Thursday, June 29, 2006

Best and Worst of Digg v3

The best things about the new Digg, launched Monday:

• Different categories. It was inevitable, announced by Kevin Rose as far back as January this year, and now it’s here... you can digg more than technology news (OK, so people always did that, but it was never official). Let’s see how this works out in the long term; right now it looks well. The video category is especially interesting.
• The design still looks fresh and good. A lot could’ve gone wrong with a redesign, but a lot went right.
• The menus aren’t cluttered, even though features were added.
• The tabs work very well, they are intuitive to use. In particular, I like the “popular stories | upcoming stories” tabs.
• You can now undigg stories. Nice for those who have second thoughts about a particular story.

The worst things so far about Digg 3:

• It’s still terribly slow to use. Click anywhere and either watch the browser loading bar, or switch to another site in the meantime.
• The font in the comments box is ridiculously tiny. I wasn’t sure if that’s a Firefox bug, I hope they work this out. Other fonts used on the site are too small too.
• The technology sub-categories are still relatively badly chosen. I think Digg would fare better of either getting rid of them, or highly improving them. Also, you can’t select multiple categories, even though that would often make sense (e.g. something can be both “hardware” and “video,” and there’s Apple but not Microsoft).
• Archive pages are too cluttered with ads, and animated ads. Why not choose a couple of good ads that go well with the layout instead of “surrounding” everything with ads? How does that increase click-thrus anyway?
• The title font used has a negative letter-spacing of 0.03em. This makes titles look cooler, admittedly, but it’s also harder to read. Being able to very quickly scan Digg headlines should be a priority.

As for the navigation to the left, I’m undecided but got a feeling it would be better positioned on the right side. And as for Digg’s problem with comment threads – often, there are replies to buried comments, which forces you to expand the buried comment again – that’s still not solved in v3.

Now that you had the chance to play around with Digg for some days, what do you like the least, and what do you like the most?

Best and Worst of Digg v3 by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (18)

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