User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/We're updating the look of categories to improve your community's SEO/@comment-5558012-20181108175852

Now that I can actually see the new look myself, I'm not impressed. Visually, everything is too big and takes up too much room. Pages listed in three columns greatly reduced the amount of scrolling to browse, especially for viewing large categories. The little thumbnails, or any thumbnail for non-trending pages, isn't needed. It's clunky and doesn't add much value given the small size. The biggest reason I greatly disliked the Category Exhibition was due to thumbnails being displayed for every single page and here isn't much of an exception, even though it's less extreme. Very slow and takes away from the navigation aspect.

To navigation. Navigation is the primary purpose of a category page. The new layout fails at it, most notably because of its treatment of subcategories. Listing them separately is key to providing an efficient navigation tool, especially for categories that have a number of subcategories. If you don't know the name or even if the subcategories exist, category navigation, as a functioning tree, breaks down or is much slower than it should be. I'm very bothered by the fact that this new design if moving away from the important of showing a wiki's category tree given its organizational important.

I've put in hours of work on categories, creating a very strong category tree, and I'm very upset that this new design is the norm for the majority of readers.