It Just Keeps Scrolling -- Feedback Thread

Some of you may have noticed a small change in the way you read news and articles (okay, so it's not that small). We've rolled out a new interface for mass article consumption, Seamless Content.

Put simply, Seamless Content lets move directly from one story into the next without having to load a new page or otherwise do anything more than scroll, making it easier for them to read more of our content.

This is just the first version of this, and there is still plenty of more for us to iterate on to improve it, such as additional animations and fun factor in the strip at the bottom of the page, a refined ad mix on each page, and a better optimized commenting experience.

If you have any feedback or questions about this, please reach out. And as always, when posting insight please be mindful of GameSpot's Golden Rule.

My big concerns are three-fold:

1) the screen is rather cluttered as it is right now. Having the vertical dimension, along with that cross-bar on the bottom, plus the ads... it's just hard to take it all in. It's not clear what everything does?

2) the main page has an important benefit: you can see most of the possible things to read laid out before you, and you can just click on what interests you. But in the scrolling feed, you have no idea what is coming next. So you can scroll through... and scroll through... but honestly the much stronger impulse for me is to go back to the main page and then navigate back down into an article of interest with a simple click. What if there's a bunch of stuff in a row in the scroll feed that I don't want to read, and I get bored of scrolling before I get to something I would have actually been interested in? -with this fear in mind, again, my impulse is to simply go back out to the main page and scan for stuff of interest

3) Is there a way to re-collapse the comments after you've opened them? If it's a full page of comments I feel like it deters scrolling down to the next article because you've just made the scrolling that much longer - again another factor driving me back towards the main page.

It's not that the continuous "newsfeed" style is itself off-putting. But ways of streamlining to encourage me to stay in that format are needed.

To help with point #2, for example, you could have an overview pane on one side of the screen showing a vertical list of, say, 10 articles. As you scroll down, the overview lists scrolls as well to keep the 10 articles surrounding your current "position" in the stream up-to-date. A square box could highlight the one you are currently on. This allows the reader to 1) see where they are in the bigger picture of the stream, 2) bypass the need to go back to the main page for an overview of what other content is on the site, and 3) could give them an opportunity to click on something else in the overview pane to quick-navigate instead of scrolling through irrelevant articles.

Seamless content is okay, however the page layout is not...I never liked layouts that don't preserve some kind of consistency...

You have the hub/listing pages, like news or the home page, that have a main content/right sidebar layout, and then the articles themselves have a completely different one...so my main grip is with the bottom slider, which makes the page look cluttered, especially on 768px monitors...

If you could get rid of that and just respect the main content/right sidebar layout, then it would be really really good...you could put the bottom slider in the right, and make it sticky like the menu and it would remove the cluttered feel...plus there's too much space in the left and right sidebars, so that's not good either IMO

PS: I think a major drawback for seamless content is the comment system...sometimes the comments are the main traffic generator here, and I don't know how the refreshing will work for example( if ever), especially now that you have a pager in the bottom...I think seamless comments > seamless content

The problem is that continuous scrolling is not how people digest content like this. This sort of content presentation only works for top-level, quickly digested bits like titles and synopses (see Mashable's website for an example of this). For actual articles, there is no reason to show more than one article at a time, as other articles are going to be unrelated or not interesting for the reader.

For me, my workflow is to go into the news section, spawn off new tabs for the 5 or so articles that interest me and move on. I'm not going to read other articles below, even if it is one that I already opened in a new tab, because I am never going to look past the comments section. I'm probably not the only one who goes into articles just for the comments too, which is now more irritating as those don't auto-load now.

I agree with Xantufrog, it looked too cluttered for me. Especially that I zoom-in the page a bit when reading on gamespot (ctrl&+ on firefox) to make the text bigger.

And I too just visit the home page first, see what I am interested in, and open it in a new tab.

One way I can think this would be useful though, if they are all articles about the same game/subject, or for E3 announcements and articles if I decided to catch up on everything.

Apprecitae you trying to improve the website :)

I greatly dislike the new system...

What I usually do is look on the front page and open all the articles I want to read on new tabs, but with the new system it feels so cluttered and I dont want to read all the articles, just the ones I picked from the main page. I have to open up the comments too, its so bad I feel like i am on a mobile site.

Bring back the old system

I have been a long time reader of gamespot and made an account here as I wanted to give feedback on this change.

1) As others have already said, most of us are only clicking on and reading the articles we want in new tabs. I wouldn't scroll through the others. Lots of other news sites are also using this same system now, we are just loading useless content.

2) With the article list bar across the bottom of the screen on my laptop (15" 720p) its like im peering through a letterbox at the content.

3) I like to see the comments and now I have to click at the bottom of every page to read them. Id rather have seamless comments than seamless content.

Interestingly im seeing the old system again now I have an account, please leave us this option.

Oh, yes, the fun factor is through the roof for sure. If only I could express my joy with an emoticon.