Stuff that needs fixing

[denise]

I'd like to make a list of things that need some design work: things that could be improved, workflow-wise or visually, for better usability or accessibility.

Things I can think of, off the top of my head:

* The reading/subscription filters management interface
* The access/posting filters management interface
* The Manage Circle page
* The Upload Icons page
* The Directory Search

What else can people think of that needs work?

Comments

[ex_rising236]

It works, and it works, but the select style and customise style pages have always felt a good bit clunky to me. Mind, I'm sure they're way complicated, but just in general. I wasn't saying it was a too realistic suggestion of stuff because I'm not sure how to fix the workflow-wise issues with it but there are a few issues of workflow with it.

[denise]

Oh, don't try to restrict yourself just to things you think 'realistic' -- I have nothing against redesigning the workflows of the whole darn site over time, honestly!

What are the specific workflow problems you have with it? (I've always found them a little irritating to use myself, but I can never put my finger on just why, so if you can articulate some of it, it might help me figure out what annoys me...)

[matgb]

OpenID login and taskflow, especially for new OpenID users, I know I said I'd do some mockups awhileback, but want to make sure it's on list in case I never do and someone else gets time.

Separate but related, OpenID login on the comment box and/or navstrip.

The Advanced Customisation area, again, been discussed, but the current page is a horror in offputtingness and needs a fairly urgent user friendly makeover.

Also, while I'm thinking of it, larger texbox for the custom CSS please, that's my main area of work at the moment, and it's teeny, got used to the layeredit page and while that's clunky the text area is massive.

[denise]

FYI, if you use Firefox, there's an extension called Resizeable Textarea or something like that, which will let you, as one might imagine, resize text areas. I use it often to make things much bigger so I can see what I'm inputting.

(Safari has one too, but I can't remember what it's called, if you're using a Mac. I don't know about any of the other browsers, but it's such a useful thing that I'd imagine any browser with plugins or extensions would have had someone come up with something for it.)

[ninetydegrees]

If you mean besides what's already in Zilla, I agree that Select Style and Customize style could use a little redesign. The top sections (titles and current theme) take too much space and have little to do with the primary function of the page, which is to select a style. Also, each link current theme has is also repeated somewhere else in the page. I'm against removing it entirely because knowing which theme you currently has is very useful but making it much smaller would be awesome. As for titles, I think they should go to the Presentation options (with Mood theme, Nav Strip and such).
I would move the drop-down menu next to Features and actually print the numbers on a line instead of having them in a drop-down menu (one less click \o/).
As for the theme boxes, well no lines would be great for me because they make everything blur and it would nice to have the 'Apply Theme' buttons aligned. Crediting takes too much space and will take even more when bug 1845 is fixed. Would it be possible to have an info link which would expand when you click on it?

What else? Recent Comments? It's not very nice, I think.

Manage Communities? The page could be more compact if notifications would be moved to Notifications, Create would be removed (it's in the Nav menu already) and Manage Invitations would be moved elsewhere (to me, it has nothing to do with what the page is for and seems like it has been put there because nobody knew where to put it).

Another thing that bugs me a lot are the design inconsistencies between pages. Edit Profile has one way of designing the Jump To section. Manage Circle and Recent Comments have another. Edit Profile has one way of doing headers, Manage Communities a slightly different one, Read Profile mixes the two, some pages have none. It would make the site neater and nicer if it looked more globally designed.

[denise]

The reason for the inconsistencies is because all of the pages were done at different times, usually by different people, and often by completely different owners! I'd love to standardize design elements and create a consistent visual interaction vocabulary -- it's been bugging me for years.

[deborah]

Tags:
* choosing tags on the new entry page or edit entry page
* managing tags

Although both of those are already projects in process or open bugs.

Bottom vs Top Nav

[jesse_the_k]

Home page & inbox: http://www.dreamwidth.org/ and http://www.dreamwidth.org/inbox/

the only site-nav controls are a strip at the bottom of the page, different than the top-oriented strip on every other DW page I use.

