Does anybody else think that the rows for each thread on the discussions page are really tall? Compared to how it used to be you can see very few threads on a single screen =/ (or am I the only person bothered by this?)
They are, BUT it's a trade off between that and not having clear separation between posts. I figured it looks about right on a 1920x1080 screen, but I'm probably going to be sending an update to @Fengol at some stage - I'll have a look and see if I can shave a few pixels off each item and darken the shadows around each item - they're a bit soft at the moment.
EDIT: I see @Tuism has is own ideas as well, okay lets see how it looks. I feel if you shrink the avatars too much, then it just becomes a wall of text with no colour to break it all up...
I was going to do it like they did with the avatars on the side, but when you take the avatars out of the main flow of text the responses loose a bit of their impact to me - Having your eye forced to read the name of the person commenting BEFORE you read their comment allows you to interpret their response better - ie. if I see @Fengol's posts, I automatically imagine a whiney voice while reading his comments XD
@RickyGC the notification are there, they are just in a super pale yellow, which I'm finding difficult to spot. My only request is that this notification be changed to a more prominent colour, at the moment it is really difficult to spot
@RickyGC the notification are there, they are just in a super pale yellow, which I'm finding difficult to spot. My only request is that this notification be changed to a more prominent colour, at the moment it is really difficult to spot
I softened their impact so as not to override the category colours, but maybe it's better if they are prominent.
@Nitrogen I think more prominent is better. the whole point of the notification is so that you can quickly spot where there are updates, at the moment I'm almost having to squint to see them, which (to my mind at least) is a problem...
Are you guys finding the "1 NEW" things hard to spot? I think they're ok, but ok, we can just make them red like any other notification things, though I don't think it's necessary. You will learn to read this yellow colour really quickly, because it's quite obvious over all other colours on the screen, besides the red in the logo.
I do think the category colours aren't the most important thing - they should be noticible when you do want to notice them (like I'm skimming for projects or skimming only comp entries), but generally them being pale is great.
Cool, I'll change them back - I just dont have a chance to catch up with *everything* on the front page, so there ends up being a lot of "new" tags everywhere for me.
Hmm, I see now that posting a lot of short replies does make the page rediculously long... @Tuism - your idea has merit, but I love how the current white boxes are like a large content area that's been sliced up. I'll have a think about it and see if I can come up with a compromise between the two.
Please make the new things red...I'm having a lot of trouble to spot it. :)
@Tuism, breaking the posts into user/post made me think there were 8 different posts in that mockup. Would it be possible to break it up by different colors? So make a post grey background then white background...etc instead of using spacing?
@Rigormortis if you thought there were 8 posts, did you start reading the grey stuff too? Did you then very quickly realise they were the names of people? Did you then realise you could skip over them really easily and quickly? That's the point :P
The whole thing about the design I made is that when I read down from one thing to another, I want to quickly find an anchor and get going, and because right now, I'm just about forced to read the username and icon before I can find the actual content, it makes reading the content harder.
When reading a big chunk of text, you easily float from one paragraph to the next. Reading a conversation should have the same effect - you shouldn't need to stop, find the start of the next piece of conversation, continue. The text is harder to find in this arrangement.
BTW Can we get a "back to top" button right at the bottom, next to the pagination (< 1 2 3 >) perhaps? Sometimes I just wanna go back to discussions or jump to another section like inbox or whatever. And I either have to use mousewheel or use scrollbar, which is irritating.
Does anybody else think that the rows for each thread on the discussions page are really tall? Compared to how it used to be you can see very few threads on a single screen =/ (or am I the only person bothered by this?)
Yeah, I noticed that too.
The regular font also got a bit smaller so posts are harder to read - what's with that? At least writing posts have the same size text ;)
I'm also still getting blue links in posts and the header shadow intersects the Dashboard, Discussions, etc. links and neatly halves the search box. Firefox, latest. Have CTRL F5'd a ton.
The regular font also got a bit smaller so posts are harder to read - what's with that? At least writing posts have the same size text ;)
I'm also still getting blue links in posts and the header shadow intersects the Dashboard, Discussions, etc. links and neatly halves the search box. Firefox, latest. Have CTRL F5'd a ton.
Ah, thanks for catching that - I totally forgot I changed it. No wonder it was difficult to read the posts. In fact, with the font the old size, I think the spacing between the posts becomes less of an issue.
Blue links in posts are normal - but the header shadow thing is very weird - could you attach a screenshot?
