I don't have a full changelist -- one of the things I'm doing for our next post, whenever that is, is asking our design team for a complete list of changes. But I can throw out some examples (I've posted this in another thread, so it's partly cut and paste -- apologies if anybody's already read it).
One of the biggest complaints back in October was that the beta site was limited to a relatively narrow max width. I don't recall exactly what it was -- around 900px, perhaps. In response to feedback, we made it responsive up to a much wider limit. We've also been busily implementing features as we work toward full parity with the old site. It's still not finished, but a lot more things work (or, at least, are implemented) now than was the case in October. We've changed how the pictures flow as window size increases. We've reduced the whitespace on all of the layouts to one degree or another (and yes, we know -- it's still too much).
I get that you're still not happy with it -- but that doesn't mean it hasn't changed. It will continue to change.
Website development is not a quick process. We've been collecting feedback -- not everybody reads Slashdot concurrently, and we don't want to leave out the people who didn't happen to be around on Wednesday and Thursday. After that's done, we need to decide what needs to be done, what order we're going to do it in.. and then the engineers will start hacking at the code. (In reality, they're already hacking at it, to continue implementing features while we work toward parity.)
That's why the beta site is... beta. And why the Classic site is still around, and will continue to be around for quite a while. I'm sorry it's not as fast as you'd like, but it's entirely incorrect to say we're not acting on feedback.
For one, we drastically upped the maximum page width. Back in October, people very strongly complained that it was too narrow, and made the site difficult to use on bigger displays. So we fixed it.
We also reduced the amount of whitespace. Yes, we know a lot of people think there's still too much, and we haven't finalized it yet.
The original beta was also very feature-incomplete. We've implemented moderation, the ability to add replies, a number of comment navigation options, story submission. We've re-arranged some page elements to make them fit better.
You may not like the current design -- that's your right. But that doesn't mean we aren't incorporating reader feedback. I'm sorry if it's not as quick as you like, but that's why the classic site is still around, and why we're continuing to ask for feedback.
I'm afraid I can't answer all of your questions, as I'm not part of the team who decided on the redesign.
What I can tell you is that website designs need to continue updating. Slashdot has seen a few redesigns over the years, most recently in 2011. I get that it's really jarring to have it all change at once, rather than incrementally. The thing with minor tweaks and the occasional new feature is that the need for those things never ends -- it's a treadmill.
Keeping up on the treadmill is what some sites choose to do, and it's perfectly valid -- but you also lose the opportunity to make significant changes, and eventually your site just looks old and ill-maintained. This redesign is an attempt to catch up and keep the site current -- not just for now, but for several years from now.
It's not a re-targeting -- we don't want different demographics. But we also don't want to turn off new users in our existing demographic.
Given the way you guys are going back to yesterday's threads and downmodding all the posts about Beta wholesale after you know that other mods won't see them to push them back up again, you will forgive me for not giving your voice credibility.
Fortunately, you don't have to rely on credibility. Here's a story more than a day old. About 15% of the comments are rated 4 or 5, which is a pretty typical percentage, and all of them are complaining about the beta. It's like that in a lot of stories. As for submissions -- well, they pass through the firehose like everything else, and why you don't ever see submissions from a week ago sticking around in it. That's why it's called the firehose.
We've deleted nothing, as the vast sea of comments complaining about the beta in every story should attest to. All submissions are still around, too, though they eventually drop out of the firehose like any other submission does. If you want a simple test, bookmark the URL whenever you submit something.
I suppose it wouldn't be a redesign without conspiracy theories, though.
We're well aware that people come here for the comments. That's why comments are at the top of our list of features that need more work on the Beta site. I agree that "audience" was the wrong word to use. Another commenter described us as a chalkboard, and I think that's fairly apt.
When design/feature discussions happen, we editors are most fiercely protective of the commenters and submitters, because you're the ones who drive the site.
However, since you claim to have been receiving valuable feedback about the beta experiment since at least 5 months ago, why is it that the nature of the beta has not radically changed to accommodate that feedback?
In some ways, it has. For example, one of the biggest complaints back in October was that the beta site was limited to a relatively narrow max width. I don't recall exactly what it was -- around 900px, perhaps. In response to feedback, we made it responsive up to a much wider limit. We've also been busily implementing features as we work toward full parity with the old site. (It's not there yet, and we know it.)
Has it changed radically? Well, clearly not, for a lot of people. But it has changed, and in ways readers asked for. It will continue to do so! We brought it back to everybody's attention again specifically so we could continue to get reader opinions on it. If we didn't care, we'd just flip the switch to set it live and not look back.
