What's with the New Look? Patch Gets Prettified
Patch got a speedy nip-and-tuck to make your community news hub more user-friendly.
No, you're not losing it! Patch looks different today. We did a quick, visual nip-and-tuck to the homepage to make it even more user-friendly. And we've moved a couple pieces of furniture.
For those keeping score:
- We tweaked some words in our navigation bar to save space (e.g., "Traffic & Gas" is now "Commute")
- We moved the weather icon next to the Patch branding so you can find it more quickly!
- We moved, well, YOU closer to the top! (Our "shout stream" is now front and center to show all your comments off)
- And of course, we prettified a few things.
While the site might look a little different today, we still offer the same robust coverage of everything happening in your community. That was, is, and will always be our mission.
We hope you'll let us know what you think of our tweaks - drop me a line or offer a comment below!
CowDung
3:03 pm on Thursday, March 29, 2012
I don't really like the new look at all. I find the "shout stream" to be more difficult to read, and is harder to follow my conversations as I can't tell as easily when there is a new post on the thread I am interested in.
James R Hoffa
11:11 pm on Thursday, March 29, 2012
Hands down, the new 'What People Are Saying...' section, or 'shout stream,' as CowDung calls it, BLOWS!!! In fact, it's downright horrible!!!
Instead of improving on the old system, it took something good that worked well and made it exponentially worse!!!
It's more difficult to read, doesn't make much sense the way in which it links everything, makes it difficult to follow discussion/conversation on the Patch boards, and excludes the logged-in user's activity from showing up.
Who ever thought this was a better system should be fired immediately!
Move it back to the right hand side of the page or even keep it top center - just PLEASE bring back the old format ASAP!!!
CowDung
9:17 am on Friday, March 30, 2012
Just to be clear, the term "shout stream" was used in the article, not my words...
Jay Sykes
11:27 am on Friday, March 30, 2012
Is something planned for the lower half of the far right column;the former location of the 'shout stream';that area is currently 'blank'?
Bob McBride
3:45 pm on Friday, March 30, 2012
I'm guessing ads targeted at you based on whatever collection of cookies you've got stored in your cache.
Sarah Worthman
10:52 am on Friday, March 30, 2012
Thanks for your input, CowDung and James R Hoffa. I'll forward that on to our development team and see what we can do. Appreciate your honesty. Have a great day!
Steve ®
12:02 pm on Friday, March 30, 2012
The comment view is terrible. Unless patch is trying to hide all the crap us jokers say to shield from view from the "passer by". If that is the case they succeeded.
Lyle Ruble
3:14 pm on Friday, March 30, 2012
Change it back to the old foremat.
Bob McBride
3:42 pm on Friday, March 30, 2012
It's the AOL way. Take a good thing and make it progressively worse with each "improvement".
I blame all the progressives around here.
CowDung
9:50 am on Thursday, April 26, 2012
OK--since it appears that things are getting worse rather than better, it's time to revive this thread.
Are there any changes to the Patch layout that are going to be rolled back to the previous form?
With the new ads, the new "shout stream", which was already criticized as a bad idea, has gotten even more useless. With the 'Patch hometown partner' ad taking up most of the space, there's barely enough room to see that one person has commented.
Can someone please do a follow up and let us know why these changes aren't going away despite the negative feedback from the readers? Obviously the changes made are not nearly as 'user friendly' as Patch is claiming.