Forum - View topicANN 5.0 Beta
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Evropi
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I agree. I set it to 'List view with images' (layout button on the top right) and it's brilliant. I reckon it should be the default. Having more than 3 columns is generally a good pointer of a bad UX. By the way, I just added a couple of tasks to the site's seemingly unmaintained Redmine instance. They both discuss the problems of filtering news items. You can view and comment on my reports here and here respectively. EDIT: Looks like redirecting from the beta site to other sub-domains of animenewsnetwork.com doesn't work. Last edited by Evropi on Fri Oct 04, 2013 5:07 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10420 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Sorry to hear that. But like I said, we aren't going to change the site's look because some people prefer grid (I'm sure there are many others that prefer grid), when other will prefer the other settings. It's impossible for us to set the site to the default that everyone prefers (you can't please all the people...). If I changed the default just for you, I'd probably have your evil twin complaining that he hates the new default and also refuses to use cookies. So we set an option to allow people to set their preferences, but obviously those preferences need to be saved. A cookie is the standard way to do that. Regards, Chris |
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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It's also becoming a deprecated way to do it. Private browsing is growing in use and it's disappointing a new site change isn't taking this growing audience into consideration. May I ask why registered user settings aren't saved in their database account? |
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Dan42
Chief Encyclopedist
 Posts: 3782 Location: Montreal |
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Hmmm, that's a good point. The main reason is because we wanted this feature to be available to everyone, not just registered users (we don't believe in crippling the site for anonymous visitors). And the easiest, most straightforward way of doing that is to store the preference in a cookie, for everyone.
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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Perhaps use both options. Those who register can store while those who don't rely on cookies. I'd appreciate the option just for the compatibility in private browsing alone.
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fuzzytipsy
Posts: 16 |
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I definitely like the new look, and I am actually using the grid version on my desktop, and the list with images version on my iPad. I quite like both views, but the list works better for the smaller screen. My only complaint is that you can only go through the features one by one on the front page now, instead of the old design where you could choose which one to look at when you rolled over it.
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kuchu buranko
Posts: 6 |
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The previous sidebar on the old ANN page is off in its own world to the right hand side of the page. It doesn't feel like it's part of the news area. There was a good amount of white space and everything felt "open". With the beta layout, the continuous flow of the grid makes it feel like the sidebar should be / is part of the grid display of news articles. Combined with the very small amount of padding yet larger text size which gives off the impression of "I want to be compact but I'm not", you've made something unnecessarily busy.
Additionally, similar to the main grid area, the sidebar itself contains full text summaries and even styles articles/posts the same as articles presented in the grid (review/etc tags, comments #) which contributes to the fact that the sidebar looks like a misaligned continuation of the grid rather than a detached sidebar with different things. The darker inner shadow in the sidebar is a bit ??? too. If the sidebar is supposed to look like a page under the main content area, why doesn't the gray bit run all the way to the right? Now look at: - The NY Times: Also has columns lined up, but the text size is much smaller. - Kitkat's Android Parody: I really don't like this page, but their use of larger text similar to the ANN beta is more understandable when they have less text to begin with. Down at the bottom you see they have a chunk of text, but the size is smaller. - The BBC: Looking at the articles on their right hand side bar, they do have small summaries, but they're also styled differently (boxed in gray) which makes them clearly distinct from the rest of the articles presented. - Google News: Sidebar can be hidden easily. Articles posted on the sidebar have very similar styling to the main list of articles, but they're only headlines + the source. - Fansite: Instead of looking at big sites like the BBC or NY Times, look at Nova Crystallis for an alternate sidebar. The sidebar here is quite different from all of the bigger news site. It asks for the communities opinion and it shows you where commenting activity is going on. Additionally, I'm not sure you should leave the search bar static. Let's say I'm reading a forum discussion and someone brings up some anime I don't know much about. To pull a random example out of a hat, let's say it's BakaTest. If I want to search for BakaTest and I'm 1/2 way down the page, then I'll need to home key to the top to use the search bar on both the old and beta sites. Or I could just use the search function at the top of my browser. And what does typing BakaTest into my browser's search bar give me? Wikipedia, MAL, BakaTest Wikia, Funi's YouTube channel, then finally ANN. If I pick one of the first few, I am leaving ANN for another website. And next to the search bar, your social media icons. Why not have them open in new windows? You're getting me to leave your site to FB/Twitter where I have 50 million distractions and forget about ANN. Then even when sharing to social media, the only social media buttons are at the bottom after the article. Also, when doing responsive design, remember to see what things look like in lower resolutions. In example, the rotating banners: 
Or the sub-pages: 
Another layout issue I saw is that when you use the categories/filters, the date will re-position if there are no articles in that categories on today's date: 
Edit: On that note perhaps you should change the caching... Last edited by kuchu buranko on Tue Oct 15, 2013 3:48 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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DerekTheRed
 Posts: 3544 Location: ::Points to hand:: |
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There was an early beta version that had a floating search bar, and I liked it and would welcome it back. However, everybody else hated it with the fire of a thousand suns. Ire for it was so strong that it got removed almost immediately. |
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Dan42
Chief Encyclopedist
Posts: 3782 Location: Montreal |
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Breaking down the barrier between the sidebar and the news was very much the point of this new layout, so I'm glad that's the impression you got. We wanted to break down the walls between the different types of content, but without losing the columns/reviews in the sea of news/interest (which is why there's still a sidebar). Good point about the small amount of padding in the grid layout. That's the way our web designer made it, but I think I'm going to try increasing it.
