Kohler’s back to works well.

One this page alone, I’ve got three things competing for my attention by constantly flashing; fortunately I am not epileptic. Because the sections are followed by “special features” it interrupts visual scanning and makes the reader work too hard. Finally, it looks as if the designers couldn’t decide wether they wanted a “two column look” or simply text running across the page and a committee stepped in and “compromised” and chose both.

To complete this rant, I suggest the designers read “Don’t make me think”, by Steve Krug and try again. Also may they and other designers reading repeat after me: “The internet is NOT TV or a newspaper”.

I hope you have lots of data about time spent on your site pre-change and examine users’ behaviour on the new site carefully over coming weeks. I know my own reaction in the last few days has been to enter the site, get impatient with the sheer amount of material on display, and move quicker than I otherwise would have. If the data shows others are having the same reaction, I hope you move to fix it quickly, rather than just rationalising and self-congratulating and insisting how great it is. Crikey is an important test case for finding a model to produce quality journalism in new media, and my hunch is you’ve just killed it.

http://www.crikey.com.au/paywall/ … all Crikey Daily Mail subscriber-only articles

http://www.crikey.com.au/?cat=-16648 … all Crikey original articles (only Daily Mail subscribers will be able to see the paywalled ones)

I cannot make my way around this counter-intuitive site at all efficiently. The old email format allowed several ways to either scroll trough or click to the articles. I now am faced with multiple dud connections, no real idea where to go next, no indication of material already visited and no way to either see or add to comments from the email.

After 3 hours I have finally found this page and long winded article, essentially by working my way down through each article as it came up in the email and then connecting to (mainly) dead links. How I found this page is odd - I was looking to see comments on an article.

Back to this specific page…

If it requires ten minutes of careful reading to understand a road map, then the designer of said map is not properly literate.

Guys, put simply, I am lost and I assume that many of your faithful are also, so quit slapping yourselv es on the back for a moment and fix the g_dd_mned thing.

The current tally appears to be 50/50 for those ten opr so who have made it thus far. The other 99% haven’t found this web page yet and presumably are best considered to be in the “not happy” camp.

And as for the speed of your server: Immediately after I received your daily email I tried to go to your site via the link in the email. No luck the first dozen or so times - the connection timed out, regardless of whatever I tried. dAfter approximately 30 minutes, I got through.

Now that most offices are closed, it becomes apparent that a considerable number of employees are wasting paid time on prvate reading of Crikey. Not my problem and presumably not yours either, but this is not a good look, especially for a site which sends its email after the lunch break.

Before you ask, yes I do spend my own time reading Crikey. It never sullies my office time.

Horrid and failed.

Fix, please.

No subscriber emails today? No subscriber content? No Crikey Says? etc. It’s all disappeared or not accessible. Have I missed something somewhere?