New Topics/Category Organisation Update 20:45 - Post 100

Wibbs

No worries at all tHB and apologies from my end if you thought I was denigrating the guys. No way would I have issues with the guys on the coalface. It's more the overall change they were tasked with from above that is the issue. No doubt there was a meeting, or ten.

whatismyname wrote: »

I think the whole point behind the site needing new members like a fish needs water... is that fish do need water.. therefore think he was saying like you, that new members are crucial to the site.

Yep. Exactly. Seems pretty obvious.

The traffic on this site reached a high water mark a few years back(like the rest of the folks here I don't have access to the numbers, but I'd reckon around 2010-11 was that point) and the tide has been slowly rolling back. Take out those "re-reg trolls or plain ol' assholes" and new users are coming through the doors in fewer numbers.

Why? Arsebook, Twatter and more mobile devices, more avenues to rant would be much of it. It's a far more crowded market than it was five years ago, never mind ten years ago. So Boards has to evolve, has to become easier to fall into. The content generators are everything. That's all ye guys and gals out there typing crap. Without them, Talk to and Adverts will become ghost towns. Or at least not very relevant. The time to make things less obvious, more complex, requiring more "clicks" is not now.

Just my humble, but I suspect what came outa one meeting, or three, was to reduce the headings to four. That looks balanced and such. Fine, but what goes on below is what will matter. Better to have an initial confusion that suggests a vibrant community below, than a community stuck in a "topics" menu.

El Guapo!

Anyone else's computer gone crazy when they try come into Feedback?
Just happened while I was trying to post and got brought to a survey site about 10 times.
And now I'm seeing ads on the site too.

Edit: Nevermind. Think I have some virus thing in Chrome.

But the touch site is acting up. The A-Z menu starts at E and goes bananas from there.

Dont be at yourself

It's earnings season in the states now, and virtually every article I've read about Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are most anticipating two metrics, and neither are directly revenue-related: 1) number of active users, and 2) engagement per user.

What does that say? Get the user experience right, and the business will take care of itself.

From down here in the cheap seats, it's very difficult to see the joined-up thinking or strategic planning behind decisions like this. There seems to be long periods of inactivity and stagnation when it comes to the site's development, before suddenly I'll-conceived changes are rushed out the door with little consideration of their consequences. And that's not to even mention the mobile app.

SimonTemplar

OK guys seriously, this is bad. There is an incredibly annoying defect in the Topics menu (desktop view).

Expand "Technology & Internet".
Then expand the "Software and Web Development" sub category
Then expand the "Web" sub category

The "Web" list is shorter than the "Software and Web Development" list which causes the menu to reduce in size. But this means the mouse is no longer over the menu, so the menu disappears.

Very annoying. Horrible user experience

fussyonion

Hello.

After browsing/contributing to the site in the last few hours, I just felt I'd let you know I'm really liking the change.

I think it's a lot neater and more compact and gets rid of unnecessary tabs that seemed to be clogging the front page.

I also found it didn't take that long to become accustomed to the new format, so well done.

I like the change

whatismyname

Re the constantly dished out solution of 'just follow forums in 'my forums', it's interesting to note:

Currently active users: 3,980 (1,294 registered, 2,686 guests)

And I'd imagine being midnight midweek this would be not nearly as high as it would be at some points... but point being that twice as many people are log logged in than those who are...

Yes when you're replying to someone on here they are logged in, so a suggestion of using 'my forums' seems reasonable (but not as a fix all)... .but with twice as many not logged in, the affects of the change will be just as relevant for them, I presume, yet this just use 'my forums' really isn't relevant to them.

Posy

awec wrote: »

Topics makes no sense as a header to me as the list doesn't contain topics (because a topic is a thread), Forums makes more sense. Nor does Boards.ie to be honest. I would actually expect Boards.ie to be the menu for all the forums.

Couldn't agree more. "Discussion Forums" would make more sense to a new user and I don't get the "Boards.ie" heading at all.
So I'm a new user who stumbles across boards. I go to the Newbies and FAQ forum to get a feel for the place, then I'd like to get recommendations on the best cinema in Dublin city centre, and talk about the film I'm planning to see.
I have to use three different headings, and it's not very clear why they are under different headings! Boards.ie is the name of the site, it's strange having it as a category heading.

Ludo wrote: »

TV forum is woeful now. Probably easy to fix but from a usability point of view this forum looks terrible at the moment.

I just spent ages looking under 'arts' for the TV forum and then eventually realised it was under 'entertainment' When I finally got to the forum, I actually still couldn't find it because I didn't realise you have to scroll down half a mile past the sub forums to get to it!

pconn062

awec wrote: »

I am not convinced that top centre is the best place for the one you wish to be most prominent. It should be left or right. Also Topics makes no sense as a header to me as the list doesn't contain topics (because a topic is a thread), Forums makes more sense. Nor does Boards.ie to be honest. I would actually expect Boards.ie to be the menu for all the forums.

