Great, just great

We've redesigned the logged-in homepage to bring you the stuff you want to read, all in one place.

At the top of your screen, you'll find an area that features new information from your neighborhood. Click through the links to browse posts, comments, media and updates. You can also click on "Find Friends" to see who's already on Vox, as well as send out invites to your friends who you'd like to join. Below those links, you'll find editorial sections highlighting some of the great posts on Vox. The Question of the Day is now in the right-hand column above the "Recently favorited" module. We hope that the new homepage will allow you to not only get a quick glance of what your neighbors are up to, but will also help you discover new people and content.

There's something that I don't understand about Vox, and never have-- the whole design strategy of the product seems to be to make it harder to consume what you want to read.  I completely and utterly do not understand why the design team does this, but it's very consistent.  If it's something you'll do often, like keeping up with your stuff, you have to click multiple times to do it.  It's lunacy.

My pattern for keeping up with Vox was very simple-- go to the homepage so I can take a quick glance at the QOTD and VoxHunt, and do a quick visual scan for new comments and new posts.  Assuming there are new posts, click the neighborhood link and read backwards until I run out of new content, which usually happens in one page.  Voila! I have clicked twice and very efficiently read everything on the site that I was interested in.

"...to bring you the stuff you want to read, all in one place."  Umm, no.   Yesterday I could look at the homepage and see the things that I want to see-- posts from my neighborhood and comments-- all in one place.  Now they're in two places, which is more than one.  I'm pretty sure that I had recent media as well, though I don't really care-- if it matters, it'll show up in a post.  No more!  Now I have to click to get comments, and then click back to get posts.  Try as I might, I'm really not sure how making me do more work to see the stuff I want to read is an improvement.

The question of the day seems to have moved so low on the page that I'll never see it.  It's right there above the completely empty recently favorited module.  Cool!  I guess I won't be answering it much, and I'll see fewer responses because other people won't scroll down either.

On the plus side... that godawful Facebook newsfeed clone seems to have disappeared.  I no longer have homepage real estate dedicated to who changed their theme today.  Hallelujah!

And while I'm at it, one of my favorite gripes... why is there still no good way to consume groups?  It's been over a year since they were launched, and they're still nearly invisible to me.  I want to use the groups here, I really do, but I'm entirely unwilling to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to do so.  I either have to go to each individual group and read it, or go to VoxWatch and then click on every single message.  Why can't I get a complete rollup?  I don't want to have to click ten times in order to read ten messages-- I want to click once, just like my neighborhood page.

Many years ago I learned that if you want people to hear your message, you should make it as easy as possible for them to do so.  The more you make people work, the less of an audience you get.

The cynic in me thinks 6A wants to make me click more because then they get more pageviews and therefore more ad revenue.  It's plausible, but I honestly don't think it's the answer.  I think that the people designing the interactions are so focused on different ways to slice and dice the navigation that they don't really think about how people want to consume the site.  Maybe there's yet another answer... who knows?

Oh wow... I just noticed that VoxWatch seems to have gone away completely, or at least I couldn't find it in a quick search.  Now groups will be even harder to read than they were before.