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...)

[existence]

Completely different person jumping in on things that the select style page makes me crazy about:

1. Having to remember not to hit the back button ever while working on the styles page because it works on dratted scripting, even when it would feel more natural to go back, although I'm not sure that should change. But that usually happens if I'm trying to seriously browse the styles.
2. Having to always hit the "show all" button somewhere in the process because I'm trying to remember what things I liked and didn't like.
-- if we could lightbox styles like stock websites, wherein we choose a few styles to temporarily save and then preview, that would be so awesome, now that I'm thinking about it.
3. The thumbnails, at least for me, are never enough to choose a style from: adjustable thumbnail sizes would be really nifty, I think, if it was at all possible.
4. The fact that the title editing and such pushes everything down so I have to scroll down to start looking through the styles. Related; the navigation menu on the side diminishes the width styles have to display in. Possibly should be moved elsewhere?
5. The fact that the preview opens up in another window and not in a tab, unless I'm forcing tabs to all open in the same window. (Personally, I'd rather it opened in another tab because I'm going to flip through a few previews because the thumbnails tell me not enough about how the style feels, and having to flip back and forth between windows I browse less styles at a time but end up tweaking things more frequently because the style still doesn't fit what I like entirely.)
6. The language, overall, I find to be somewhat dissatisfying and confusing: if I haven't used the style page in awhile, I find myself re-decoding what things mean.

[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.)

[matgb]

D'oh!

Yes, um, I knew that. Now I have a machine that's not creaking running just Fx, going back to those more resource intensive extensions isn't a bad plan. Danke.

[denise]

Glad to be of service :)

(And I hear you, omg. The Girl's machine dislikes FF so much that I can usually hear the fans grinding on the other end of the apartment ... which, considering it's a 1700-square-foot room with 20' ceilings, says something. Interestingly enough, we have machines with near-identical specs, running the same version, and mine doesn't do that even though I have more extensions installed; it just goes to show how much leaving tabs open/having lots of tabs chews up memory ...)

[matgb]

Oh yeah, every new version they "fix" the memory leak. Until we got this netbook my normal machine had 512meg RAM, stuff like Flashblock was essential just to go online. These days I even manage my history order, s'why I wanted the page titling for filters to work properly.

Scary, this bottom of the range cheap netbook is the best machine I've ever owned, new job hopefully comes with mid-range laptop, that'll be scary.

[denise]

Nice! My Macbook Pro is about reaching the end of its useful life for me (I am ridiculously hard on laptops, and tend to destroy them just around the same time that Applecare runs out, so I'm more-or-less on a three-year replacement cycle) and while I usually go for the cheapest refurb option in my screen size when I buy another, I've been giving some thought to getting the midrange myself ... it's really only a few hundred more, and it's tempting!

[codeman38]

That feature is built into Firefox 4.0 beta, as well as the latest stable Safari.

[denise]

Ooooh, nice! I'm not running the most recent Safari (I'm still running 10.4, believe it or not -- I hated a few of the things they did to the UI in 10.5 and started putting off the upgrade, and so by now I'll probably just leap up to 10.7 when they release it!) but the next FF should be useful. I should check it out ...

[codeman38]

You'll need to upgrade to Leopard before trying the latest Firefox, alas.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/719860

[codeman38]

...and Safari 5 also requires Leopard! Gah!

[denise]

Aw, damn. Do you know if that's going to be a permanent restriction, or is it just the beta? (I'm guessing permanent.)

[codeman38]

Yep, they've confirmed in several bug reports that it's permanent.

[codeman38]

However, some good news: the resizable textareas are in Safari 4, which is available for Tiger.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1045

[denise]

Darn. I knew I'd have to join the 21st century eventually, but still, that's disheartening.

....and I am just dragging these comments off topic today! *laugh*

[codeman38]

Hey, it's partly my fault too for mentioning the Firefox beta in the first place! ^_^

[denise]

It's a good thing I co-run the place, so I'm allowed to say what's on topic and what's not. ;)

[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.

[ninetydegrees]

Yeah, I know! And it gets worse when you look at the code and see that elements with the same style (or what should be the same style) have different names. But that's what you get when nobody takes the time to write guidelines/documentation (which now seems like a crazy, will-take-forever project :/).

[denise]

It always does, alas. But we can at least do bits of it as it comes up.

[ninetydegrees]

But we can at least do bits of it as it comes up.

Well, tbh, from what I've seen so far, it doesn't work so well. To me, one reason for that is that there is no clear model so that when a dev works on redesigning a page they lack a reference. As things are now, I think moving towards a unified style could be doable if the style of each functional element was clearly defined/named/screenshot. This way, one could make sure a very specific elements looked the same across pages. That would make for lots of easy, small projects instead of a mega one. But you need a reference for that.

[denise]

Building the reference was what I meant, actually. It's something I've been looking for someone to take point on for a while.