Also why does Regional get to be a top level menu still? That just seems random.

Agree with all of this, the headers along the top seem a little random (and maybe difficult for a new user to navigate around. Apart from that, I think it looks good.

FloatingVoter

Anybody calling new users newbs, noobs or noobies is spending way too much time on reddit. Or is possibly 12.
Just design the site so it can be used by people sitting at a computer. I occasionally pop into non-drinkers, bereavement and legal discussion - I don't follow the forums. Barring mods, nobody does - they are very personal and issue specific.
Making AH or TV as hard to find as such obscurities is a pain. This is bad design. Spend less time defending it and more time reverting it.

The site is not meant to "look good" - it is meant to work.

Firewalkwithme

[Deleted User] wrote: »

The easiest way would be to subscribe to the forums you like. Even before, to visit a random forum there would have been two clicks to access them.

I already subscribe to the forums I browse most often, that's not my issue. I don't want to add every forum I might have an interest in into My Forums because it will just end up being flooded to the extent that I may as well be looking at the latest posts tab.

Besides, if I rely too much on My Forums as is being suggested by several people here, I'd probably end up visiting other forums less than I usually would.

And no, it doesn't already take two clicks to access a random forum as you said, it's simply hover and one click for the vast majority of forums.

Sad Professor

The merger of Film Reviews, Film Awards and Film Production into Films seems to have resulted in myself and johnny_ultimate being de-modded.

mrkiscool2

Do not like this system at all. It's not, as some users have said, because "This has changed, I don't like change". It's just a pain. It adds a lot of extra time to try and find the forum I want (obviously by a lot of extra time I'm talking about % wise, not actual time). For instance, I was looking for the NUI Maynooth forum and what normally would have taken me 2-3 seconds took anywhere between 10-15.

I don't even think the menu is any better for it. It still looks the same (bar bigger bars now). It's annoying having to scroll through all the topics then click on the topic I want and then find the forum I want. I understand there is always a need to improve and redesign but this? This will do nothing but annoy users and confuse new ones as well.

Dozer Dave

Disaster

TheBeardedLady

I like it. Much neater having all the topics together like that. Good job.

_Kaiser_

On another note...

You have Computer Games out on it's own as a separate "topic", but the other computer-related stuff under Technology and Internet which I see still includes, Cable/Satellite TV and Home Media
How about a Computers and Internet heading instead and changing Entertainment to "TV, Media and Home Entertainment" for the rest?

The Business ad Finance section needs a a rethink as well.. wayyyy too many sub-fora there! Having Bargain Alerts (another one of the most popular forums) buried in there makes no sense either,
no more than putting After Hours several level deep either. I mean, it's a website and navigation bar. It's not like ye have so little space to work with that everything has to be condensed in this manner.

The bottom line here I think is that this seems to be change for the sake of it - and temporary change at that until the NEXT shake-up in a few weeks which makes even less sense! - and the user experience (critical for a site like this..especially with its commercial aspirations) seems to have been left out of whatever PowerPoints that were used to justify this.

Change it back.. at the very least until ye are ready to change the lot but I really would strongly suggest that Boards as an entity needs to consider why people come here and what they want/expect from the site.
As already pointed out, there are lots of other avenues these days for Irish folk to express their frustrations, chat, debate and so on. If Boards wants to stay relevant in that space it needs to stop alienating its user base with ill-conceived changes like this.

padd b1975

It's just taken me ten minutes to find the radio forum.

10!!

If I want to be led on a similar merry dance, I'll join Reddit.

fitz

While it might look neater initially, it's a horrible user experience.
Addition of extra navigation clicks is madness, the navigation experience should only ever be simplified and shortened, not lengthened.

Is there any way of still using the old version, cause this will actively drive me from browsing the site as much.
There are forums that I dip in and out of occasionally, but not regularly enough to want them in my subbed forums list.

I now have to hover and click to get to the position I previously just had to hover to get to, then a subsequent click if there's a sub-category.
It's ugly.
If I'm not sure where a forum is, I now have to do a load of clicking to find it, where previously, I could just hover.

On a more specific note, the Television forum is now a complete pain in the arse.
It used to be a just another forum in the Television category, now every other forum in that category is a sub-forum, meaning I have to scroll past all the sub-forums every time I want to view the Television forum.

Sorry guys, nothing personal, and I understand you want to make things cleaner and less cluttered, but this is just bad design imo.

Lovely Bloke

Dav wrote: »

OK, folks, once again, this "Topics in one list" thing is temporary, we're weeks rather than months away from the new site design rolling out,

So...a change that went live yesterday with bugs is only interim, and there's to be another change in "weeks rather than months" (a whole new site design!) - it really begs the question as to why this interim change was needed at all.

A whole new site redesign will be riddled with bugs (no offence to the designers/devs, but it's true of any new software on launch).

fitz

Just reading now that this is an interim design prior to the new site design.
That's really, really bad change management.

