at the top - that's something that our designer is going to be tweaking and optimising over the coming days.

 

Guys, why is there so much craze to optimize the same website to work across multiple devices? The site works great on my mobile and tablet, but it just looks garish and horrible on my laptop. Would it be so hard to see what the user agent is, and redirect to the mobile/non-mobile website like Facebook and others do?

 

I understand that there are budget issues, and you save a lot by keeping one single website, but please don't alienate your existing desktop users at the cost of wooing more mobile users.

 

It's only about budget in the sense that we don't have unlimited resources. We've been running a separate mobile website for the past few years, and this has limited how much we could do. It means that there are twice as many opportunities for things to break and twice as many complications when we want to introduce a new feature. If we're getting twice as many bug reports with the same sized development team, we've got less time to work on improvements to the site!

 

We're confident that a single, fully responsive website is the way to go. We're not neglecting non-mobile users at all, though. We're testing it constantly on desktop and laptop computers, and we've done focus groups with Autosport Plus members in a room full of desktop computers!

[rsherb]

We're confident that a single, fully responsive website is the way to go. We're not neglecting non-mobile users at all, though. We're testing it constantly on desktop and laptop computers, and we've done focus groups with Autosport Plus members in a room full of desktop computers!

 

I don't doubt that a single website that scales and works well across desktop, phone and tablet is the best solution, and it doesn't make sense for resource to be wasted on keeping two separate sites going. However, I really do wonder how much focus has been placed on ensuring the desktop isn't currently a downgraded experience, while the mobile experience is improved. If your focus group provided feedback on the desktop experience, was this implemented yet? The feedback here for desktop has a large percentage of negative (or at least critical but constructive) posts.

 

I've used the mobile interface on my iPhone quite a bit over the last day. It's a portrait format screen and is natural and necessary to scroll, and I really think the site works well. Also on the phone, the 'highlights' section is formatted in a vertical list, and is easy to read. In fact the whole phone experience is easy to scroll down and read. The phone experience is a job well done so far, and vastly better than the previous mobile version of Autosport.com

 

On the desktop, it's at the other end of the user experience scale. It doesn't play to any of the advantages of a desktop and all the mobile/touch-screen optimization makes it a less pleasant experience on an 'old school' computer. On initial loading most of the screen vertically is taken up by the Highlights picture mosaic. It has about 1/5 of the screen blank either side, yet the top menus are at the far left and right of the screen, and the menu bar is actually blank above the Highlights section. The Highlights section is difficult to quickly read and understand, with a jumble of articles with seemingly no real organization to the layout. It feels a bit like one of those news feed tablet widgets, or the less than popular 'metro' touchscreen interface Microsoft introduced with Windows 8, RT and Windows phone. But the biggest complaint is that it takes up nearly the whole screen (vertically), so apart from a handful of miscellaneous news and feature articles, it requires scrolling as soon as the page loads to reach a more organized and easy to read list of news articles. I've experimented with editing my bookmark, such as adding /f1 or /news, and although these avoid the 'highlights', it presents the articles in a three wide grid of large photos where you still have to scroll a lot to take all the headlines in, and also to reach the feature articles. In my opinion, the desktop experience, with so much screen 'real estate' and a precise user input (mouse pointer), scrolling should not be necessary when a page first loads, and  I should be interested by and clicking on multiple articles right from the front page as displayed on screen.

 

On my 8" Samsung android tablet (where I typically hold it in portrait orientation for sites that load a mobile optimized page), it's a mix of both the phone and desktop experience. The layout is close to the desktop with the mosaic highlights taking up the screen (and wasted space left and right, both in portrait and landscape), but fortunately the menus seem to bee more centered. It's slower to load than the on the phone, which is probably due to the more complicated layout and larger graphics. It's overall a slightly better experience than on the desktop, which I think is mostly due to the touch-screen focus of the website and it being quite normal to be scrolling on a tablet, but it's not as successful, smooth or fast as the phone experience. My phone is iOS and my tablet is android, so maybe the developers have put more focus towards the iPhone and iPad browser than with Android and Windows browsers.

 

I can confirm, as someone pointed out earlier, in landscape tablet or desktop view, if I load the page without logging in, in terms of actual content I can literally just see one large headline/picture (unless I switch on ad-block). One large banner advert and one medium sized advert to the right of the main headline take up the rest of the space. I know you have to find the right balance between making people want to come back to the site either as subscribers or as advert supported non-subscribers, but if I wasn't already a subscriber the new site design with such prominent adverts could be a huge turn-off, and might make the site less accessible to new users.

[Kristian]

I've just tried to look at it on my mobile - it looks a lot better than on the desktop (yay) but on a 4G connection took SEVENTY seconds to load. Seventy! Not even half load so I could see what I was there while I waited, it was just a blank screen. 

 

Classic took 4 seconds (8 seconds if you want to include the adverts). 

 

I tried both twice and the timings were similar both times. I actually have to keep tapping the screen to keep it awake whilst I wait for the new one. 

 

However, aesthetically it is very good on the mobile. Unfortunately, I'm a predominantly desktop/laptop user, so I'm going to avoid it whilst on those devices. 

[Tardis40]

Do us a favor and put it back into Beta - permanently.  Or at least give us a choice of using the old one.  This thing is a disaster.

[Disgrace]

It's a much-needed upgrade in my opinion. I'm usually drawn to the section in which the latest headlines are placed. It was tiny on the old site and it clearly made writing headlines more difficult. It's much easier to access those stories now.