I'm not too happy about that either, but because of the date headers there's just no way to have the sidebar boxes align with the grid. And I can't really imagine removing those.
Every site has different requirements, so while we can and we have used other sites as inspiration, we can't use their designs wholesale. In our case any design we make is strongly guided by the fact that we have both news/interest and features/columns/reviews, and we need to balance the difference in their publishing rates. As for the text size, that's the way our web designer made it and I try not to mess around too much with style decisions made by a guy who has much better design sense than me.
I thought so too and tried introducing a fixed-position search bar... and got promptly lynched.
Indeed, why not.
Without a doubt, choosing good images is a new challenge that the publishing team will eventually get used to.
Looks like there's a bug on that particular page.
IMHO I don't really think that's a problem.
If you refer to the fact that it took a long time to load "Novels" articles... we do use caching but since this is the beta there are not all that many people going there so there are not many pages in the cache. We do not pre-cache. |
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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Before the annals of history forget the truth, the design of the feature was chastised, not the option itself. Many websites today have fixed menus/footers and most people don't mind when they're kept to a minimum. But that search option was... well, let's just say its death was quick and painless. |
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kuchu buranko
Posts: 6 |
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I didn't mean that in a complimentary way. If your goal is to make the sidebar more a part of the site, then sure the current version of the site does that, but refer to my other comments about padding, text size, grid integration, etc.
I honestly didn't realize you guys had an actual dedicated web designer.
Well, I wasn't trying to say that the sidebar should be aligned. If you can't imagine the headers being gone, why not style them differently to establish that the interest columns are separate from the news grid? Cause right now it looks like they are part of the news grid, just... not aligned, with a gray background, and somehow with less padding.
I linked those sites to show you how other sites were using sidebars compared to your own. I didn't mean "go copy Google". There is no one way to utilize a sidebar, but big companies like those have surely A/B tested.
This beta looks like one poor decision after another.
Let's say web design has 3 components: Visuals, user exp, and front end code. I never saw it before, but based on what Eve replied, the implementation fell flat in one of those areas.
The CSS should use media queries to do something like hide the caption text at certain resolutions as to not cause overlap. That's just part of responsive design. it should have nothing to do with publishing at all...
It's actually not a bug. The images on the sub-pages seem to have no responsive logic so they're forcing the page to stretch in lower resolutions to accommodate the image's width. Same goes for YouTube embeds.
Naw, it isn't. It's just a consistency issue.
Gotcha. |
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Evropi
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Oh my days! The ad you place between the news items simply doesn't work in other layouts. Here is an example (too large to embed).
To be fair, I don't think it looks very pretty in the grid layout either. Personally I'd put a banner-size ad that breaks up the content if I wanted to have ads inbetween news items. Right now, it just looks woeful. |
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The King of Harts
 Posts: 6712 Location: Mount Crawford, Virginia |
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It'd be awesome if the little messages we get to inform us about when our subscriptions expire or when we receive PMs were implemented somewhere. Apparently my subscription expires in 15 hours, and I would have never* known that unless I just so happened to look up an anime title through Google and clicked the ANN link, which takes me to the old "fast." server. There I saw the message clear as day next to the log out button. And while I haven't received any PMs, I can only assume that message doesn't pop up either.
The reason I don't have any of this stuff forwarded to my email address is because it was always noted right on the website. That and the email attached to my name isn't one I use anymore. *never unless I manually checked My ANN and never until 15 hours later |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23770 |
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Yes, I would love a return to getting notice that you have received a PM.
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DerekTheRed
Posts: 3544 Location: ::Points to hand:: |
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We're allowed to change our email to a current one, in case you need to reset a password or something. |
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