Health & Fitness
The New Look of Patch — A Month Later
Patch recently got a speedy nip-and-tuck to make your community news hub far less user-friendly.
These are the times that try men's souls...
OK, perhaps this isn't really the biggest crisis we are facing, but the usability of Patch is something that seems to be getting worse rather than better.
Late last month, Patch editors told us that "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."
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After "test driving" the new look for about one month, I still don't think that the changes overall have achieved the intended goal of making the site more "user friendly." Let's take another look at the impact of those changes.
In my opinion, some of the changes made were rather non-offensive or perhaps even positive. The weather next to the Patch branding seems nice. I take no issue with changing words in the navigation bar. I also have no objection to the "prettification" that was done.
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From the comments on the various articles that announced the changes to the Patch homepage, it seems that the most objectionable of the changes is the new "shout stream" location and format.
Patch claimed that the new "front and center" location will "show all your comments off." In reality, it has fallen far short of that goal. Personally, I find it much more difficult to follow the various discussions that I am involved with on Patch. Not only are fewer comments visible, we also no longer have an indication that a poster has made multiple comments on the same thread. As if that wasn't bad enough, the latest addition of the "Patch hometown partner" has decreased the size of the "shout stream" to the point that we barely have one comment 'front and center' anymore. As advertising revenue is an important part of the website, it seems reasonable to locate the ads in prominent locations. A simple solution would be to bring back the "old" version of the "shout stream" and fill up the white space on the right side of the page. Ads would still be visible, comments would be visible again, and everyone would be happy.
Patch editors have stated that they would pass along the comments we made regarding the changes, but so far I'm not seeing much of an indication that anything is going to change for the better any time soon.