Now I feel bad for making post that contains only complaints...I also think it looks really perdy <3
@Nitrogen@dislekcia Uhm, I think I'm being misunderstood here. I'm not referring to the different posts within a thread (that doesn't bother me), I'm referring to the vertical space allocated to each thread on the discussions page. To illustrate:
I'm on 1920x1080 and whereas I used to be able to easily see most of the active threads in one screen, I now most certainly cannot. Also for me it's now harder/more straining to just read over all the thread titles from top to bottom.
Edit: I would imagine we're going to want/need a new set of emoticons sometime soon as well, given the colour change? Competition F? :P
I'm going to throw a second to what @D3zmodos has said.
While I like the additional info presented on the front page (who created the thread, last comment posted. I think right aligning the details for the last comment posted would help disseminate the information.
Also some of the tags, ("Questions and Answers", and "Jobs and Portfolios") are far larger than others which is breaking the left align for the info.
And ye a few pixels off the topic heading would be good, but only if the other stuff can be sorted, otherwise there might be some visual clutter.
I cant control the order of the additional info under each post without asking Fengol to modify the html - but it's a start. I made the discussions headings darker and the category tag text lighter to help make it easier to read. I've also tweaked the spacings throughout the site. The discussions are now closer together, the thread comments are now bigger, with less padding.
@RickyGC the notification are there, they are just in a super pale yellow, which I'm finding difficult to spot. My only request is that this notification be changed to a more prominent colour, at the moment it is really difficult to spot
No on my iPhone, it was there super early this morning, but since the update it is totally gone.
What @Karuji said, not quite as thin as it used to be I think, but it looks good and anyways I doubt you could make it any smaller without making it look bad (though if you can I won't stop you :P)
Edit: Err, while I'm at it (what with talk of rearranging things), is anybody else getting confused by the threads first naming the original poster and then the last poster? I keep seeing a name under the thread title and then being confused when I see no post by them at the end =/
@D3zmodos the standard is OP then last post. Confusion is probably due to seeing a name and assuming that that was the last post (aka how it used to be). Should normalize in your head in a week or so ;)
It really is a lot of information to have for each discussion and the titles are constantly drowned out by the dearth of other info. So I shrunk the font size of all the other info - it's super teeny now, but seems readable enough for me?
Yeah I like the new discussions, I was also playing with sizing and padding of the discussion (in Chrome) page cos it seemed quite spread thin. I do like the new colours and sizing. Only thing is the big black bookmarks and discussion buttons are stuck together :P
I don't mind the extra big labels cos there's no easier way to change them (I'd make Questions and Answers straight up "Q&A") (and why Jobs and Portfolio... They're complete opposite ends. Jobs should do. Portfolio should go with Projects), and there're only a few that does that.
The thread view - what's changed there? I still think we need better separation between user name and content of each post to make reading the whole thing easier :)
@Tuism I think Jobs and portfolio go together since Jobs is looking to hire, and portfolio is looking to be hired. Maybe one of our resident writers *cough* @Bensonance@WelshPixie *cough* can come up with a more eloquent and concise term.
But ye Question and Answers is easily understood at Q&A
Okay, seriously, wish I'd climbed on sooner 'cos I'm with @D3zmodos on his core point -- entries on the discussions (and within threads) used to take up *far* less vertical real estate and it's going to hit people with smaller screens really hard. Please don't dismiss his concerns, 1000+ y pixels is a luxury a lot of us don't have.
I am, however, liking the new colours and work a lot more. I just hope that we don't get laissez-faire with space because the work is being done on upper-bounds monitors. :P
Just to add something to @Nandrew and @D3zmodos MGSA already has a high competition for game attention. By allowing fewer posts in a viewable screen at a given time there will likely be less attention given to the games posted. Even with a 1080 monitor I find keeping track of which threads to look at to be more difficult.
Let us not forget that the purpose of a forum is to easy the conveyance of information. If the visual overhaul does not enable a clearer and easier flow of information than it is ultimately wrong.
To be clear this is not to say that the redesign is wrong, but perhaps we have been evaluating the priority of things from the wrong angle and we need to (urgh I hate to say this) shift the paradigm of how we look at the forum UI changes.
@Karuji but we have "projects" already, which is people putting their work up. Projects and portfolio should be able to consolidate easily while jobs offered/seeking should be its thing.
(i feel like the stickied annoucements being so many also contributes to the height thing. We don't really have an alternate to that yet, but for exampel we should edit the E: Summary into the E: post's first post and save one line at least)
And yeah shorter would be better for the shorter monitors... the current padding is: 7px 13px 12px Making it 5px 5px 5px would take the height down to:
@Nandrew and @Karuji - I've had a lot of trouble trying to get the discussions page to be more readable. Adding padding between items is one way of making things more readable. It's okay but I agree there's room for improvement.
