On behalf of the InfoQ team, we are happy to announce our first minor UI re-launch in our 5 year history. This re-launch is the first in a set of incremental changes that will end with a fresh new look for InfoQ.com later this year. We've chosen this approach to give us a chance to get your feedback at each step, working towards a final look and feel that combines both our ideas with your feedback.
The tl;dr of this first update is that while maintaining the same look and feel, we have added more functionality into the header and footer while removing the left bar. For the longer version keep reading. Or you can skip to the end to give us feedback.
What's new
The changes in this redesign, from biggest to smallest include:
- More functional header instead of left bar. We've moved most of the functionality from the left bar and into the header. which has expanded a bit. With no left bar, this allows more horizontal space for our content, and makes it easier to watch videos and read articles, and also access menu items at the top.
- More timely topics in the header. In the grey bar at the top we will now be promoting and rotating in and out hot topics that you’re interested in hearing about. We received a lot of criticism for why we’re not covering <insert topic X> over the years even if we were covering them often, simply because people didn’t see these topics in our menu structure.
- Focus on you vs. our internal taxonomies. Along the lines of the previous point, for the last 5 years, InfoQ listed ‘Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, Agile, Architecture’ as our main site sections, which we called “communities”. In addition to rotating in timely trend topics, we’ve also chosen some more timeless high-level site section names that reflect the wider interests of the audiences we serve including Development, Architecture & Design, Process and Practices, etc. We are also re-organizing our internal editorial teams around these higher level audience interests, allowing more diverse coverage. We can finally cover PHP and Mobile more (for example), as additional topics in our ‘Development’ section.
- Expanded footer. In our new site footer, you have another way to see what the latest content is in each of our site sections and access our menu structure.
- And yes, we have already been supporting iPad and iPhones on all of our new videos since early July, which was one of our most requested features!
What's next
This was the first increment in a set of milestones we’re pursuing; with a homepage re-launch set for the end. The next milestones we’ll be putting out over the next few months include:
- A reskin. Much has changed in UI design and our actual look and feel (font, spacing, borders, etc) will get a refresh.
- Creating index pages to browse by content type. Right now you can only browse by topic, not by type. There isn’t a nice way to go and navigate all of our conference presentations in a youtube-like fashion for example.
- Related content & hot content widgets. When you read an article, there is no way to find other related content, or keep hot content around longer before it disappears off the homepage.
- Search Usability. Many of you have complained that our search results page is not very usable.
- Homepage relaunch. Left to the end, as this is often the change that causes the most upset. This should give us time to get plenty of feedback and by then have the community accustomed to seeing changes on the site so we don’t repeat a user backlash as on digg.com.
Doing a UI re-launch for an existing established site is no easy feat. Countless hours of meetings, prior failed attempts, managing differing opinions, and making tradeoffs are involved. For example, with this launch, two of my own personal favorite differentiating features had to go, including having no site header and having the personalization checkboxes right in the menu structure.
This has been a journey for all of us! I’d like to thank our CTO Alex Popescu for leading the project, our Dev team and our artist Bistrian Iosip for a lot of hard work, and our editors and the rest of community for all their input!
We'd love to hear your feedback, please feel free to vote in the poll below, comment in this thread on the current design or our next milestone plans, or send more detailed / personal feedback to this special email feedback-ui AT infoq.com!