No, to be fair, I haven't. It's just tiresome how every single design change by any large website generates comments exactly like this.
As somebody that has done a fair amount of usability testing, that much of why people think redesigns are unusable are simply because they were used to the old version and haven't yet spent much time with the new version. But if you show the new design and the old design to somebody that has used neither, they frequently prefer the new design. And over time, everybody kind of likes (or at least gets used to) the new design.
That doesn't mean that all redesigns are necessarily good, or even that redesigns are necessary, but the kneejerk "it's unusable!!!!!" is so cliched.
In this case "unusable" is fully justified, it means that the entire (and, I suppose, important) class of use cases had been eliminated: it does not work offline. And the system is designed in such a way that there is no hope it'll ever be fixed.
I doubt they did any proper UX testing at all, they did not collect user stories, they did not consider all the use cases. They just hired a bunch of hipsters eager to add as many buzzwords as possible to their CVs.
Obviously the tone wouldn't do at HN, but this Reddit post in /r/unitedkingdom mentions a lot of the problems with the new mobile site and the Android app.
>Jackal___ 121 points 1 day ago
>Their new Android app is very very slow to load the news and uses a fuck load of background data.
>Quagers 72 points 1 day ago
>Also it doesn't download the stories when you hit refresh, just the headlines and then downloads the story when you click the headline. Completely bloody useless on the tube!
