I've posted most of this on the "blog" site where it's likely to be read instead of buried in a 1000-post thread, but this seems the right place to follow up with your well-articulated, broad-based global objections (with which I agree 110%), and outline the nits.
Upon re-reading this list, it's depressing just how many things about the 3.0 redesign that I'm already thinking of blocking/hacking out client-side via greasemonkey or local CSS overrides. The depressing part isn't that I'm willing to do it; I love the site enough to go through the trouble. The depressing part is that the only reaction I can have to all this effort is to start thinking about how I can disable it.
1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.
2) Whitespace:
Narrow the spacing between lines.
It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.
3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.
4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)
All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article
summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit
within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)
5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful
indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally
filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)
6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical
to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference.
"A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further
out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things
like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development
before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem
by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012,
2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months
from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone
successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot
is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know
on what day it reported on something.
P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true.
http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author
notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant.
If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.
7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.
D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks
into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.
D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments.
(or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).
D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.
8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.
Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because
I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the
site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can
forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst
defect of the redesign.
9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something
other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.
10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?
11) Will D1 be preserved? I felt that D2 was something I could adapt to,
and on occasion, I prefer its presentation to that of D1. This is
unusable, and I will leave if it goes through as presented.
12) Like most UX redesigns, I know that the overwhelming flood of negative feedback will be ignored. We're just the users. We don't know a thing about design, and it's the designer's attitude that matters, not whether it's usable or not.
This means I'm likely to be leaving for other places soon. I'm not sure where I'll go yet, but I'll find a community somewhere.
Fark's fun but nontechnical. Digg's dead, and good riddance. Reddit requires too many mouse clicks to do anything. HN is clean, elegant, technical, informative and so bone-dry sterile that I can only go there once a day.
Thank you, /., for 15 years of providing a place for funsightformative coments. There was truly no place like this. I respect that the Dice sale was as good
an exit as you could have made under the circumstances (I thought
SlashBI might have actually gotten some traction given some time),
but failing to prevent their UX people from killing Slashdot was a
pretty ignoble end to what was once a proud website.
Good luck in your future endeavors.
Signing off,
Tackhead (#54550)
5-digit-club, with 43 achievements, 2^9 +5 comments, 2^8 consecutive daily reads, embarassingly low 2^2 metamod score; I suppose I'd have metamoderated more often if the UI for that hadn't been broken in the upgrade to Slashdot 2.0, (I still don't know if +/- means that the comment was good/bad, or if the moderation done to the comment was fair/unfair, and yes, that distinction is important in the case of "+1 Funny" vs "-1 Flamebait" because the mod missed the joke) and maybe it's fitting that
Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer was my last +5.
(P.S.: Does anyone know how I can tell how many comments I've posted in total? I'd like to know before I go.)