(2015-11-21, 8:05 pm)ファブリス Wrote: The index page could be better but overall I think the design is pretty clean and readable. Have you ever seen a typical forum, without Ad BlocK?Hell, I don't see typical websites without AdBlock lol. Blogs are the worst.
Most buttons on the forum are links styled as buttons anyway. It makes sense for mobile devices so they are clearer tap targets. I think there is a good balance between such buttons and links.
On mobile devices though, you would usually have that kind of thing in a navigation menu that drops out. At least that's the general trend these days.
Quote:And hide the categories, one of the main navigation elements in a dropdown where many users will miss it? Makes no sense.I don't know. If they were moved into an expandable div like element that was triggered via a button that said "Forum Navigation" with the "New Topic" button right above it. Do you think people would overlook it? On the desktop side, I'm not actually saying move everything somewhere else on the page, I think the location of the sub-forum buttons is good, more like "compress" them unless you need them.
Quote:I like how you casually put down my work as aesthetic instead of being functional. =) Your post is pretty hilarious to be honest. Much of the work I did, creating a completely unique, and new theme for MyBB, is not called aesthetic freedom, it's called *design*. Design takes in account usability. Readability of the page is helped with contrast, alignment, etc. Contrast of size between important and secondary buttons, contrast of colour,etc. Repetition of shapes, and elements throughout the pages. I think I did a pretty good job with the colour scheme that is consistent between index, forum, and thread views.But designing something is still applying a sense of aesthetics to something. Calling it "aesthetic freedom" doesn't demean the technical aspects of what goes into designing something, at least it doesn't to me. Google's Material Design and Apple's Flat Design still have aesthetic decisions to them. I think the color choices/branding are great, I think the layout is great. I'm just simply pointing out that I think the index page is feeling a little cluttered.
Quote:The index page is probably the hardest one to get rightDefinitely.
Quote:I think I also did a pretty sweet job making the forum scale down all the way down to 480px phones.The Responsive side is quite well done and its not something that's easy to do if you are doing it by hand vs using something like Bootstrap or Foundation. (I do make a point about the categories below though)
And on my iPad 3rd gen simply switching between portrait and landscape switches the thread view between the "classic" (authors by the side), and "vertical" (author info in between posts). Pretty neat!
Quote:Probably the better way, if you want to suggest a better design for elements like the Categories, is to show me a good design somewhere on the web.Actually you are quite right. This is probably what I should do. If I get some time I'll try and see if I can do something to demonstrate what I had in mind, but I'm pretty shit at front-end web dev stuff. CSS gives me headaches, so there's no way I could have ever done what you did here.
Quote:But even on mobile, I think the Categories work ok? You can scroll very fast on phones typically with fingers drag gestures. So I figured it's probably better to scroll down, than hide them in a accordion, or add more cruft to the top of the page.Actually just looked at the site again on my phone and didn't realize the sub forum buttons were at the bottom of the page. When I had looked at it on the beta site weeks ago, I mainly payed attention to how posts and the board looked on mobile (they look great). Having the navigation at the bottom seems a little weird to me. If you are concerned about new users landing on the site, my feeling is that a lot people will open up the index page and probably think the the site only has one forum, assuming they don't read the "Recent Topics" thing. They won't see a button to hit to show them the other forums. If they hit anything, I'd bet it'd be the sprocket for Advanced Search.
I don't know how you feel about navigation bars at the top, but they stop lots of tedious scrolling and centralize a lot of the core functions a user would want to do (search, navigate, login/access their account). If you take a look at most shopping sites like amazon.com, newegg.com, rakuten.com, whatever. They all have a button you can hit for browsing in subcategories. Sometimes its pop out, sometimes its just an anchor jump (ie: they put the menu at the bottom of the page kind of like you did), sometimes its a jump to an entirely new page; but they give you the navigation tools as soon as the page opens.
Quote:I still don't get what's the problem with Categories though.
I guess it's just my aesthetic choice on things. I'm only trying to offer some constructive feedback, I'm not trying to say all your hard work is shit or anything like that. I think the site is a great improvement over the old version and am only offering suggestions that I think might improve the user experience. I'm not a UX guy by any stretch of the imagination, that's why I asked what other people thought, I could very well be the only person that thinks its cluttered. I come to the site every day, sometimes multiple times a day, so I just want the place to look the best that it can.EDIT:
LOL I just noticed you can see Google and Bing's crawlers as users. That's awesome.
Edited: 2015-11-22, 3:14 am