I’ve been a customer of SparkFun for quite some time, and a visitor to the site long before that. I remember back in the days when Nathan was still in school, all the different variations of the “dark blue” site (back when you could download a PDF of all the product pages, which was actually very handy).
I just want to add my name to the list of those who find the new layout a big step backward from the previous one. I’ve tried for a few weeks now to get used to the new appearance, but I find it frustrating for a number of reasons:
Font legibility has decreased dramatically. For some reason it’s just harder to read the product descriptions.
The new column on the right seems mostly to be a bolt-on. I guess that getting used to reading various blogs where that right hand-column is filled with ads has pretty effectively trained me to ignore content in that area. It actually took me a while to figure out where the shopping cart link was. It’s previous location seemed far more intuitive. It also seems as if the space used by this third column necessitated several of the changes that make the site more difficult to use.
Clicking on the heading for a section on the left no longer simply opens the sub sections on the left but now loads a list of everything in the major section… This is quite annoying compared to the previous behavior. Doing that for the “Development tools” sections results in a long wait for the page to load, and chances are good that I’m NOT interested in looking through the entire list of all 220 Dev Tools.
There are various subtle changes, like the product section listing being two line instead of one. It now takes a conscious effort to find the red/yellow/green dot that indicates whether an item is in stock, where before it was all on one line, far more amicable to skimming. I’m pretty sure this is a usability issue beyond simply being used to the older appearance.
I won’t repeat the numerous other observations of problems with the new design that have already been covered by others in this thread, except to say that I agree with most of them.
While I will admit that the old design may not have been as cosmetically appealing to some at first glance, it was much more usable. It seems that someone’s idea for the aesthetic appearance of the site has trumped usability issues. Most unfortunate. I also agree with the previous commenter that says the site looks more “generic” now, which I don’t consider a good thing.
If the idea of the latest design is to discourage me from perusing the site to look for something to buy, then the latest changes are working. I’m not saying the to be mean or to act like a troll: Its simply harder for me to “window-shop” the SparkFun site now.
Sorry for the rambling rant. Just my $0.02.