Perhaps it’s fitting that in the post-LA auto show haze, we’re getting a mild refresh of our own.
The biggest news here — and most obvious change — is the addition of infinite scroll. Once you click on a post from the homepage, you won’t have to go back to it if you want to read older posts — just scroll down and the next post will be there. And so on.
Other changes include a cleaned-up list of brands in the “car reviews by make” section, mild changes to our logo at the top, a button that expands the comments so you can see all of them, and a new sidebar on mobile.
These changes are obviously subtle and minor. As to whether TTAC may receive a full redesign in the future, all I can tell you is that we do not comment on future product.
If you, dear reader, have questions or comments, feel free to reach out or make your voice heard in the comments section.
I liked to be able to click on the date in the comment as a bookmark. Now I have to open the comments and scroll back down even after adding a new comment, when practically every other Web site will place you at or after your new comment!! This will quickly become tedious!
If VS wanted to kill off this site by making it almost unusable, they’ve succeeded! If there’s not an option to go back to one article per page, I’m done here!
Thanks for the feedback. If this is a problem, we’ll tweak it.
Yeah, Tim, this is a problem. I didn’t comment until I had a chance to use the new system, but it is cumbersome and confusing. You lose all context of the conversation by not finding the comment directly in sequence and having to search for it. Please put it back, thanks
Several issues I’m seeing, first of all Mobile “friendly” sites are ubiquitously horrible to use. Just allow my phone to access the full browser site.
Second the TTAC icon is not at the top which makes exiting an article more time consuming, and thirdly expanding the comments section is a useless feature when the purpose of having a site such as this is the readerships commentary.
It’s is much cleaner, but again give me an unedited desktop site.
Hear hear!
Just give us a “View Full Site” or “View Desktop Site” somewhere.
Exactly!
The B&B participation drives this site, and these changes complicate the UX for the comments a great deal!
Agree re the comments. Just load ’em all, don’t make keep clicking-and waiting-for more comments to load.
Repost of my comment from the Joint Battery Plant story:
Tim (or Steph), the new “Read all comments” needs some tweaking. You only get two comments by default, and if you post something, it reverts back to two comments again. Seems like overkill to me. Maybe make it ten comments to start, and not revert back if you post something?
When sites want to increase their number of clicks this is one way. The most egregious examples are the sites that have an article as a 20+ click slideshow without the ability to see the entire article.
Bottom line is that I was surprised today to only see two comments and then to do another click to see the rest of the comments. And I haven’t a clue what “infinite scroll” is. What am I missing?
Infinite scroll means once you scroll down to the end of the comments you come to the next article. Scroll down and see.
Not sure if I’m for or against it yet.
Even after your message is posted it never scrolls automatically to post.
I’d like to add another vote to dukeisduke’s comment. It’s especially true if you post something. In the previous version, it’d bring you back to where you posted. Now, it starts you back at the top.
I thought I didn’t like it (I noticed the “Read all comments” part) but now I kind of do (the “infinite scroll” that Tim points out).
Signed,
Open Minded and Embracing the Future
P.S. Having become an expert at deciphering things unsaid (thank you Ford), I welcome the “future product.” Maybe. :-)
I open them all in new tabs anyway so I don’t need to see the stories and I don’t care for constantly having to click show and scrolling down the comments to find where I was in the conversation.
It is far more cumbersome this way. At least have the show more comments go away once you post a comment. Should be easy enough in the code.
Hi, I’m a UX designer and fellow TTAC car enthusiast. Here’s my feedback
-I think the new expand and collapse feature in the comments section is a non value add. It adds unnecessary complexity to the user experience because it adds additional clicks to the content subscribers are trying to access.
– The featured content section below the top level navigation is not updated enough and features articles that are days old. I think a carousel of only the latest and greatest content should be featured at the top of the page since that is prime real estate and is one of the first sections subscribers see.
– The TTAC logo is a bit dated IMO and I think the new black font causes less continuity between the icon and text.
Just my thoughts…
Thanks for the feedback. One note on the top featured articles…the updates are done manually, once per day. So it takes a week or so for older articles to fall off. Increasing the pace of updates is something to consider.
“Read All Comments” is fine on the main page but is just a pain on individual article pages. If I’m clicking on an article, I want to see the comments.
It also is preventing links to individual comments (including those on the “new comments” bar on the main page) from resolving correctly.
Agree with this. The new comments bar should either go away or be fixed.
Still better than Kinja. Keep up the good work.
Infinite scrolling is one of the really bad parts of Kinja though.
Seriously this site needs to ditch WordPress entirely. It is astoundingly outdated. And the stylesheet is a Very Bad Design.
