I have to say that even after a week I am having a hard time reading the new forum. It’s mainly to do with the different proportions between things. There’s a lot of pretty graphics and white space that seem very nice from a design point of view but actually waste a great deal of space. I don’t really need to know the exact time of both the latest comment and the original thread creation, and compressing the information about time and poster into a narrow column means they take up two lines each, reducing the number of topics that can be seen. Even if I shrink the text I can only get 10 items onto the screen before I have to start scrolling.
For example, when you fires come into a forum you can see only 8 topics at once before you must scroll. On Elektron-users (with the smaller font and wider columns) you can see 15 topics. This makes is much easier to spot where the activity is. This problem is even worse when I’m reading a thread. Because the avatars are so large and everything is squashed into the middle , I can only see a small number of messages, and the text is dominated by the graphical elements, including the horrible horrible soundcloud bars. I don’t want to link my soundcloud account because the bar is so big that it acts as a massive heavy horiztonal divider between Every. Damn. Forum. Post. I mean really, if I’m reading a thread where one person makes three different comments, what’s the use of seeing a giant souncloud bar under every comment? The bars are so big and heavy I feel like I’m in jail.
I don’t like the sidebars either. the only choices I get are ‘On Fire’ and ‘Recent activity’ (which often duplicate each other), and the fonts are bigger than the forum topic list, so my attention is continually being drawn over to the right side of the screen for no reason. On the other hand, things like messages and subscriptions are buried under my profile up in the top-right corner, so I can’t see if I have a new message unless I reach up and click on it. Just now I found I got a message from another user 2 days ago, but there was nothing to indicate this information to me. The ‘Notifications’ and ‘Forum’ activity subpages (from the home page) are also useless because every single message is given its own entry, instead of a summary telling my that a small number of threads have ‘7 new replies’ or whatever. I am finding it hard to keep up with the threads I participate in because the design is so user-hostile.
I know designers like whitespace and all, but about 50% of my screen is just empty space. I don’t visit a forum every day to look at it (as designers seem to imagine), I visit it to read and the reading experience is very, very bad. I feel like I am stuck in a children’s book with bright red text everywhere, chunky fonts, and a minimum number of words.
Posting and commenting is worse again, with the tiny interface where you are limited to a box and the empty space in the box is greater than the text entry area, so you can only see one paragraph at a time. I mean, why is there so much empty space below the ‘create topic’ button? For writing tutorials or any kind of in-depth discussion this is a killer, who wants to scroll up and down all the time? I find it difficult to write or edit a longish message like this because If I scroll to add in a sentence to a different paragraph I can’t see anything else, and so I keep putting things in the wrong place.
Being restricted to typing in an area that is only about 5% the size of the screen is just ridiculous. Also, when I’m posting or commenting I’m stuck with this modal dialog box. I can scroll the page behind it but I can’t move the box around to look at anything. So if I am commenting on an existing thread and I want to quote someone, I have to:
[ol]
[li]open up a new tab in my browser[/li]
[li]navigate to the Elektronauts.com[/li]
[li]navigate to the forum[/li]
[li]navigate to the thread[/li]
[li]scroll to the message I want to quote[/li]
[li]copy the text[/li]
[li]go back to the first tab where I have my edit window open[/li]
[li]paste the text[/li]
[/ol]
I’m sorry, but this is fucking ridiculous. What good is a quotation button when you can’t even select text in the same browser window? What should be a 2-step operation (select and copy the text on the same page; scroll back to the edit window and paste it) now takes 8 steps.
Elektron, please rethink the design of this, Grab your designer and explain to him/her that this is not a product page or advertisement. This sort of simplified layout is OK when I am looking up product information, design is quite important in that context. But on a forum where communication and text are the most important, the design sucks. Demoting the text in favor of colors and whitespace is extremely unfriendly and is creating a barrier to the exchange of information.
I’m sorry to rant and use rude words, but the truth is that I am feeling worse and worse every day. I find I am avoiding this site because browsing and posting are such a painful experience. By contrast I still like reading Elektron-users - it is not the most beautiful site either but it does not punish me for the simple activity of reading and writing.
