Eww! What have you done to the layout?
I really don't like the new layout of the forum posts, please return them back to how they were!
This topic was created by Haku .
We are standardising design throughout the site - among other things this will help us in rolling out new features. When we have completed this we will consider redesign.
Drew
Points by other commentards about re-position of icons is acknowledged. We will have a think.
I'll bet its done to get more attention to the user forums ;)
Honestly, I've been a regular poster here for quite some time (I personally enjoy El Reg better than Slashdot), but I think this is the first time I was looking for a non-article thread like this ;)
I do like the way they now show the most favoured posts right below the article. I think that change makes sense. The new greyish look.. It's different, I can't say I'm enthusiastic about it, but I also don't dislike it.
The icons however are distracting. It's stupid. There is a good reason why most fora (SMF, PhpBB, vBulletin, etc.) default to showing the name and optional avatar of a writer to the left; because we read from left to right.
So skimming the posts would immediately give me a good idea as to what someone would say. A Microsoft article I liked or agreed with? Then I'd usually ignore the 'Fail' icons, easily spotted.
But now?
Is El Reg by any chance running the latest SharePoint or such, and are now inclined to using Microsoft's currently favoured "bare looks"?
Edit: I guess we'll know for sure once they remove all the colour from the icons ;)
I like lines around things. It makes it obvious what's a button or a single element, and what isn't. So for example, my imagination still paints the line you've taken away around the upvote/downvote buttons. I go to click on them, and the mouse pointer doesn't change to a button-pressing-pointy-finger, because I'm actually hovering over the number, which is now no longer part of the button. Fair enough, other than making it a smaller target it's no problem. But I just don't understand why? The old buttons were perfectly fine.
You've also taken away your red branding, and everything's going grey. Well your choice obviously. I don't personally go for it, but it's no skin off my rosy nose - and makes the forum no better or worse.
Putting the icons away on the right is just silly though. They should be the first thing you see. It's already difficult enough getting the hard-of-thinking to realise you're making a joke sometimes. But how come I have to press a button to get the icons when I'm posting?
Finally, small white writing on grey background? Really? Bold white on black yes please, but not thin white on grey. Please give us visual contrast. It makes stuff easier to find. Sod the designers, sod pretty, go for obvious. This site is aimed at techies who generally prefer function over form. But if you want design, you can't sacrifice function for form, it's either both, or if you must lose one, lose form.
Finally to play my trump card. The disabled card for me please. I'm visually impaired. I like big, bold and contrasty. It costs me less concentration and mental effort to sort it out. That's true for average sighted people too, so no bad thing. My reading glasses use 5x magnification, and so have to be focused in on a couple of words at a time. So I get positional cues from peripheral vision. To a lesser extent that's true of everyone, who use centre vision for detail.
For example, If you're going to use a line to separate posts, don't use the thinnest grudging line the designers can get away with, because they're all sulking as users complained when they took the old one away in the last re-design. Put the old thick one back. It makes the page look no uglier. But it does make it clearer. And clarity is a good thing. You seem to be moving your forums gradually to just a bunch of information floating in white space. Devoid of any structure holding it together. I don't understand why. That structure should guide the eye to where it's supposed to be. In summary, lines are good (as that nice Columbian man told me last night).
Should we presume that a TIFKAM, tiles interface is just around the corner.
Have to agree with some of the others, the interface is not quite as readable.
* Icons on the Right - just feels all wrong - As mentioned above - we read from Left to Right. The icons are a visual clue as to what to begin reading and what to ignore.
* Icons -- have to click on a tab to select an icon - As Eadon would say - FAIL. The old system was far more ergonomic.
* Icons -- Once wou have selected an icon and return to the text you can no longer see whiohc icon you have selected before clicking preview or submit.
* The title "Sort Comments by " - looks like a "Tab" but it is not..
* "Sort Comments by " - can we have "Most Commented" option in the list please.
* Upvote / Downvote arrows should be on the right. - This is where we naturally terminate reading.
* Grey and White colour scheme is "bland" - I am being polite here.
* Strange I just began replying to a recent post and the icon selection was at the bottom as per normal - Is El Reg doing a bit of live editing by any chance ?
I dont mind if the interface changes just as long as it doesn't replicate TIFKAM or that horrible flat windows look.
Can we fix the forum forgetting who I am and requiring me to log in every now and then please?
And perhaps in the 'my posts' a link to the actual post, rather than the thread, could be applied? I often want to see if a reply has been made, but I don't want to read the whole thread...
Neil,
That's there already. If you're in the my posts page you've got the forum title to get direct to it, with all your posts in it listed below.
Above each of your posts is a date/time thingy saying posted at blah blah blah, which is a click-able link directly to your post.
Also, any post which is a reply to another, will have that swirly arrow thingy to the left of it. If you click on that arrrow (on any post) it will take you to the post it is in reply to.
IAS - thanks for that, but I failed to make myself clear.
What I'm looking for is *almost* the functionality of the arrow: but instead of going to the post to which I replied I want to go to *my* post (whether it's a reply or not) and see if there are answers there.
