new interface is hard to browse

I imagine you have been spending a lot of time with it, so please don't feel annoyed, disappointed with my comments.

I am browsing from a MacAir. I can see around 2 posting per screen, only 2! It is hard to browse because one has to scroll down and wait for the new bunch of postings to be updated.

perhaps I am an old timer, but I prefer the simple list where one sees only the title, and the author, and one can more quickly browse and see what is interesting. The new one requires more active scrolling to be able to see the same amount of information.

--dmg

Find more posts tagged with

Bugs & Features

Comments

Kyle_Hildebrant_82029

I'm going to second "old-timer". I think it's a marked improvement.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Thanks for the feedback. We're aware that this is a departure from the old forum design, which listed titles and author in a more compact table format. The reason that we're trying a different design is twofold - 1) to show some context along with the title, so you know what the post is about and can more intelligently choose whether to read it or not, and 2) to set a design foundation for future features, which will include different types of stories in this feed, not just posts.

We'll keep monitoring the situation though, and will likely make design tweaks in the coming weeks. Would love to hear more feedback as you get used to things. Thanks!

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Also, we love honest feedback - you'd be doing us a disservice by holding back! We're trying to build the best experience possible and if you have issues with it, we'll try our best to make it right.

ttpoker

I agree. I prefer a streamlined option of just titles, where we can expand to the current model, followed by the full thread if possible.

dmg_3440

You can probably data-mine the logs to see what changes the new interface imposes on users. Which is a good thing.

I think the new interface makes it easy to access new posts, in detriment to older ones.

my hypothesis is that people will concentrate more on reading latests posts. And older posts will not be access almost exclusively via the search mechanism.

The data might prove me wrong, but you, the developers, are probably users too. And I see the advantage of the new interface: it is more enticing than the older one.

Perhaps one solution is to replace the "keep scrolling to see older" with a "fixed paging" mechanism where you can go to the next page (and provide quick access to say 10-15 pages, sort of like google does at the bottom of the page.

Google uses quants to determine what the best interface is. I am sure you can do something similar in a smaller scale: prototype solutions, try them with different random populations, and use data mining to see what works and achieves what i believe is your ultimate goal: to get people to stay in the site, to come back often, and communicate with each other.

--dmg