These days, Newspond.com is all the rage in link exchanging cycles – it’s a new, Digg-like tool that looks sexy as hell and twice as sleek.
Since it’s a relatively quiet Friday night, I decided to try it, but my workday won’t leave me behind: the critic eye is here again. I just realised I’m better in pointing out other people errors than correcting my own. But that’s enough food for another post.
So if you want to check a longish, kinda detailed design review a la Sugar, by all means keep on reading.
Frontpage
At first look, Newspond.com is a really sexy looking web application, with a slight touch of animation here and there. But by looking at it a bit closer you’ll see the difference: Newspond looks so much like a desktop app (correctly, a Mac OS X app) that it hurts. It’s not bad, it’s not bad at all, at least for Apple fans.
Its colour scheme is low-profile, following the dark bluish grays way, quite a safe path to walk when designing news exchange tools. It’s kinda heavy on imagery, featuring glossies and gradients almost everywhere, but its structure is simple and solid and since it follows the well-known Digg model, works.
On the downside, I think that Newspond hurts a bit the sub-1280×1024 people: in 1024×768 pixels, only two or three news are shown, due to the ample use of white space and box elements.
Another remark is that there’s no clear purpose or tagline of what the site actually does in a prominent position. Sure, there are two strings used for that, but this is redundant, plus one of them is shaped like a tip-of-the-day or help element – at first I thought it’d display usage tips every time I reload, but it does not.
I stumbled upon that “buoyancy rating” too, not being a native english speaker (as *gasp!* many people on the webs) I had just the slightest of ideas of what this means; wouldn’t a simpler and less… buoyant word sound more appropriate for that?
And that’s a tiny, but I dislike the hover colour used on the categories links, shown on the right of the news; I don’t think it matches well the purpose of hover-ity (that is, to show in some way that the mouse is over something actionable – without depending solely to colour).
Registration
You can register in Newspond.com by clicking on the prominent yellow button found on the frontpage sidebar or on the subtler one found in the footer. Registration is really easy as only a username, password and e-mail are needed, no confirmation e-mails or anything, kudos for that. It also features a sexy way to show if your username is available or your password is good enough using beautiful animations and pretty icons.
What baffled me though was the header of the registration page : “Create New User”. Ahem? Isn’t that reserved for cases like, adding users to a project in a project management app or something? Why not follow the frontpage convention and use “Create New Account” in the first place?
Upon registration, the system does not prompt me to login, but instead offers a link to the frontpage, which is unchanged since registration. This is bad, because you leave the user wondering: OK, I registered, now what’s the difference? The registered user options should be highlighted somehow to better explain the point of the whole procedure.
I seriously dislike the subtle login link on the header – I didn’t see the other one under the registration button (because I have already registered anyway) so I tried to login by clicking on it, thinking it’d be a link of some sort. Alas, the “login” string is not clickable, so you have to click on the tiny icon next to it to open a glossy login form. Bad, bad bad: tiny clicking area, not linking the verb to the actual action, mystery meat navigation, me hates.
Speaking of mystery meat navigation, one of my pet peeves with this site is the icons (often tiny) used everywhere instead of strings: what’s wrong with simple phrases as “Logout”? Check out the logout button below:
Seriously, in my humble opinion it’s really bad practice to use obscure icons to link to important stuff like login, logout, account settings and the like. They should really work on that.
Commenting
One of the strongest design elements of Newspond.com lies here: the tree-structured replies. They’re sexy, they’re fun to click at, they’re some fresh thing in comment trees and I like them.
I could do without all the bumpy animation effects though, a subtle underline or change of background-color or both would be sufficient. Fortunately, Newspond.com people offer users the chance to disable cutesy animations altogether at their account settings.
Upon opening one of the comments to check it, I realized two things. First, there is no expand all/collapse all option. Call me elitist, but on my nice big 24” screen I’d like an option to see all the comments at once, which makes keeping track of the whole conversation a whole easier.
Second, even if there’s an option to jump directly to the root (first) comment, there’s no option to go to the parent comment, so you have to scan the list and find it for yourself. This may sound trivial for short comments, but for longish comments that require scrolling to get to the list it’ll quickly become tiring.
Conclusion
Overall, I like Newspond.com, I think it’s a refreshing change from the same ole boring digg clones as it brings an air of app freshness to the web. Since I like it, I decided to point out some of its most obvious flaws, just because I love pointing out other people flaws.
I should become a consultant or something.