[runpunkrun]

This is a simple thing, but on Tropospherical site pages, in the drop down menus below the header, "memories" does not appear anywhere I can see. I'd expect to find a link under "read" or "organize," but instead I have to go to my profile page to access them.

[denise]

That's actually deliberate; memories are old and mostly broken, and we didn't want to highlight them in the menu until we fixed them up. (Which we will be doing!)

[azurelunatic]

The Inbox and I have a deep and abiding loathing for each other. Really, everything at the top of the page needs to be at the bottom, and there's a lack of pagination in there.

[highlander_ii]

Adding to this - it would be fabulous if the 'inbox' functioned a lot more like an 'inbox' with abilities for adding folders and such for organizational purposes. Still with size limits that count what's in said folders, but so things one might need for reference are accessible there w/o cluttering the inbox.

[epershand]

Yes, this. What I would really love would be if the Inbox had some degree of interaction with things that get duplicated to email. Most of my frustration with the inbox comes from the fact that the information in it is duplicated, and that I have to manage them separately. For instance, it would be awesome if submitting the form within the body of an email to respond to a comment triggered the inbox to mark the comment notification as read.

[timeasmymeasure]

I'll have to second your 'Upload Page' suggestion. Once you get past more than 20, managing userpics becomes a bit of a chore.

[isis]

I would sure like it if some of the links on the inbox (off the top of my head, replying to a message and subscribe/access) didn't spawn new windows/tabs. If I want a new tab or window I right-click and make one.

[ex_rising236]

Oh yeah. I just went to manage the notification settings for comments.

It would be really nice if "Someone replies to any comment I make*" wasn't limited to via email and could be set up to show in the inbox as well.

[summerskin]

Seconded.

[denise]

That's limited to email only because it was never converted to the notification system, mostly because doing so would require a total rewrite of the notification system. I believe LJ's recent rewrite of the notification system also included converting it, but there are enough problems with that implementation that we can't just adopt it wholesale.

[permetaform]

Okay, this isn't stuff that NEEDS fixing, but if implemented would make my life so much easier omg.

Basically I sometimes use Rich Text to convert pre-formatting text into html, but sometimes I don't need all that html, or some of the html's ridiculously redundant.

Is there any way to strip some of the formatting while leaving the others? Like either a toggle button, or...gah, even I dunno, a find-and-replace/kill option?

I have no idea how hard this idea is, or even if it's feasible. But I'm going to throw it out there.

[epershand]

This is a more mobile suggestion than anything else, but since "onMouseOver" doesn't really exist as a state for touch screens, I wind up losing the navigational menus on my Nexus 1. I'd love it if there was a way to get the menus on the phone without loading an intermediate page.

[feathertail]

This sounds like a serious accessibility concern. Dreamwidth's menus should gracefully degrade for users whose browsers don't support mouseover events.

[feathertail]

The "Profile" page. All of it. As it is, it's a barely-formatted HTML list of statistics, with a bio sandwiched inside it.

The most effective bios, IMO, like this one, are memorable because they use a ton of white space ... the opposite of our current approach of cramming in as much data as possible.

Maybe there's a way we can use whitespace to make it more readable, put the bio up near the top (make it and the icon and a few basic stats the most prominent things on the page), and make the rest of it accessible but not equally important.

Should I submit this to dw_suggestions?

[denise]

If you have a design mockup, yes; if not, here is best, so that someone who's looking for a design project might see it. "We should redesign this" type suggestions don't get far, because they're not very concrete.

[goodbyebird]

I know the 'description' field for icons is there for accessibility, and I don't know quite how that works, but is it necessary for that field to be visible when you go to look at someone's userpics page? To me it seems overly cluttered.

[denise]

Yes, the description is there so that people using screenreaders get the same experience as people who aren't. It's also very important to leave the description visible so that others are aware of it, and are encouraged to fill it out.

[turlough]

As far as I'm concerned a complete overhaul of the reading/subscription filters management interface is the most important because as it is now that page is almost impossible to use if you have more than just a couple of filters. I've spent parts of this week trying to use it to rearrange my whole filter system but in the end I had to fall back on using the individual subscription management pages just so that I could be sure that each journal/comm ended up in the correct filter. It was hell!