Okay so I took a look at the old design (people are so opposed to change :P) and relooked at my design. Does this look better? It's extremely close now, but may just be a better solution overall. Obviously there's still tweaking that should be done this is a 5 minute mockup.
@Karuji but we have "projects" already, which is people putting their work up. Projects and portfolio should be able to consolidate easily while jobs offered/seeking should be its thing.
@Tuism I kinda feel like we are saying the same thing here ;) though I might be mistaken: so if you could clarify it would be cool. Since I was asking for a renaming of the section so that would be concise and clear.
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@Nitrogen I'm going out on a limb and guessing that is a screen cap on a 1920x1080 resolution screen?
Since currently I am getting 11.5 threads viewable at a time, and you are getting 14 which is a good improvement, and I don't really see how things are less readable on that page.
@Nitrogen I'm going out on a limb and guessing that is a screen cap on a 1920x1080 resolution screen?
Since currently I am getting 11.5 threads viewable at a time, and you are getting 14 which is a good improvement, and I don't really see how things are less readable on that page.
Readability is not just about the amount of text you can shove on a page - it's also got to do with separating separate interests and delineating clearly between them. That said, I think this new tighter design is an improvement. If the general opinion is favourable, I'll send it off to Fengol.
@Nitrogen I know that readability, and how much text one can fit on the page aren't the same thing (In fact could be said to be opposites since the more text on the page: the hard it is to read)
What I was trying to say is that there should be a balance between the amount of text visible and the readability of that text. And with the design you just posted I felt that there was more text being presented without a drop in the readability of that text.
I agree that more padded discussions do a good job of making *everything* more readable, but I still believe that there are tiers of importance in the information presented, and only the most vital bits of info need that maximum readability.
To me, this info would be the discussion titles and New Post notifications, both of which remain exceptionally clear when taken at-a-glance in the more compressed design. Heck, even the tiny thumbnail double generated at the bottom of your post is telling me where the thread titles are and which ones warrant attention, which I take as a good sign.
@Nitrogen what's changed there? Basically the spacing, so like the padding change I put up the post before? Anything else? In any case I think it's fine, good to go :)
Pretty much just the padding, and I just lowered the title font by 1 point, and very subtly altered the letter spacing.
Just wondering if it would be possible to get the icons on the home page to be made a little nicer? (no offense meant to whomever designed them in the first place - but always room for improvement!)
I made them, and they were made that way to fit with the overall style of MGSA (the logo) - chunky red pixels. Saying to make them nicer is like saying mario should have more polygons :)
Sure there could always be improvements if anyone feels like another redesign redesign... But I don't think now is that time.
Well, as raised a while ago, that pixel image of Steve Jobs that looks spookily like @elyaradine is actually copyrighted. So that at least needs to change at some stage.
Comments
EDIT: I see @Tuism has is own ideas as well, okay lets see how it looks. I feel if you shrink the avatars too much, then it just becomes a wall of text with no colour to break it all up...
http://try.discourse.org/t/most-important-sci-fi-movie-of-the-2000-s/27
I was going to do it like they did with the avatars on the side, but when you take the avatars out of the main flow of text the responses loose a bit of their impact to me - Having your eye forced to read the name of the person commenting BEFORE you read their comment allows you to interpret their response better - ie. if I see @Fengol's posts, I automatically imagine a whiney voice while reading his comments XD
See it's not about the size of things, breaking things up can depend on the rhythm and other design things :P
Otherwise you've done a great job :)
I do think the category colours aren't the most important thing - they should be noticible when you do want to notice them (like I'm skimming for projects or skimming only comp entries), but generally them being pale is great.
@Tuism - your idea has merit, but I love how the current white boxes are like a large content area that's been sliced up. I'll have a think about it and see if I can come up with a compromise between the two.
@Tuism, breaking the posts into user/post made me think there were 8 different posts in that mockup. Would it be possible to break it up by different colors? So make a post grey background then white background...etc instead of using spacing?
The whole thing about the design I made is that when I read down from one thing to another, I want to quickly find an anchor and get going, and because right now, I'm just about forced to read the username and icon before I can find the actual content, it makes reading the content harder.
When reading a big chunk of text, you easily float from one paragraph to the next. Reading a conversation should have the same effect - you shouldn't need to stop, find the start of the next piece of conversation, continue. The text is harder to find in this arrangement.
BTW Can we get a "back to top" button right at the bottom, next to the pagination (< 1 2 3 >) perhaps? Sometimes I just wanna go back to discussions or jump to another section like inbox or whatever. And I either have to use mousewheel or use scrollbar, which is irritating.
