Site looks off

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You ready? You look ready.
I can confirm the mobile photo upload is broken.

Insert button on mobile photo upload doesn't work. Just opens another page and shows you your picture.
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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza



Like now, a post will take up my entire screen and I don't even know who's name is on it. Don't mean to seem like I want to complain but it's like a completely different site experience in every way.



It's hard to explain, but suddenly the site seems very cold.
The fact that it's hard to explain is, I think, pretty significant. Here's what I said earlier:
Logistically, it feels like this should clearly be easier. The "feel" of it is not unimportant, but if that's the primary issue, that's a really strong indicator that familiarity is the real explanation. Which is a totally real thing, but very different from it being objectively worse, since one will change and one will not, if that makes sense.
When things just feel off and it's hard to explain why, that strongly suggests that the problem, such as it is, is just that it's new and different.

It makes perfect sense that it feels cold, because part of the "warm" feeling of a familiar place is its familiarity.



You ready? You look ready.
Yeah, there are a lot of things on this site that are visual based. When you remove them the site becomes jarring and, as a result, we have to focus/read more carefully. Basically, the mobile site requires me to ignore friends and family more than I did before. I'm fine with that, but you may get angry letters from them.



Sometimes you just know what you like, what you don't like, and what doesn't feel like it works. There is unfamiliarity, but that's not all it is.



I can stop talking then. No problemo. Not trying to start an argument just stating my opinion.
I'd rather you talk by replying to me, rather than talking past me or just finding new ways to say you hate it immediately and always will. But yes, if that's all you want to say about it, and the other thing isn't an option, then not saying anything would be better.



I'm closing the thread for a (very very) short while so people can actually read and digest this, since right now people just seem to be posting their instant reactions to everything and I'm not sure it's helping much. I will reopen it very soon.

Please read and consider the following:

Would really ask you guys, sincerely, to trust me a little here.

I'm not kidding when I say this is a known hurdle with web development and functionality/layout changes: people get used to doing things a certain way, and that makes that way easy through familiarity even if it involves lots of unnecessary work/steps. So I know you're telling the truth when you say, right now, it's harder or feels worse. But I hope you'll know I'm telling the truth, too, when I say that a lot of that is familiarity making harder things seem easier, because that's how it works. I've been on both sides of this myself.

If you're willing to trust me and actually give things a try, we can work together to figure out what Mobile needs and tweak it so doing all the stuff you wanna do is easy and, eventually, becomes second-nature, too, and is even easier and faster than the old stuff was.

If you can't do that, I'm sorry to hear it, but fair enough. But if you can, I think you'll be pleased with the results.



Okay, gonna open this thread again tomorrow when I get into work, I think. I have some ideas for the mobile style. I'll be working on some tweaks, a mix of functionality and design, over the next few days.

Anyone who's open-minded about the idea and wants to help it get better is very welcome to contribute to that end, though I think we'd all agree on which features deserve priority, so I'm going to try to bundle a few at once, implement those, and then open things up to improvements past that, since I imagine the first round of suggestions would be pretty near unanimous.

More soon.



Okay, opening this thread up.

For the moment, I'd prefer if people only used it to help solve specific problems, particularly things I might not be aware of. I think we have a good handle, collectively, on which things need to be added soonest (mostly stuff with images since that affects basic posting on mobile), so I expect people's list of priorities would look very similar at first. So give me a day or two to knock out some of the basics and we can go from there.

The mobile style could use a few design tweaks, too, so I'll be bumping up avatar sizes and a few other related things. There are a few things I could do that would cause legibility to take a slight hit at the cost of making the site feel a little more like the desktop version. On those we can experiment and see how they land.

You should see some changes by the end of the day.



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1. Overall Navigation of mobile. It seems like it's severely outdated and it's just not user friendly.

2. Copy links and image links for mobile. I use these so often for the Hall of Fames.

3. I would say simply allowing desktop to be more navigation friendly for those who don't care about screen size/zooming in etc. I know it worked just fine for Cricket and I. Actually I didn't care about having to zoom at all



Like I said, please give me a day or two to implement the basic features so we don't get a lot of people requesting the exact same things. Let's see what's missing when that dust settles.

Any feedback based on concepts like "user friendly" is going to have to be a lot more specific and considered, however, and not just vague gut reaction. In most cases I'm following some very common and well-tested design practices that are used basically everywhere for smartphones. Frankly, if we were starting from scratch most people would tell me having to zoom in and out was not user friendly, and they'd be right. It manifestly isn't. Instantly legible text and large buttons, however, manifestly are.

For the record, yesterday I went to look at a large movie forum for possible guidance in how to display posts and avatars...and it had basically the exact same format. However jarring or unfamiliar this may be to some of you, personally, you should know that the basic principles of making sites usable for mobile are pretty much universal. Those aren't going to change.



You ready? You look ready.
Yoda is in kinda uncharted territory here, so we really need to let him do his thing. Not many forums are geared towards mobile devices, so there's no style/layout he can "copy". He's basically gunna have to figure it all out by himself. It is going to take some time, so just...be



I don't use mobile versions on any site, I just don't like it at all. As far as desktop, I just can't get to nearly all the options that I should be able to. Maybe those are tweaks to be made so I'll just check back periodically.



There might be some very general tweaks to desktop to rule out some of the more dramatic issues, but they'll be marginal. If you're determined to use a large desktop site on a small screen I can't guarantee you'll be able to get to everything.

Whether you want to give mobile a try or just live with that is, of course, up to you, but most sites handle mobile this way for a reason, and a lot of logical and easy things inevitably feel bad if they're fighting habit and muscle memory and all that. There's a lot of observational data about this. It's difficult to overstate how pronounced it can be.

But, not my call. Just letting you guys know what to expect.



For instance when I try to post on desktop and I get to the point where the post reply button is out of the picture, I can't even get back to it. That must be an issue. Also the options at the top aren't even available, like reviews or podcasts.



And as far as mobile, it has nothing to do with getting used to it. I've never liked it anywhere and especially here it's so impersonal and completely takes the fun out of the site for me. Usually I go to MoFo and I see everybody's name and avatar and everything else, and now it's one big post. I can't fathom how anybody would enjoy that.



As I mentioned, I'll be making some very general tweaks there, but that's it. I can't possibly support a full desktop site on an array of mobile devices right now. That's why mobile layouts exist: they're simplified designs that are one-size-fits-all for all kinds of different phone sizes. And they simply work better and faster for people on those devices, all else being equal.

If someone is on mobile and using the mobile style, I'm happy to take feedback, feature requests, and bug reports. They'll be seeing a lot of changes soon. If someone decides to force their mobile device to use the desktop version, I can't guarantee everything will work.