What factors does slashmedia use to make these determinations, and why do you believe that a radical change instead of a refinement and polish of the current system is in order? Can you please elaborate on some of the design choices that slashmedia has taken in the beta, ans why they felt these were good decisions...
I'm afraid I can't answer this, since I'm not part of the design team. I will ask them to share their thoughts on design choices, but I can't promise anything.
I'm pretty sure contemporary ideas about UX design are inappropriate for Slashdot.
Sure, I can certainly agree that not all current design trends belong on Slashdot. I mean, I have my own personal preferences for the look and behavior of the websites I use.
That said, while I'm no UX expert (and before anyone asks, no, I wasn't one of the designers of the Beta site), I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
Anyway, regarding your suggestion: comment editing is something we've gone back and forth on for a number of years. The immutability of reader comments has always been a prized feature. I don't think we ever discussed versioning/revision control, though, and I really like that idea. I can't make any promises, particularly with the amount of work that's ahead of us with the beta, but I'll run it up the totem pole.
User expectations change; it's the nature of the web.
For example, fire up the Wayback Machine and look at some popular sites from a decade ago. Many of them look radically different. Can you honestly say they wouldn't look out of place alongside modern sites? If you were browsing through modern news sites and you stumbled across this, would it not give you pause? At some point, your website just looks old and unmaintained -- that's why virtually every major website updates their design.
It's not necessarily a lightswitch moment, and you personally may not care. But a lot of people do.
I just don't see why you had to start over with a completely new design when the old one works so well. A few tweaks is all that is needed.
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
The comment system isn't finished yet, that's for sure -- but we've implemented a number of changes and improvements in response to the feedback from the October launch.
We can't implement every suggestion -- some contradict each other, and there's only so much time in the day. But we are listening and incrementally improving the experience based on what users are telling us.
If I may ask: has anyone in the userbase specifically requested that classic view support be dropped?
No, of course not. And make no mistake, we'd love to leave the classic site around in perpetuity for those who prefer it.
But it does take engineering resources to maintain. Maybe not a lot, but not a trivial amount either. There are a number of concerns here; eventually, something about the old site will break, and we'll have to dedicate engineering time to fixing it. Whenever we roll out a new features on the new version, we'll have to think (read:test) to make sure it doesn't screw anything up on the old site.
Our engineering team is small. We're going to leave the classic site up for some period of time, but it's a non-zero drain on limited resources. And as time goes by, that drain only gets bigger, as the codebases diverge.
Regardless, I'll bring it up again with the engineering team and see if we can at least extend classic site some more.
"Involved" doesn't mean "nod and go 'mm-hmm' then do whatever the fuck you were planning to do anyway;" it means "actually make changes to implement the community's desires."
I agree. However, I'll add that it doesn't necessarily mean implementing everything everybody asks for. A number of the things in your list are due to be implemented and/or fixed.
Horizontal space is a trickier question. Some readers demand words that go from one side of their 1920px-wide monitor to the other. Usability studies have shown that doing so actually decreases readability. Given that we can't set a different width for every user, we've got to try to figure something out. We also have to take into account comment indenting.
I don't know what how the horizontal space situation will shake out. I know I'd personally like the right rail to disappear once the content ends. But I'm not one of the designers or engineers, and I don't know the difficulties and tradeoffs in doing so. It may or may not end up to your liking. If it doesn't, I'm truly sorry -- but that doesn't mean we're not listening to you and weighing your opinion along with the opinions of other users.
Can you define "constructive suggestions?" Perhaps provide an example or two?
There have been a lot of great emails from users with tweaked screenshots showing how they'd prefer the layout to look. Some people have even sent us CSS/HTML tweaks.
But mainly, it just helps to have a detailed explanation of a specific task, and how the beta site prevents you from completing/accomplishing it. For example, direct links to individual comments isn't implemented yet. So, if you were to say, "Every time I leave a comment, I go to the comment link and bookmark it in my browser to keep track of it. The beta doesn't let give me direct comment links, so I can't do this anymore.' That would be something well-defined and actionable.
Presumably what they desire is more money, and they believe the redesign is a way to increase ad revenue.
The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away. Or keep new users from giving it a shot. (Not necessarily new types of users.) Websites have to evolve. To me, it's a necessary evil. I'll occasionally use the Wayback Machine to check out sites I frequented 10 years ago, and it often strikes me how bad the old versions look, comparatively. They didn't look bad when I used it, but they do now.
