A few months back, allkpop changed their site’s design to what you see today. While the previous one was generally standard and effective, allkpop obviously wanted a drastic change in an attempt to reinvigorate their users and brand.
It failed.
So exactly what came up short and why didn’t it work? I’ll explain.
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1. Lack Of Visual Guide And Flow
In this digital age of Facebook and Twitter, we are constantly bombarded with information. As a result, we tend to no longer truly read websites. Instead, we end up scanning them. Therefore, modern websites need to provide the reader with proper visual cues that point the users to relevant pieces of information, thus creating a pleasant user experience by providing a good reading flow.
With that established, it’s fair to say that the current allkpop design is terrible at achieving this.
For example, on most news blogs or websites, articles are typically placed one above another, with newer articles placed on top of older ones. This order tells me that the newest articles are closer to the top of the website while the older articles are closer to the bottom.
Google News is a good example of this.
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On allkpop, however, there are no such visual cues or clues. The articles are instead laid out in a three column grid, so there’s no rhyme or rhythm to the order of these articles. As a reader, I am confused. Should I read from left to right or right to left? Should I read from top down or bottom up? I have no idea. Nothing is established.
Sure, I can guesstimate by leveraging my prior experiences, but this grid-like layout can be confusing for a first time visitor or someone who is not computer savvy.
Here’s an example of my flow when I tried to skim through allkpop:
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It’s plain to see that the articles are intermixed with random call-to-action button and articles which ultimately interrupt my reading flow.
Look at the picture above, for example. While skimming the articles, I suddenly come across this “Featured Badge” call-to-action button. Quite frankly, I don’t care about the “Featured Badge”, but it’s too late for the reader, as this call-to-action has already fucked with my reading flow. As a result, I have to stumble around and find the next articles of interest so I have to re-orient myself before I can start skimming again.
Have you ever had sex and halfway through the deed your dog (or cat) decides to sniff your butt? You then have to stop, re-orient yourself, and start humping again, right? And sometimes it kills the mood, yeah?
It’s like that.
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2. Questionable Visual Design Decisions
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As you can see above, allkpop represents their articles as images, and they place article titles on the bottom of those images. I’ve only got one thing to say about that choice:
What in the fuckity fuck?!
First off, there is not enough contrast between the images and the article titles. As a result, I can’t discern the article titles from the images, and my eyesight is pretty good.
Also, why are the article titles placed below the images? No one publishes articles like that. Not The New York Times. Not The Huffington Post. Heck, not even tabloid paparazzi shit like TMZ does this.
Why is allkpop so hell-bent on going against convention? It doesn’t come off as edgy to me, just dumb.
Furthermore, there is a distinct lack of white space present. A lack of white space causes the site to feel cluttered and the user to feel claustrophobic. There are far too many visual elements crammed into too little space, and every single visual element is trying to grab for my attention, which results in the complete opposite reaction.
By the time I’m done, I feel like I have a visual, sensory overload, and I can’t absorb all of the visual information that’s presented to me.
Have you ever “accidentally” wondered into a brothel district with endless streets full of brightly lit, neon signs? On one hand, you know you have stumbled into the right place. On the other hand, you are so overwhelmed by the lights and sounds that you don’t quite know what to do.
Yeah, its like that.
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3. Useability & Access Problems
Perhaps this is the worst offense against users out of everything, mainly because it severely impacts the willingness of the reader to return again and again.
In short, however the site is coded, and likely because of the amount of visual elements present (see criticism #2), it makes allkpop take a fuck ton of time to load.
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Alexa has the load time at 3.161 seconds with 88% of sites faster and Pingdom (my favorite load time tool) generally clocks allkpop in slower than 83% of sites at between 7-9 seconds. On my own personal connection, it took over 10 seconds to fully load.
Absolutely fucking ridiculous.
Now normally I don’t need the site to load completely if I just want to click on a specific article I want, so even if the site is left loading forever, it’s okay if I’m able to click the article and read it right away. Unfortunately, the way allkpop is designed, the user can’t even do that, because the site has to load in full before the drop down option that displays over the picture which allows you to read the article will even display.
Due to this, I don’t even bother to visit the site when I’m in need of quick information now and when I want to read the site I’m forced to hunt down a direct link so I don’t have to face their splash page.
Needless to say, all of these things are extremely annoying in terms of user experience and it risks alienating a good portion of the user base, stunt the growth of the site, or at least force users to turn elsewhere.
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Obvious Conclusions
I seriously don’t like allkpop’s site design and I’m not even sure why they changed it.
I suppose allkpop was trying to go with an edgy concept with the idea that this layout would separate them from other Asian entertainment news sites. However, those decisions have been a significant detriment to the overall user experience.
As an individual that is quite well-read and experienced in software product design, and with experience at companies that probably made the operating system you’re currently using, I think it’s fair to say that I’m familiar with what is taught in product design. One of the mantras in product design is that user experience is always priority number one. You never prioritize anything over it, period. Prioritizing features or whatever other crap over user experience is a sure-fire way to kill your user base when something better rolls along.
