The new NHL website

A lot of sites upgrade to this minimalist style design, some succeeds and some don't. It is very modern and it is easy to look at. I guess it depends on what the site has to offer. If it’s for content creation like photo/video sharing or a blog site like Medium, then it’s probably fine. But if your website shares information then it has to present the information in an efficient way — that is, without extra clicks to a new page or without the need to scroll down a really long page.

The problem with minimalist sites are you often have to minimized — for the lack of a better term — the clutter with the use of huge empty spaces. It could also ease the load when viewing a full webpage from a mobile device. However, there’s a thin line between an elegant website to a complete abomination.

Take a look at the new NHL website:

(Keep in mind, I’m a hockey fan not a professional designer so this is from a hockey fan’s point of view, just trying to be professional about this lol)

Let’s take a look at the front page:

(Note: I’m using a 13" Macbook pro and I’ve stretched the window so that it feels like it’s in full screen mode, ignore the black line at the bottom of the images, that’s how far a window will stretch to in default.)

As you can see the website fills the whole screen, but there is a lot of space filled with nothing that could’ve been cut by 50% or more to be replaced by more information. The menu could be moved in between the NHL logo and the search + log in icons. Basically fill in the spaces with useful stuff.

This is how I imagine it should look like… or at least close to this. The only changes are — aside from the fictious and mostly enraging headlines — the real estate of blank spaces is cut back but the basic idea of minimalism is still there. As you can see the size of the page is still the same but there are far more information when you first load the page. Oh, the team list on top replaced the tab bar, but you can still cut the extra space from the game scores below it.

As a reference, here is the old header.

Now let’s take a look at the actual News list is on the right with so much dead space and the actual article on the right.

Functionality wise, the News page is actual cool. Click on a News headline on the left and it will scroll down to where it is located without loading another page. Design wise, it’s a barren sea of words and empty spaces. It would’ve been great if the News list on the left didn’t take a huge chunk of the screen.

Apart from that, this is my favourite part of the site but it’s because of the funcionality of the page. The downside of the functionality is that when you’re at the bottom of the page and you want to look at the header for whatever reason, you have to scroll all the way back up since the page is just a string of numerous pre loaded news articles — meaning even if you didn’t click an article it still loads all the article for you. You know, just in case you want to read all of it.

The work around for this is to scroll to the very top part of the headlines list then click the very first article, it will auto scroll you up the top of the articles and then scroll again ONE. LAST. TIME. to get to the header.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Now it gets real. This is the most infuriating thing of all things infuriating about this site.

So… I’m just speechless… You click the preview of a match up and this is what you get. You get the headline on top but you know where the article is? Click the link to load another page to actually read the article. Oh, what’s the headlines for? I don’t know, maybe it’s for the stat below because that make sense, right?

Instead of getting a list of news on the left, what you have is just one headline which takes up the same amount of space as the news list so you are only left with the actual article cramped on the right section of the page.

It feels like the website is designed to be loaded on a mobile device. There’s something about minimalism that is elegant, simple, and attractive. But the style mixed with functionality is harder to achieve than it actually looks.

Here’s what Gary Bettman thinks.

People are historically resistant to change, and you’ve gotta learn a different navigation pattern. If you’ve been used to something for the last six years, and we change it up, no matter how good it looks, you’re not comfortable with exactly what you’re doing until you play with it a little bit.

I’m done.

I’m sorry this “article” isn’t up to standards. I’m not a writer, I tried my best. :)