Sometime's that's done incrementally, and sometime's it's done in huge chunks. We're doing the latter, of course. Unfortunately, we can't just think about what the site looks like today -- we have to think about what it will look like in three years.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a full changelist -- one of the things I'm doing for our next post, whenever that is, is asking our design team for a complete list of changes. But I can throw out some examples (I've posted this in another thread, so it's partly cut and paste -- apologies if anybody's already read it).
One of the biggest complaints back in October was that the beta site was limited to a relatively narrow max width. I don't recall exactly what it was -- around 900px, perhaps. In response to feedback, we made it responsive up to a much wider limit. We've also been busily implementing features as we work toward full parity with the old site. It's still not finished, but a lot more things work (or, at least, are implemented) now than was the case in October. We've changed how the pictures flow as window size increases. We've reduced the whitespace on all of the layouts to one degree or another (and yes, we know -- it's still too much).
I get that you're still not happy with it -- but that doesn't mean it hasn't changed. It will continue to change.
Website development is not a quick process. We've been collecting feedback -- not everybody reads Slashdot concurrently, and we don't want to leave out the people who didn't happen to be around on Wednesday and Thursday. After that's done, we need to decide what needs to be done, what order we're going to do it in.. and then the engineers will start hacking at the code. (In reality, they're already hacking at it, to continue implementing features while we work toward parity.)
That's why the beta site is... beta. And why the Classic site is still around, and will continue to be around for quite a while. I'm sorry it's not as fast as you'd like, but it's entirely incorrect to say we're not acting on feedback.
For one, we drastically upped the maximum page width. Back in October, people very strongly complained that it was too narrow, and made the site difficult to use on bigger displays. So we fixed it.
We also reduced the amount of whitespace. Yes, we know a lot of people think there's still too much, and we haven't finalized it yet.
The original beta was also very feature-incomplete. We've implemented moderation, the ability to add replies, a number of comment navigation options, story submission. We've re-arranged some page elements to make them fit better.
You may not like the current design -- that's your right. But that doesn't mean we aren't incorporating reader feedback. I'm sorry if it's not as quick as you like, but that's why the classic site is still around, and why we're continuing to ask for feedback.
I'm afraid I can't answer all of your questions, as I'm not part of the team who decided on the redesign.
What I can tell you is that website designs need to continue updating. Slashdot has seen a few redesigns over the years, most recently in 2011. I get that it's really jarring to have it all change at once, rather than incrementally. The thing with minor tweaks and the occasional new feature is that the need for those things never ends -- it's a treadmill.
Keeping up on the treadmill is what some sites choose to do, and it's perfectly valid -- but you also lose the opportunity to make significant changes, and eventually your site just looks old and ill-maintained. This redesign is an attempt to catch up and keep the site current -- not just for now, but for several years from now.
It's not a re-targeting -- we don't want different demographics. But we also don't want to turn off new users in our existing demographic.
Fortunately, you don't have to rely on credibility. Here's a story more than a day old. About 15% of the comments are rated 4 or 5, which is a pretty typical percentage, and all of them are complaining about the beta. It's like that in a lot of stories. As for submissions -- well, they pass through the firehose like everything else, and why you don't ever see submissions from a week ago sticking around in it. That's why it's called the firehose.
We've deleted nothing, as the vast sea of comments complaining about the beta in every story should attest to. All submissions are still around, too, though they eventually drop out of the firehose like any other submission does. If you want a simple test, bookmark the URL whenever you submit something.
I suppose it wouldn't be a redesign without conspiracy theories, though.
We're well aware that people come here for the comments. That's why comments are at the top of our list of features that need more work on the Beta site. I agree that "audience" was the wrong word to use. Another commenter described us as a chalkboard, and I think that's fairly apt.
When design/feature discussions happen, we editors are most fiercely protective of the commenters and submitters, because you're the ones who drive the site.
Here's our official survey. Thanks for contributing.
Thanks for the detailed list.
In some ways, it has. For example, one of the biggest complaints back in October was that the beta site was limited to a relatively narrow max width. I don't recall exactly what it was -- around 900px, perhaps. In response to feedback, we made it responsive up to a much wider limit. We've also been busily implementing features as we work toward full parity with the old site. (It's not there yet, and we know it.)
Has it changed radically? Well, clearly not, for a lot of people. But it has changed, and in ways readers asked for. It will continue to do so! We brought it back to everybody's attention again specifically so we could continue to get reader opinions on it. If we didn't care, we'd just flip the switch to set it live and not look back.
I'm afraid I can't answer this, since I'm not part of the design team. I will ask them to share their thoughts on design choices, but I can't promise anything.
I'll ask the design team.
