Homepage Redesign Part 2

jd83

Just to mirror what everyone else is saying, please change it back. In the last week my productivity in work has quadrupled as im not lurking on boards half as much due to this godawful new homepage.

Dades

padraig_f wrote: »

The front page still has the major problem of posts taking up too much vertical space.

Article on Slate last month, think it's relevant to the redesign:
You Won’t Finish This Article

It refers to articles rather than forums, but I think the effect is the same, i.e. you lose readers when you force them to scroll.

Without a hint of irony that article describes how most users don't read on. On my iPad all I can see is the title, two enormous banner ads and (most of) a stock photo before I have to scroll to see the first line of the article. Utter nonsense.

In fact, from a design perspective, a lot of what I've read recently suggests people are not as afraid to design long pages anymore with the ubiquity of wheely-mouses. People don't want to have to navigate anymore, when they can just scroll. It's becoming a lot more common place where before it was frowned upon. See Apple for example. Of course it'll never work unless the content is good enough to keep people scrolling and ugly banner ads at the top ain't gonna cut it.

Not sure either of our examples are relevant to a discussion forum, however.

But while I can see a need to make the new homepage more legible (which it is not at the moment), and to reduce some superfluous padding, this notion of people stopping to use the entire site because they need to roll their finger on the homepage or give the screen one extra swipe leaves me incredulous.

nesf

Dades wrote: »

But while I can see a need to make the new homepage more legible (which it is not at the moment), and to reduce some superfluous padding, this notion of people stopping to use the entire site because they need to roll their finger on the homepage or give the screen one extra swipe leaves me incredulous.

For neither you nor I it's much of a thing. Most of my objections are because I disagree very strongly with the UI design and philosophy and I don't want to see it spreading to the rest of the site.

There are people however who do just use the homepage to follow the site, they refresh every so often and see if a new thread catches their eye. They don't sit down and *read* the forums in the way you or I do. For these people homepage changes are a major thing and I can imagine someone stopping to use the site if they found the UI changes terrible.

Chucken

nesf wrote: »

For neither you nor I it's much of a thing. Most of my objections are because I disagree very strongly with the UI design and philosophy and I don't want to see it spreading to the rest of the site.

There are people however who do just use the homepage to follow the site, they refresh every so often and see if a new thread catches their eye. They don't sit down and *read* the forums in the way you or I do. For these people homepage changes are a major thing and I can imagine someone stopping to use the site if they found the UI changes terrible.

Thank you! Thats exactly it in a nut shell.

Rabies

Constantly getting sent to page 1 of a thread is really annoying. Need the thread count number back beside the the thread title.

I know I'l adapt over time, but this is the longest its taken for a new Boards.ie home page to grow on me.

My Threads page need to lose the bold text when viewed too. Always think there is a new post

Nate--IRL--

Chucken wrote: »

Thank you! Thats exactly it in a nut shell.

I have to concur.

Nate

Spear

nesf wrote: »

For neither you nor I it's much of a thing. Most of my objections are because I disagree very strongly with the UI design and philosophy and I don't want to see it spreading to the rest of the site.

There are people however who do just use the homepage to follow the site, they refresh every so often and see if a new thread catches their eye. They don't sit down and *read* the forums in the way you or I do. For these people homepage changes are a major thing and I can imagine someone stopping to use the site if they found the UI changes terrible.

The homepage (past and present alike) just doesn't represent the structure or depth of boards.ie at all. There's an entire sticky in N&F to try and get people to realise there's a structure and logic:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056533903

I suspect that the move away from vbulletin will remove that level of view, making navigation even more difficult.

Dades

Spear wrote: »

I suspect that the move away from vbulletin will remove that level of view, making navigation even more difficult.

Maybe that view could be replaced by some kind of sitemap?

Something akin to eBay's category page:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/allcategories/all-categories

Dav

Version 3 is coming tomorrow (probably) so I've started another new thread to discuss it here.