This isn't a problem with only a dozen posts on a thread, but when the thread gets to three or four pages, it's a different matter. If you've replied to something, then the arrow gets you close, but if you made a direct post, then the only option is to click to the beginning of the thread.
Neil,
That's what the "Posted Wednesday 3rd July 2013 11:45 GMT" link does at the top right of every one of your posts.
Personally I think they should have a way of posts telling you how many replies they've got, or a page that shows it or something, rather than having to go through your recent post history and check. But the functionality you describe already exists.
And thanks for pointing that out.
/me looks in the big book of user interface design for the chapter entitled 'discoverability'... remember when links were blue if you hadn't been there and purple if you had? Now you just wave the mouse blindly and hope the cursor turns into a pointy finger...
Ah the Big Book of User Interface Design. It's so big that many designers don't appear to be able to fit it through their doors - as few seem to have bothered reading it...
I made the same complaint to El Reg that you've just done, on their old design. It turned out that there was a # hidden somewhere around the post, and that was the link that took you back to it in the thread.
My favourite though was a band's website. It had a nicely done hand-drawn sketch of a tree as a landing page. But no link through to the site. I guess I should have just changed the URL, but I had to figure it out. So I moved the mouse over the screen in a methodical fashion - looking for the pointer to change.
And blow me if it wasn't all down to my own stupidity. Amongst the several hundred near-identical drawings of leaves in the picture, one of them, at the end of a branch was waving slightly. Click on that, and enter the site. How could I have been so stupid as not to see it!?!? There was no text at all on this landing-page, not even copyright. That beats any of the 90s Geo-cities horrors, or even mid-brown cursive text on a light-brown background illegibility, as the worst website I've ever used.
howdy reg layout team, the double-wide spotlight (two icons/stories wide) is distracting, and it seems that the comment text is now significantly narrower, such that the thing I am interested in reading (comments) gets less than 50% of my browser real-estate on a not-particularly big laptop.
Would it be possible to return to single-wide spotlights and restore the width to the comment text?
Also, re the link arrows-- yes, I could click to see which post was replied to, but that's kind of distracting. It would be nice if either the alt-text showed username@time or I actually like what the Guardian has done in the last week where they have a subtle arrow along the top with a pointer to the name of the person replied to.
oh, and while I'm banging on. . . Any chance of a John McAffee icon? I'd propose this as a replacement for the black helicopters.
IMHO the layout is gradually going the way of many sites that 'steal' stories from elsewhere just so they can get advert revenue from squeezing in the stories into a site over-laden with adverts :(
What am I on about? The double-wide SPOTLIGHT links on the right, when it used to be just 1 link wide, and the newly added RELATED STORIES links on the immediate left of the article text.
Now it feels like the actual stories are being shoehorned into a bunch of links and adverts, I already run a custom Greasemonkey script to remove things on this site which have zero interest to me, I guess I'll have to further revise it to remove a bunch more crap that gets in the way of reading the actual articles.
No, you misunderstood what I meant.
There are many 'news' websites that merely copy other sources virtually word-for-word, just so they can fool people into viewing their site (rather than the originating source) which they've laden choc-a-bloc full of revenue adverts, so much so that the actual article text is shoehorned into a small strip in the very middle of the page, and often they split the (short) article into 2 or more pages just to get more pageviews.
I'm not likening The Reg to verbose article stealing but I am likening to how the main article text is getting squeezed in such a manner by adding the related articles to the immediate left of the text.
Too much clutter.
Drew, you're right that the double wide isn't bigger than the previous spotlight (it is much more distracting though). I think I was confused by a separate change(?) that seems to make the text width of replies excessively narrow. The text width on the initial posts is fine, but then you lose about an inch on the right hand side on the replies which is just weird.
...are stroking the fur in the wrong way for many commentards here.
Oh, well, some more foreign domains get routed to 127.0.0.1. That's not too troublesome. At least not enough to consider invoking some ancient curses.
But please, think hard about what kind of demographic you want to keep around.
Since the change to the new layout, I cannot give up/down votes when using IE9 (what we're stuck with at work) might just be a problem from work computers, I'm not sure, just thought it woudl be worth raising.
Also can't click into the password box sometimes, so I have to tab through to get to the right box so I can comment.
Haku, I second what everyone else has said and add the following flame bait.
The new forum designs have begun to look like they were designed by a Taliban Supporting, Ginger Haired, Dyslexic, French, Left Hander who just got fired from Microsoft previously having had a hand in designing the Metro interface before Ball-More beat him/her with chair causing great mental disability.
The light grey lines are too light, who was the odlid that decided to add a tab you had to click on to add an icon? That is the very pinnacle of needlessly redundant UI design, thus my nasty comments.
Also, exactly what is the freaking reason to to even write a climate change article (or any article) without enabling direct comments????? Really, even Andrew allowed direct comments and Lewis welcomed them.
Next, I second the visual disability issue and ask that the type face (don't ask me to zoom!) be increased to 12 point please. Next is the link color change... black type does not make clickable links very obvious and they don't change color in (sorry to say it) IE 9 that I'm stuck with.
You could sell ad space on the blank white area to the right of the comments to afford a better design.