Sure, I can certainly agree that not all current design trends belong on Slashdot. I mean, I have my own personal preferences for the look and behavior of the websites I use.
That said, while I'm no UX expert (and before anyone asks, no, I wasn't one of the designers of the Beta site), I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve. You may disagree on the particulars -- and clearly, a lot of people do -- but I'm surprised so many attribute that to malice.
Anyway, regarding your suggestion: comment editing is something we've gone back and forth on for a number of years. The immutability of reader comments has always been a prized feature. I don't think we ever discussed versioning/revision control, though, and I really like that idea. I can't make any promises, particularly with the amount of work that's ahead of us with the beta, but I'll run it up the totem pole.
User expectations change; it's the nature of the web.
For example, fire up the Wayback Machine and look at some popular sites from a decade ago. Many of them look radically different. Can you honestly say they wouldn't look out of place alongside modern sites? If you were browsing through modern news sites and you stumbled across this, would it not give you pause? At some point, your website just looks old and unmaintained -- that's why virtually every major website updates their design.
It's not necessarily a lightswitch moment, and you personally may not care. But a lot of people do.
Here's the link: Slashdot classic. I'll add it to the summary above.
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
The comment system isn't finished yet, that's for sure -- but we've implemented a number of changes and improvements in response to the feedback from the October launch.
We can't implement every suggestion -- some contradict each other, and there's only so much time in the day. But we are listening and incrementally improving the experience based on what users are telling us.
No, of course not. And make no mistake, we'd love to leave the classic site around in perpetuity for those who prefer it.
But it does take engineering resources to maintain. Maybe not a lot, but not a trivial amount either. There are a number of concerns here; eventually, something about the old site will break, and we'll have to dedicate engineering time to fixing it. Whenever we roll out a new features on the new version, we'll have to think (read:test) to make sure it doesn't screw anything up on the old site.
Our engineering team is small. We're going to leave the classic site up for some period of time, but it's a non-zero drain on limited resources. And as time goes by, that drain only gets bigger, as the codebases diverge.
Regardless, I'll bring it up again with the engineering team and see if we can at least extend classic site some more.
Alice Hill does not work for Dice, and hasn't for a while. She has nothing to do with the Beta. Put down the pitchfork.
I agree. However, I'll add that it doesn't necessarily mean implementing everything everybody asks for. A number of the things in your list are due to be implemented and/or fixed.
Horizontal space is a trickier question. Some readers demand words that go from one side of their 1920px-wide monitor to the other. Usability studies have shown that doing so actually decreases readability. Given that we can't set a different width for every user, we've got to try to figure something out. We also have to take into account comment indenting.
I don't know what how the horizontal space situation will shake out. I know I'd personally like the right rail to disappear once the content ends. But I'm not one of the designers or engineers, and I don't know the difficulties and tradeoffs in doing so. It may or may not end up to your liking. If it doesn't, I'm truly sorry -- but that doesn't mean we're not listening to you and weighing your opinion along with the opinions of other users.
There have been a lot of great emails from users with tweaked screenshots showing how they'd prefer the layout to look. Some people have even sent us CSS/HTML tweaks.
But mainly, it just helps to have a detailed explanation of a specific task, and how the beta site prevents you from completing/accomplishing it. For example, direct links to individual comments isn't implemented yet. So, if you were to say, "Every time I leave a comment, I go to the comment link and bookmark it in my browser to keep track of it. The beta doesn't let give me direct comment links, so I can't do this anymore.' That would be something well-defined and actionable.
You can do this by switching from Standard mode to Classic using the button in this screenshot: http://imgur.com/6wnb138
Unicode support is just a matter of finding time to do it. We've got a small engineering team and lots of work to do.
Better comment loading/filtering is in the works.
I can't speak to the indenting, but I'll bring it up with the designers.
The whole point of the beta is to get feedback from the community. If we were ignoring you, we would have just flipped the switch and not looked back.
I can't promise we'll implement every suggestion (indeed, many are contradictory), but we absolutely consider them.
Believe me, there's no confusion about the immensity of the community's contribution to the site.
This is very true. Please keep the feedback coming. The more constructive, the better.
The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away. Or keep new users from giving it a shot. (Not necessarily new types of users.) Websites have to evolve. To me, it's a necessary evil. I'll occasionally use the Wayback Machine to check out sites I frequented 10 years ago, and it often strikes me how bad the old versions look, comparatively. They didn't look bad when I used it, but they do now.
Sometime's that's done incrementally, and sometime's it's done in huge chunks. We're doing the latter, of course. Unfortunately, we can't just think about what the site looks like today -- we have to think about what it will look like in three years.