Spear

Having the topics below the boards.ie section isn't going to work. New users will see it headed boards.ie and think it's the main site. We're going to all sorts of even worse random junk turning up in forums such as Helpdesk.

Star Lord

I could be wrong, but I think it's too get us used to the new categories and way of listing them before the rest of the site changes, rather than everything in one go.

Seems to be a lot of the complaints are down to not being able to find things where they used to be, but I do agree with the complaints about clicking being required where hovering used to do, it does slow things down a little.

Otherwise, I like it, and I'm sure most will too when they give it a chance and the wrinkles have been ironed out.

LuckyLloyd

I guess there are two sides to this:

- feedback / thoughts on the reorganisation;
- feedback / thoughts / bug reports on the implementation of changes;

In regards to the first piece I'd hope to stave off having anything to add as I stick to older unsupported skins. That says something - though probably something more about me than boards.ie.

But with regards to the latter, I'd suggest that you had perfectly good criteria for a no go yesterday in:

Dav wrote: »

Hey all,

As we were getting ready to start pushing all this out, we realised that the existing menu was going to cause is some problems, so we've turned off the Javascript that controls it and manages it's drop-down functionality. I expect it'll be that way for the rest of the afternoon whilst we're making the category changes.

and

Dav wrote: »

Why couldn't we just copy all this over from our test environment in 10 minutes instead of faffing about with it all day? Well, we thought we could until we started poking at it this morning and VBulletin started threatening meltdown. So I had to spend the day re-doing all my work

That's an error of judgement outside of 'I hate change'. It's not always going to be possible for releases / changes to be incremental and seamless; but once you realise pushing through is likely to cause a day or so of disruption it's probably time to go back and see if you can roll it out another way.

Dav is clearly a good guy and fair play to him and his team engaging in heroism staying late trying to fix P1s on the fly but I think there is a lesson to be learned about what to do if assumptions you had before pushing a release don't stack up.

httpete

This isn't something that is negatively affecting users because "they haven't gotten used to it yet."

This definitively makes it take longer to access every forum here.

And I don't know why a few people are saying it was done to make it easier for new users. How exactly did having the navbar with all the categories on display make it harder than it is now? It simply made every just about every forum a simple "hover...click" away. This isn't 1995, everybody has well over a decade of internet experience these days, how did having all the categories at the top confuse anyone, sure all the forums are still under various categories, these categories are just now all stuffed under the same menu.

It feel like the entire site is now buried one level deeper than it used to be. The best feature on this site binned over out of the blue, I would love to hear the trur reason this was done, if it was done as a UX improvement your UX guy needs to get the boot as he/she hasn't a clue.

I've worked as a software dev in arguably the biggest business software company in the world alongside top notch UX people who were brought in on "rock star" contracts as UX was considered THE most important aspect of web/mobile dev. Everything was built around the UX, that came first. Speed and ease of navigation around apps and websites decided how things got laid out. Whereas as here we have a site sacrificing UX either for aesthetic purposes or to give more prominence to their commercial side. Either way its a MAJOR mistake making it more awkward and take longer to navigate around this site.

How did this change get suggested I'm the first place? - "I know guys, let bury the entire site one level deeper and make it take our users a few extra seconds longer every time they want to visit a forum."

Alf Veedersane

Now I appreciate why you sometimes get complaints despite a lengthy consultation period......

But no separating Health from Fitness?

*sad face*

That is all.

_Kaiser_

fitz wrote: »

Just reading now that this is an interim design prior to the new site design.
That's really, really bad change management.

And that's half the problem here.. the split-personality of Boards.ie

On one hand it's trying to be a Community.. on the other it wants to be a Commercial Entity

But in doing so it's alienating the former, and not following industry-standard best practise on the latter

IvyTheTerrible

Yeah, the boards.ie drop down not actually leading to most of the discussion forums seems to me to be really confusing for new users. If I was coming here for the first time, that's where I'd be going, not to the topics tab.

Lovely Bloke

Something has happened to "Television" - it's in my "My Forums" list, but when I click it now I see displayed a list of forums, all sitting on top of the actual Television threads, meaning I've to scroll past a list of 28 Sub Forums, and all the Television Stickies before I can read threads.

Previously I was taken directly to the Television --> Television Forum which was better, obviously.

rob316

Real amateur hour, considering the size of this site.

mirrormatrix

I didn't know this forum even existed until today, because I never needed it before, but after looking at the absolute mess of a menu system on the "interim" website this morning I had to figure out what was going on. Hopefully this system is drastically revised in the coming weeks. In particular, having to scroll down through the topics is a PITA. What was wrong with the way it was laid out before, with multiple columns clearly displaying all topics?

El Guapo!

Is the word "Topics" annoying anyone else?
Why isn't it just called "Categories", like most other sites?