This looks like it was designed by someone new to web design...so bland and such weak use of space. The gradients and shadows are oddly used as well. This just comes off as a rough prototype put together over a weekend, not a year-in-the-making-23-person-team real product.
They should really have a UI/UX expert come take a stab at a redesign of this. Hell, throw it up on Dribbble.
I had the same feeling. I'm really surprised they didn't migrate accounts over. They clearly didn't start out with a fresh database entirely as they have a huge list of companies already. It's kind of off putting to the people who contributed data to them the first time.
Hmmmm... at first I felt I have to complain, then I remind myself that new designs mostly are very controversial because humans on average don't like changes that require them to adapt to a new usability pattern. So maybe I need some time to adapt.
Here is my first opinion: The new page looks a lot more fancy and modern, but the company detail pages just waste a lot of space. The older version wasn't that pretty, but it had all necessary informations on one page without much scrolling. Now I need to scroll a lot, which is a thing that I really don't like. Might be better on tablets, thou.
I had a detailed interview with Crunchbase president Matt Kaufman a few months ago.
IMHO Matt and his team are smart, focused, on-target, and have very good ideas about improving Crunchbase. Our discussion ranged from the long-term big picture to the nitty-gritty tech needs, and all of it impressed me as solid, worthwhile, and brimming with interesting opportunities.
(I don't have any affiliation with Crunchbase, and I don't get anything for recommending them.)
I agree. CrunchBase 1.0 was rough around the edges but I think it was more usable than this.
I wonder if this isn't intentional. My understanding is that there are a number of companies that license CrunchBase data for their own paid services. From what I have seen, some of these services rely heavily if not exclusively on CrunchBase data. A more usable CrunchBase would certainly not benefit them.
So the focal point is the search for companies, but no category search. When you type a word and try to scroll the results it automatically puts whatever I hovered over in the search bar. Why!? Implement amazon menu delay
trending is now only 5 companies
the slider has a fixed height, which cuts off the bottom text. dots to offer a preview what is next
who is going to swipe 3 times to read the latest news each time.
The landing page looks like you are trying to sell it, than let people use it. Look at angelist for inspiration https://angel.co/companies
Seems like a step back from the old design? Not a great browsing experience and for company pages, there is not very much information above the fold anymore.
The comments complaining about the paging circles on the front page seem to have missed the big arrows on either side. Seems to be a rather standard pager from where I'm sitting. That said, layout on the front page for said pager is still kinda odd, particularly when the browser window is short -- the pager elements roll into the footer of the page and text content is awkwardly cut off. Overall though, I appreciate the ascetic aesthetic. I'm rather aggressive with blocking ads, so perhaps the volumes of negative space on the right side of the page are normally full, but the spacing around elements in their list boxes is well balanced and makes it all quite easy to skim.
I didn't use Crunchbase 1.x much and don't really have an opinion on whether this is an improvement. Judged on its own, I think there's a lot here that makes accessing and using the company and person profiles simple and straight-forward.
Some of it's OK. The old company pages were busy, but required very flew clicks. Now, it seems as if everything is buried behind yet another 'More' link.
I was about to write a list of feedback, but there was so much that I don't like that I couldn't continue. My best advice is either you make the site faster, or consider using more javascript (i.e why do I need to load a whole bloat of HTML and rerun all the same javascript when I click "see more" on the funding rounds ?)
Wondering how much of http://Crunchinator.com we're going to have to recode. The only people they have advance API access to were the paying customers.
Hopefully it's not too much work, but then, we don't have 25 people to throw on rearchitecting for a year.
Just saw it. I like the landing page but the company page seems to be a bit off. One thing I did like in the older version is there was a table with key dates from when the company was founded, VC round, ect.. (also when key people were hired) -- a temporal progression of a company.
"During development and planning, our web analytics showed that relatively few people used this feature, but clearly we neglected to realize how much it was used by some of our most active users."
what!? how did they miss that. Why bother having analytics then.
They should really have a UI/UX expert come take a stab at a redesign of this. Hell, throw it up on Dribbble.