RumPatrol

Is the actual design of the site being worked on? The way threads are presented in a sub-forum is not acceptable. If I can't tell the difference between section titles and new threads in an instant, you've failed as a web designer. Please tell the development team they need to add some contrast on the thread pages (see my image a page or two back). The font inconsistencies from page to page isn't helping.

Also dulling down the blue might help. The color that buttons turn when you mouse over them is the color the blue should be by default. Why not reverse the colors? Make the lighter blue the default and then when you mouse over the button you get the darker blue that it is now. All the colors on the site are a shade or two off and it is jarring, to say the least.

Just some ideas.

Zorak

New today: links are broken when clicked on. For some reason some version of the current post URL is being prefixed with exclamation marks, and that of course breaks the URL.

This seems to have a transient thing and/or fixed shortly after I posted this and went looking for examples.

Globaliser

Thank you very much for restoring visibility to hyperlinks within a post.

However, please can that also be applied to hyperlinks within signatures?

[ETA:] And also within wikiposts, please? In particular, there would have been little point in IB spending all that time and energy enabling the function of internal pointing within wikiposts (the [wikifrom] and [wikito] tags) if nobody can see that there's a link that they can click.

CPRich

Yes, there have been many. Going through the first 5 pages, I count 96 "I hate it", 6 "I like it", and 6 that can be charitably called in the middle.

5.6% liking a redesign isn't normal. I've never used 5% approval as the Go/No-go cutoff in any UX testing I've led.


fwiw, good practice would also dictate a separation between design feedback and bug reporting, but that seems to have followed the same path as UX. (Bugzilla, anyone?)

beltway

For my money, the biggest recent(ish) leap forward on FT in making the site more informative & worth visiting was adding the wiki functionality. That feature was made even better when, at the urging of one noisy user (me), IB added wikito/wikifrom. (Before that, you had these massively lengthy wikis--the most informative ones!--with no navigation mechanism except manual scrolling.)

The last two redesigns, by contrast, have been an unmitigated disaster for usability. For example, perfectly good formatting tools that enhance readability and usability have been gratuitously crippled. As but one example, indented text--extremely useful for visually breaking up Qs & As in posts & wikis--now looks like this:Being a FT user these feels like being the parent of a 6-year-old who wants to help with a wallpapering project. At a certain point, one ends up wanting to say, "OK, I think you've helped enough now."

So I'll say again what I said after the last UI/UX downgrade: for [expletive]'s sake, talk to your users. Pick a group of regular users and ask them not just what they like/hate, but also how they use the site. (Like, what's your site-entry point for a session? How do you choose what to read? Are there navigation or subscription tools you rely on? Etc. etc.)

Everybody will be better served if you start from that sort of understanding rather than having the dev team arbitrarily deciding what kinds of new go-fast stripes to slap on the interface.

StayingHomeIsBetter

I have not yet "liked" anything during this session. But, I repeatedly attempted to like this post. Total fail.

As I said, this is not a manifestation of the horrible reformatting. This existed long before.

IBobi

Can you try clearing your browser cache and try again?

muji

Same here. For me it's a contrast issue.

RealHJ

The font choice is horrible. It is so rough and blurry at the same time, it really does hurt the eyes and head - physically.

zero thought put into this massive functionality downgrade.

CPRich

Search results in tiny font, 3/4 size of the rest of the site. Feature?

Font Finder reports 12px font, 15.6px line height. Everything else is 16px font, 20.8px line height

Element ID: thread_title_1362511 vs. Element ID: thread_title_1521187

TonyBurr

I think the quality, size and boldness of the font is very, very nice, especially good for older eyes. Thank you

ijgordon

Not sure if anyone has reported this, but I have a hard time navigating back to a forum after I make a post in that forum. Most of the time there is no link back to the main page for that forum. In the old skin, there was the drop-down menu at the bottom of every page and you could just click “go” to get back to the forum (though it would jump back to the first page). Now that menu is only on the forum page not on a page with posts. The posts page has a different style menu at the bottom to jump to a different forum, but since there is no “go” button, there’s no way to jump to the current forum. There’s a link to the current forum at the top of the thread, but if it’s a long thread, there’s no easy way to get back up there with the infinite scroll.

controller1

YES!

Steve_ZA

The update to the blue down arrow for first under post is an improvement ^

intuition

I'd never used a quota based on a miniscule percentage of the userbase as a proof of anything.

On a site with 700 000 members and where there is 10 000+ users online at any given moment, what does 96 out of 112 posters really say? Unless you solicit all kind of feedback from all kind of users and balance the results, the numbers tell you nothing. Especially on FT, where those who oppose things are the ones who really knows where to post about it and how to do it vocally. As an evengelist I think you know that too.


On this thread there is so much hyperbole that the true issues drown. You very nearly lost me at the "unmitigated disaster", but this is one of the design mistakes in the previous round, where suddenly indents looks similar to qoutes. Just like the hyperlinks needed fixing and was fixed, I do hope that IB have noticed this issue and will find a better formatting. Indents doesn't need any special formatting, they just need to be indented!