Unfortunately for them, that is the road allkpop has chosen to head down.
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Unsolicited Recommendations
I would hate to write an entire post dedicated to negativity, so I will offer some thoughts on how allkpop can improve going forward.
1) Adopt the K-I-S-S principle, which can summarized with “perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Apple is a great example of this principle, as their products are simple, elegant, and a pleasure to use.
2) Along the same lines as thought number one, embrace white space — less is more. Remove unneeded elements and spread out the rest. Let your website “breathe”.
3) Disregard edgy designs and acquire conventions. Don’t force the users to learn or re-learn your user interface. Allow them to leverage the knowledge that they have in their head. This will make allkpop’s website easier to use and more comprehensible to its users.
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Editor’s Note: Fobio didn’t design Asian Junkie, so holster your gun on that line of rebuttal, I just bought the layout. He yells at me all the time to fix it and I tell him to fuck off because I’m stupid.
Worth noting though is that Asian Junkie takes anywhere from 0.7-0.9 seconds to load, faster than over 90% of sites on the Internet.
Bitches.
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Good, so I’m NOT the only one who seems to lag like a mother when I go on allkcrap.
Lagging mothers. I found that funny for some reason.
Nope.
Well they do it because it generates more clicks, which generates more traffic, which means more ad revenue. It’s not designed for the users, but to maximize profit. Screw the users if it means making more money(akp philosophy).
I’ve been trying to find a new way to get kpop news, but all other sites are the same crap. I really wished Sookyeong still updated, but it’s been over a year so it’s probably never going to happen.
dude, K-Bites ruled. :’(
You never know, it took Asian Junkie six years to come back.
I don’t have a problem with anybody making money, honestly.
They put in the work, so they deserve it.
My issue is with the decision making that revolves SOLELY around making money and that I don’t think this kind of stuff is actually solid business because it prevents people from visiting.
Omg thank you! I liked their older design
looks very similar to theawesomer.com
That is meh as well, but it loads faster.
It takes me over a minute to be able to click on any article on the home page. What a shit load of fuck. Good thing I use Naver a lot for my news. :c
Better entertainment reading international netizens.
Google Reader. The answer to life’s problems.
Preach.
I haven’t bothered to use that yet.
:o
AdBlock crashed for some reason on my Chrome browser today, and I was absolutely disgusted by the amount of advertising on that site. Holy fuck, they’re such sellouts.
Open up firebug (in FF) or webmaster tools (in chome) and look up the amount of Javascript AKP tries to load.
Its ridiculous.
Somebody on Twitter replied to me and said the site crashes his Chrome.
Agreed. The new design is one of the worst I’ve ever seen (both in layout and usability).
A simple workaround to poorly-designed sites like this is to put the RSS feed into Google Reader. Then all the articles can be read in a clean, simple interface.
Actually, almost all websites are best read through Google Reader.
I understand all the design stuff, but yeah, dude, the load times are UNBEARABLE.
HOLY SHIT.
Good point.
But google reader’s new design has been fail as well.
Even one of reader’s old product manager wrote a blog post and ranted on reader’s new design. See below:
http://brianshih.com/78073742
That’s not to say google reader is infinitely better than AKP though :o
I heard those complaints as well.
Seems that they tried to perfect something that was already perfect to users.
That fucking drop-down box over the article titles pisses me off to no end.
I have to agree with this. The old design was nice. But now I confuse ads with articles. Its very frustrating to me. Then sometimes I accidentally click them.
That’s sorta the point though.
Cat sniffing your ass during sex and walking into a brothel district. Hahahaha, you are a very special person.
Anywho..I completely agree.
Why oh why did allkpop fix what wasn’t broken? They went from a very user friendly website to the mess they have now. I think that they’ve lost some of the people that read their site regularly, they’ve certainly lost me.
See how they’ve changed from showing you how many people comment on a story to how many people view it.Now that could be that they want prospective advertisers to see how many people are view pages on the site, as a person working online we use those tactics when trying to sell advertising as well,lol :)
Or it could be that people just aren’t commenting as much as they used to, they simply go to akp to see that story about their bias and leave after reading.
Either way, “One of the mantras in product design is that user experience is always priority number one. You never prioritize anything over it, period.” AKP needs to realise this and get back to giving people their Kpop news in a simple yet aesthetically pleasing way.
FYI, I absolutely love this place. I love reading your articles, very informative and very well written.
1) Thank you.
2) I loved their previous design, personally. Dunno how Fobio would evaluate it, but out of all their designs that was my favorite by far, which is probably why Soompi basically stole it.
3) I think the change was probably to prevent comment flooding, because that’s not really what the comment section should be for.
I thought about real time commenting on Asian Junkie, but then I figured that if you can’t click on two buttons to comment instead of one, then whatever you were gonna say wasn’t worth it to me anyway.
i hope TH will not turn out like this.
They usually change TH later to the same thing as AKP.