Annoying Pop-UP Side Bar on road.cc

We always try to listen, these days we're not so hot at communicating that we're listening - something we're working on.

We do appreciate that you care enough to tell us if something isn't working.

Don't bring it or anything like it back.  I'm one of the people who made it look a success, because every time i tried to close the stupid thing i clicked through on it.  If that comes back i leave.

"only 13 users", but I wonder how many users are like me, don't like some things but can't be arsed to complain?

Anyway, the "13" are doing a good job as the main irritations of the new set up are being removed.

Yes thanks from me too. By the way regarding the "only 13 users" there are plenty more negative comments amongst the comments on various recent articles.

I'm really hoping you will replace it with something static.

@Tony Farrelly - thanks for listening.

Good news. We're giving the slider a little holiday while we tinker with it to make it less irritating for some of you. 

@cdamian –We don't measure success in clicks - nice as it is to have plenty of them. Glad you like the new design. 

Sadly I am working also in the Webbusiness and have to put these kind of features on our site (slideins, modal windows, ads, these sill headlines in the middle of articles...)

The problem with these is that if you measure the success by number of times they are clicked, the bounce rate (coming and directly leaving), the number of pages people look at, then they are reasonably successful. The cons of them you can't easily measure. It takes a while until people are annoyed enough to visit the site or bother to click on articles.

Or people like me who install an adblocker which allows removing individual elements like these from the page to have a nice reading experience again. This obviously also blocks all other real ads on the site, which I guess is the main income of road.cc. (previously I had them enabled on this site).

road.cc is still my favourite road cycling site, even if they make it more more difficult to use it

And I am all for the new design btw.

I am generally very supportive of road.cc, including when others complain about particular types of stories, but I really, really want this go to away.

"of the tens of thousands of people that use the site every day a 13  have complained."

Out of those tens of thousands how many asked for it? And how many are irritated by it but haven't posted here? I would say the answers are "none" and "many".

"by any of the standard measures of web success it's worked"

Do any of those standards measure user irritation? Do you measure success purely by number of clicks or do you take comments into account?

Please just remove it, there are so many static, non-intrusive methods you can use to offer suggestions for further reading.

@Tony Farrelly - I appreciate your comments about moving to the new platform, but the fact remains that the slide out hides content from the page that I actually wanted to read. By all means have previous/next navigation, but don't have it so intrusive. When the close button doesn't work properly, I have to resort to scrolling the page so that what I'm reading is above the slide out bar. Honestly, what were you lot thinking?

Don't get me wrong, I understand that you're still getting to grips with the new platform and I don't mind design changes if they're well thought out, but the slide out naviagtion is a mistake. Please move it out of the way.

Despite the explaination the fact still remains the irritarion is too great. Next job is to remove from favourites list & visit other sites.

@colin267 We can't replicate that problem on any of the iPads of varying vintages and types. It works fine on all of them

@ Tony Farrelly - not content with the annoying 'pop-up' you still haven't fixed the 3 horizontal bars (left hand side of title bar) on the mobile version, for all mobile devices. Works OK on my phone but hasn't worked on my iPad from day 1 of the change. It's becoming increasingly bl**dy annoying to keep having to scroll down to the bottom of the home page to access what should be available under the 3 bars!

Sort it out . . . . . . . please.

Quote:

There are a number of reasons for that. First, by any of the standard measures of web success it's worked,

If by that you mean its worked because people are clicking through it, well, no, they aren't.  The clicks are going through I suspect mostly because the 'close' icon detection is totally off and half of the close icon being clicked leads to the article being loaded (rather than closing the popup).

You don't ned a pop-up for previous/next navigation at all, you can just put a static link at the top and bottom of stories.  Far easier, far less prone to error, and far cleaner.

I'm sick of the pop up/ slide out. The close button doesn't work all the time and it's too close to the  next article . I've lost track of the number of timesaver actually clicked on that and gone to where I don't want to be.

Thumbs down on the pop-up, but thumbs up on no more duplicated article headline links of the previous web design layout.

Sorry you don't like the slide out next/previous tab - we are going to change the design to see if we can make it less intrusive when viewed in the desktop version of the site (it's a static block on mobile or tablet), and to change the way it behaves so that it slides back in when you scroll past it and/or after a certain amount of time. Hopefully that won't take too long.

Doubt we'll be getting rid of it though because the reason we put it in in the first place was long time users asked us for next/previous navigation - what we will do is to keep changing it until we get it right. 

Sorry you don't like the changes to the design of the site as a whole mithrasm. I don't know whether it's any consolation but we will be re-introducing many of the features we had to take out when we moved platform, but we can't change back.

There are a number of reasons for that. First, by any of the standard measures of web success it's worked, and second we didn't have any choice about changing it anyway. Our old platform was as near as damn it obsolete and increasingly buggy - not a good place to be when you've got a site with a fair amount of custom coding in it. The old site was also not at all mobile friendly at a time when the people who use it were doing so increasingly via mobiles - something that both users and Google were taking an increasingly dim view of. So even without our platform issues we'd have had to change to a more stripped down, fully responsive design.

Now that we're free of the old platform we're going back to the approach we took in the early years of road.cc – one of continuously evolving the design of the site to try to make it better. Back in the day the way road.cc looked used to change often, some bits changed very often.

What didn't change then and hasn't changed since is our approach to news, reviews, blogs, and features that remains a constant.

Road.cc doesn't seem to think I'm it's core reader.

It's obvious to me why all the recent changes are detrimental.  It's obvious why they should all be got rid of.

Road.cc must see this as well and have their own reasons why they persist in spoiling a previously good site.

Road.cc doesn't seem to think I'm it's core reader.

It's obvious to me why all the recent changes are detrimental.  It's obvious why they should all be got rid of.

Road.cc must see this as well and have their own reasons why they persist in spoiling a previously good site.

Yep, please get rid of it.

There

is

a

solution.

Apparently

Firefox

has

an

add

on

called

JS

Quick

(or

switch),

but

it

hasn't

worked

for

me.

Agree it's annoying. It's worse because the clickable area for the close control is small, and if you miss it you get taken to the linked page. Also it seems to move five or ten pixels just after it loads, which makes it even harder to hit the close accurately.

Please stop it. It's really poor design and will just put people off using the site. I know it's already putting me off

Yes, it's very annoying. Half the time, the close button doesn't even work properly. Whoever thought this would be good user interface design needs to rethink.

If the side bar thing hadn't been obscuring it, you'd have seen that there is already a thread complaining about the side bar thing.

Yes.  Get rid of it.  Annoying and not useful.