I wanted to give it a little more time. I'm actually a UX Designer professional and one thing I learned about agency work was often times stakeholders hated new designs even if they were objectively better because they were so attached to their old design or way of doing things. That's just human nature. So I want to start off this by saying I loved the previous Verge website design, and when I first clicked onto The Verge, I absolutely ****ing hated it. I actually went straight into making this thread, wrote out a couple paragraphs blasting the design, sat on it awhile, and deleted that writing to see what everyone else had to say.
After looking at it for some time, here's my analysis.
To sum it up, as an overall system in terms of the interactions, the page layout, and some of the more widespread design decisions, it's unique, it works, and in a lot of way pretty brilliant. We often call this the "user experience" and "program" level of design. Where it falls apart, however, is when it comes to the interface design of the site. I understand part of The Verge's branding and style is to be unique and fresh, but it really feels like a fresh graduate graphic designer's wet dream come true.
The typeface choices and colors are unbelievably bad. Design should be inclusive and invisible. If the user notices your experience or the experience makes you think, it's bad design. I shouldn't have to think about "What section am I looking at?" between each section, but I do and that's because the typeface choices and colors chosen have zero scannability. Don't even get me started with people that have visual handicaps - The Verge tends to be a more liberally-opinionated company and they have completely made their design not follow any ADA guidelines and completely inaccessible.
Try to read the category here, quickly. Most Popular. It hurts your eyes. Now stitch a bunch of these sections together and imagine trying to read those to figure out where you are on the page. Forget about it! I also really want to ask whoever designed this "WHY IS THIS SECTION BLUE?" Do users correlate Most Popular, or "Hottest" articles with a cold color? Wouldn't red be more appropriate and highlight the "hottest"? Where is the color psychology here?
The left side of the page highlights a combination of Verge and outside articles in two ways, I guess. The first cell in the example below is when an article is from outside The Verge. It works well to give you information in "Tweet-like" TL;DR formats. But again, where it falls short is the interface of each cell - how do I click into it? What do the little icons in the top right mean aside from adding noise? Why are there like 4 competing headines of different typefaces all in the same size with various weights? It makes no sense and is so god damn terrible.
The other cell, for example "It sure seems like Google is struggling to invite the future" are internally written articles they want you to click into to read. These are a little better designed, but the words "GOOGLE" on the left, and "POLICY" below it, I think are supposed to be categories? Why are they flipped and all the way to the left like that, making them hard to read and scan. And why are these cells ordered in the way they are?
I could go on and on about the poor interface choices here. But I do believe in iterative design and releasing MVPs with the expectation of improving it is the way to go. They did a lot of cool, interesting things with the foundation of the site and I think they nailed the foundational, most difficult parts of website design. The interactions. The proportions of the content. The navigation. I actually really like the white on black, too. All of those things they did exceedingly well. What they need to do is take what they have and completely rehaul the graphic design elements of the interface with a focus on scannability and acessibility and they'd be golden.