This “infinite scroll” is offensive to me. I find it very irksome that I can’t find the bottom of a page. It’s like being in a room so big that you can’t see the walls. Unsettling to say the least.
Refresh. I thought something was broken. Didn’t notice the logo change but was not digging not being able to read the comments without having to hit another button. Consider this refresh equal to what Hyundai did with its prior generation Sonata – a clean but boring step backward. Thankfully they have the new 2020 one ready to take the boring out of the Sonata.
I see logging (at least on mobile) still requires you to do it twice if you are lucky and don’t get the dreaded math problem that makes you do it again and then kicks you to some user profile homepage.
Oh, it’s still doing it; I’m using a laptop on a 32″ monitor, not a phone.
I occasionally get a “Jetpack” statement “Your IP address has been flagged blah blah” and it won’t let me in. After one or two retries it still bombs, then I open a new window and viola! I’m in.
Yes the “Click for more comments” makes no sense for this site. Couple that with how you can scroll to the other articles which I never indicated I wanted to read……those two changes seem incoherent with each other.
If people need a mobile-centric site then let them select one like Vbulletin does for forums.
Last night I tried logging on the site and got a ‘Jetpack has blocked your IP for suspicious activity’ something or other. I sent in an email about it (please ignore, it resolved itself).
I’m all for change, and infinite scroll sounds wonderful. I have a bad habit of catching up on TTAC over the course of my work week, and sometimes end up stopping at page 4, get distracted for a day or two, then go back to click next page and i’m way behind again. Essentially the site is always on an open tab of my browser, so infinite scroll will help ensure i read every article.
If blog-style layout goes away, so will the readers. Poor Autoblog, I know you tried to correct but it was too little too late.
page loading seems faster and there seems to be less crud running in the background. pages seem far less sluggish today.
Infinite scroll does weird things in FireFox. The logo bar is 1/2 cut off when you scroll up. When you scroll down is disappears entirely. Not sure that was the intended effect.
Any way to edit our avatars?
Love to be able to post images or links in the comments.
^ +1,000 on being able to change avatars!
I dutifully created a “Gravatar” over the summer, and it doesn’t show up on this site as advertised, but works perfectly on the blog of a certain former EIC of TTAC.
I did the same, it works on some platforms but not others… including this site – the very one which directed me to setup a “Gravatar”. I sold my 350Z nearly 18 months ago.
I really like this version of the Impala. The problem is, however, that there is just no place in my life for one.
Our van does the family duty. I rides all five of us, and the occasional couple of guests, in great comfort and I am totally happy with it. The Impala, despite being a full size sedan, can’t do this.
Our Versa Note does the in-town runabout duty. It’s small, nimble and easy to move around town in. It’s possible the Impala could do this work, but the “small” was an important factor in the decision and the Impala can’t do “small.”
Our truck is used as a truck. It hauls trash, garden supplies, and the occasional BBQ grill, bicycle, motor scooter and all sorts of what-have-yous. The Impala can’t really do that.
So where does that leave me? Happy without an Impala but sad to see them going away. I could see having one if I were an empty nester…
This is probably the most damning post of all for this new comment setup.
I had never seen a comment on the wrong post before today.
Don’t worry TK, this isn’t a comment on you.
I was wondering where this comment went! :)
There’s a “buy/drive/burn” comment in the Buick TourX article, too.
I have not noticed this happening before.
I have noticed that hitting the “page back” left error on my browser just takes you to the top of the current article. Hit it again, same thing. You have to click it twice, quickly, to go back one page.
I normally cmd-click on TTAC articles so they open in a new browser tab, all by themselves. That still works, but my new single-article-tab is now abbreviated, ending with a new “Read All Comments” button that I’m supposed to click in order to see the comments. That’s not helpful.
The whole reason I opened a new browser tab was to read the comments. Requiring another click to permit me to see the comments seems unnecessary and tiresome.
I know, it’s just one more click. I guess this means I’m “doing it wrong” (I’m “not enjoying TTAC correctly”). But in the long run, this probably means I’ll read less TTAC.
More clicking = less user friendly. I also like to keep separate tabs open for each article, to manage them individually and refresh to read new comments.
This just makes everything harder.
I click the date string on the comment to bookmark it again in the browser on a refresh. That “go to” functionality is completely busted now!
I got used to clicking on an article title on the main page and opening in a new tab. Kind of like Stuart.
That works once. You get the article, and then below it you get the remainder of the main page again. So now you’ve got two mainpages going, one longer than the other.
Which is utterly useless.
Someone without much of a clue in ACTUALLY USING the website made these changes. In isolation they may be fine. But if you are a regular user, the change is completely annoying.
