Yeah, this UI ain't it, chief.
Aside from each game having its own special color, which was a nice touch, but ultimately not super essential, this new layout has some big problems. There is so much wasted space, for one thing. Individual mods are farther apart from each other. The sides of the site are just big empty voids of wasted space without the old banners. The only colors on the whole screen being black, white, and gray gradient sucks out all life from the experience.
The redone tabs have problems, too. Going from "New Today" and "New This Week" to just "New" is a good change, as those tabs were redundant, and limiting the time frames like that was pointless. But the "Updated" tab is arguably the most worthless tab of the bunch, as it's filled with a flood of notifications the user probably doesn't care about. A mod getting updated isn't necessarily a mark of quality (as evidenced by the website getting updated with this new UI), and it's not an announcement of a totally new mod experience that didn't exist before, like with the "New" tab. If people want to be notified when specific mods are updated, that's what the Wishlist and Following functions are for. So then why is Updated pushed to be the second tab next to "New?" And why get rid of the "Popular (30 Days)" tab? Having separate speedy options to view the most popular mods of all times as well as the most popular recent mods was already quite nice, but of the two, the All Time list needed the extra publicity the least. If you made the 30 Day list the default people saw, the All Time list would still get plenty of attention, as they're the top of the top of the charts, and people are going to go out of their way to see them. But unless a game is new, that list isn't going to shift around much. Of the most popular Skyrim SE mods, for example, only 2 of the top 16 mods are less than 5 years old. Everyone already knows those mods. By contrast, mods that would have shown up on the "Popular (30 Days)" list need the attention more than anything. Nobody knows about them yet. And they often get passed up in the "New" tab because they get lost in a sea of sex mods, presets, and translations. Making people have to work to see them by adding extra button clicks is going to drastically reduce the visibility they get, again, at the time they need the visibility the most. And for those of us who want to see popular new mods, either out of desire to support the mod authors, or because it's our preferred method of curation, only to have extra steps unnecessarily put in our way like this, it's just a bad experience, and it feels like the people who put this update together didn't put any thought into what they were doing or the experience they were crafting.
I don't get involved in forum posts, ever, but this new UI is really bad. And after seeing the devs say they've been "getting mostly positive feedback on it so far," I had to go out of my way to write all this, and beg the Nexus Mods team to revert these terrible changes.