The regular font also got a bit smaller so posts are harder to read - what's with that? At least writing posts have the same size text ;)
I'm also still getting blue links in posts and the header shadow intersects the Dashboard, Discussions, etc. links and neatly halves the search box. Firefox, latest. Have CTRL F5'd a ton.
Blue links in posts are normal - but the header shadow thing is very weird - could you attach a screenshot?
@Nitrogen @dislekcia Uhm, I think I'm being misunderstood here. I'm not referring to the different posts within a thread (that doesn't bother me), I'm referring to the vertical space allocated to each thread on the discussions page. To illustrate:
I'm on 1920x1080 and whereas I used to be able to easily see most of the active threads in one screen, I now most certainly cannot. Also for me it's now harder/more straining to just read over all the thread titles from top to bottom.
Edit: I would imagine we're going to want/need a new set of emoticons sometime soon as well, given the colour change? Competition F? :P
While I like the additional info presented on the front page (who created the thread, last comment posted. I think right aligning the details for the last comment posted would help disseminate the information.
Also some of the tags, ("Questions and Answers", and "Jobs and Portfolios") are far larger than others which is breaking the left align for the info.
And ye a few pixels off the topic heading would be good, but only if the other stuff can be sorted, otherwise there might be some visual clutter.
http://nitrogenlab.com/files/makegamessa/discussions.html
http://nitrogenlab.com/files/makegamessa/thread.html
I cant control the order of the additional info under each post without asking Fengol to modify the html - but it's a start.
I made the discussions headings darker and the category tag text lighter to help make it easier to read.
I've also tweaked the spacings throughout the site. The discussions are now closer together, the thread comments are now bigger, with less padding.
Edit: Err, while I'm at it (what with talk of rearranging things), is anybody else getting confused by the threads first naming the original poster and then the last poster? I keep seeing a name under the thread title and then being confused when I see no post by them at the end =/
http://nitrogenlab.com/files/makegamessa/discussions.html
It really is a lot of information to have for each discussion and the titles are constantly drowned out by the dearth of other info.
So I shrunk the font size of all the other info - it's super teeny now, but seems readable enough for me?
I don't mind the extra big labels cos there's no easier way to change them (I'd make Questions and Answers straight up "Q&A") (and why Jobs and Portfolio... They're complete opposite ends. Jobs should do. Portfolio should go with Projects), and there're only a few that does that.
The thread view - what's changed there? I still think we need better separation between user name and content of each post to make reading the whole thing easier :)
But ye Question and Answers is easily understood at Q&A
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@Nitrogen I fully <3 that discussion page.
I am, however, liking the new colours and work a lot more. I just hope that we don't get laissez-faire with space because the work is being done on upper-bounds monitors. :P
Let us not forget that the purpose of a forum is to easy the conveyance of information. If the visual overhaul does not enable a clearer and easier flow of information than it is ultimately wrong.
To be clear this is not to say that the redesign is wrong, but perhaps we have been evaluating the priority of things from the wrong angle and we need to (urgh I hate to say this) shift the paradigm of how we look at the forum UI changes.
(i feel like the stickied annoucements being so many also contributes to the height thing. We don't really have an alternate to that yet, but for exampel we should edit the E: Summary into the E: post's first post and save one line at least)
And yeah shorter would be better for the shorter monitors... the current padding is: 7px 13px 12px
Making it 5px 5px 5px would take the height down to:
Okay so I took a look at the old design (people are so opposed to change :P) and relooked at my design. Does this look better? It's extremely close now, but may just be a better solution overall. Obviously there's still tweaking that should be done this is a 5 minute mockup.
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@Nitrogen I'm going out on a limb and guessing that is a screen cap on a 1920x1080 resolution screen?
Since currently I am getting 11.5 threads viewable at a time, and you are getting 14 which is a good improvement, and I don't really see how things are less readable on that page.
What I was trying to say is that there should be a balance between the amount of text visible and the readability of that text. And with the design you just posted I felt that there was more text being presented without a drop in the readability of that text.
In any case I think it's fine, good to go :)
To me, this info would be the discussion titles and New Post notifications, both of which remain exceptionally clear when taken at-a-glance in the more compressed design. Heck, even the tiny thumbnail double generated at the bottom of your post is telling me where the thread titles are and which ones warrant attention, which I take as a good sign.
@All:
Live preview up here:
http://nitrogenlab.com/files/makegamessa/discussions.html
Sure there could always be improvements if anyone feels like another redesign redesign... But I don't think now is that time.