Dig up another programmer or whatever grand title they go by these days, with some sort of a clue. And put things back the way they werer while they fiddle and inevitably get it wrong at least the first time.
So I submitted this and the stupid thing doesn’t even come back to the point where my comment was made.
Amateur hour all around. FIX IT!
Infinite scroll is the lane-keeping assist of website design, made for people who can’t be bothered to be engaged with what they’re doing.
If I wanted to read a different article, I’d click on a different article.
If I want to get to the bottom of the page to leave a comment, now I can’t, because there is no bottom. Just more crap loading every time I move my mouse.
Good points, color me against it. I guess this is the print equivalent of Netflix starting the next episode right after one finishes, trying to hang on to your eyeballs. Just stop it.
This is unbearable.
Seriously.
Awful.
Unuseable.
Agreed. There’s user-friendly, and on the other side of the coin there’s this.
DeadWeight, is it worse then Cadillac?
Careful now, his response may destroy the Universe.
I’ve decided DeadWeight is like that crazy uncle who shows up over the holidays to pontificate on every subject under the sun giving the rest of the family fodder for discussion the rest of the new year
“Then Uncle DeadWeight stood up on his chair during dinner and announced to the whole family that he was…”
Except here he’s right and his characterization of it isn’t exaggerated. The design of this interface is horribly unsuited to the task.
Anything that ruins the comment section will ruin the entire website. Car and Driver, Road & Track, MotorTrend, I’ve stopped going to every single one of their sites *permanently* when they removed audience commenting.
All these negative changes here and you still cannot fix the broken login system.
Re the login, I log in once, it fails, I close the tab, then open a new tab and point to TTAC, and I’m already logged in. PIA, but works every time, and I can live with it. Chrome on Windows 10.
Test.
I thought I posted something in another thread that seems to have vanished now. I hope that it was my mistake and not the new update. If my posts start to go missing it will dampen my enthusiasm and limit my participation.
I have to say that I am not a fan of the click-here-for-more comments button. Not sure if it is something, as another poster has said, intended to double clicks but it is annoying. I’d rather have all the comments under a given article than infinity scroll.
If you want to give us something useful, how about allowing us to edit posts after they go up for an hour or two. I try my best to make clear points when I write, but sometimes I screw it up and would like to change it. A nice feature would be to allow us to edit at least until someone responds to our post.
Please modernize the UI…
1. Why multiple logins required, plus the math bit.
2. The ability to post at least one photo would be great
3. Why can’t we use italics, bold, etc?
4. More than five minutes for an edit of a post
Don’t get me wrong as I appreciate the content here. A lot. I’ve been here since the hoary Farago days. But the user-friendliness and feature set is sorely lacking. VS needs to up their game. Frankly, it is a good reflection on the TTAC staff that keeps a lot of us coming back. Please consider this to be constructive.
It’s a serious problem, please change it back .
-Nate
I kind of like the new UI especially on mobile.
Christ on a bike Tim….when the he11 is the “Jetpack has locked your site” bull sh!t going to be resolved??
(further comments deleted….)
Apologies for the sharp tone Tim. Too much caffeine (as if that’s an excuse)…
No worries. The issue you’re experiencing is a technical issue, it happened to me too at least once, and it’s separate from the refresh (it happened to me a few days before). We’ll look into it.
OK, a couple of more issues. One, when I click a link on the right side of the site to see a recently posted message, a feature I often use, it takes me to two comments – the one I clicked and the one below it. If the post I am looking at is a response to something above, I can’t see what they are responding to. If I click “view all” then it jumps me to the top of the column to see everything and I have to scroll back through everything to find what I was looking for. Frankly, this sucks.
Second, your infinity scroll. combined with the view all BS means I can’t quickly flip to the bottom of the posts to see the newest ones. More clicking and dicking around.
Look, I’m getting to be a grouchy old man and I don’t feel like learning a bunch of new crap to do something I have already been doing without issue for years. I quit commenting on Jalopnik years ago when they screwed with their interface and haven’t really gone back since. People vote with their feet and I see a bunch of carping going on already.
Oh yeah, that’s me too. Now ya’ll get off my lawn!
“End of comments” instead takes me to the top of the page.
Infinite scroll coupled with the relentless page crashes triggered by the constantly reloading ads means I’ll never see more than a handful of comments.
The endless Trump trolls have already reduced my coming here from multiple times daily to once or twice a month. This “upgrade” will probably be the end of my reading the site at all.
Just a note to all who have given feedback … I’m in the process of jotting everything down and running it up the chain. Some of the complaints here refer to technical issues that have nothing to do with the update but we will work to fix those and tweak the new design to make the site work better for you. We’re listening. Thanks!