You can see it here. I’m running heatmap tests comparing the new and old versions right now. More on that when I have more data.
It’s interesting how people react to the new larger font size. Most readers like it, but for some it’s a bit jarring because so much of the web is still set in tiny Verdana.
Beside the type, Fred’s readers are noticing much faster pages, which is a big win.
What we wanted to do with this redesign
- Readability: If it looks better in Instapaper than in the browser, back to the drawing board.
- Mobile Ready: His old template (that I also did) had mobile CSS for the iPhone, but on this go-around we made sure that it looked great on the iPad and Android too.
- No More Widgets: 3rd party blog widgets tend to be noisy, more about promoting their own brand than being useful.
- Speed: Widgets are also heavy, injecting a ton of javascripts, images, and HTTP requests into each page view. Even worse, they often don’t use compression or long cache headers. We took AVC.com weight from almost 900KB and 130 HTTP requests to 250KB and 39 requests (and just 40KB when everything is cached). Now pages load in well under a second instead of ~5 seconds.
- Mobile Ready, Part II: The iPad and iPhone are now my target browsers, their limitations and features informing the design in subtle ways. For example, since getting the iPad, I prefer pages with subtle textured background. The texture serves to subtly anchor the scroll state, making it feel more tangible, and it also takes the edge off the screen brightness, allowing for visual effects like button embossing.
However, if I had to pick one feature in the iPhone OS browser that changes everything, I’d say it’s the “double tap to zoom a column” feature. It’s a subtle, tiny thing, but it completely subverts clutter on the web, which makes the web a pleasure to read. Column zoom makes the iPad the best web browser yet devised.
Update:
Within an hour of the redesign launch, enough “the font is too big!” comments rolled in that we decided to nudge the base font down from 18px to 16px.
Thoughts on this:
- After so many years of tiny type, the world isn’t ready for 18px yet. One commenter called it “yelling”.
- It was too much change, too quickly.
- Fred’s audience is finance oriented, and they prefer information density to breathing room. Think about Bloomberg machines, stock symbol tickers, and the way stock data is presented in newsprint.
- The web is such a “your milage may vary” medium. On reflection, the type did look a little big on Arial in Windows, and Windows in general is biased toward making smaller type look good. Plus, you never know whether a Windows user has tweaked their DPI settings because so often the default DPI makes things look too small.
- Interesting, no Mac or iPad users I ran it by said the type was too big. I think this has to do with type being rendered in a more aesthetically pleasing way on Macs. If a font renders a little ugly when small, it goes all sore thumb on you when large.