javic666

I just returned to this site after a few months away. Seeing the new look compels me to respond. First, a few caveats: I’m using the site on a desktop PC with a widescreen monitor at 1920x1200 resolution, so please interpret my remarks in that context. I’m familiar with responsive design and so understand many of the tradeoffs required. But I don’t browse or download mods with my phone, so the benefits of this design approach for me are moot. Apologies if I repeat points already made by other respondents. I made an effort to read or scan through the existing responses, but I didn't have time to fully read them all. My remarks include many questions. That’s just my style. They’re rhetorical, reflecting my thought process as I interact with the site—see Steve Krug’s excellent book “Don’t Make Me Think”. No need for any answers. The previous post about constructive feedback notwithstanding :smile: , most of my comments identify issues but don’t offer solutions. That’s because I’ve been on the receiving side of this kind of feedback many times. Constructing effective solutions to user interface issues typically requires a deeper understanding of the site’s design constraints (technical, political, and economic) and implementation than I currently have, so I’ll leave that to NexusMods. Now on to my impressions… My first reaction is “Whoa! What happened here?” but I soon realize what’s going on, so I’ll temper my first impressions to distinguish what to me seem like true issues from simple unfamiliarity. I also fully acknowledge I’m using this site for free, but it’s a very useful site and I’d like to see it succeed, so I’ll spend some time here to see if I can help out. First off, I notice the empty (or ad-filled) space at the top of the page (apparently at the top of every page). Making me scroll down on every page to get to content is a UI fundamental no-no (especially on small devices). To be fair, the old site had some of this too, but the ad space on the new site is bigger (according to my informal A/B comparison). Simply finding the game in which I’m interested is now a minor pain in the butt. Clicking the “Games” button in the menu reveals a megamenu filled with “Empty favourite” tiles at the very bottom of which in tiny letters is the link for browsing games. (And BTW: I own several hundred games. Eight slots for my “favorites” among them is insufficient.) Browsing games should IMO be the easiest of easy things to do. I’m not sure the new “Search” feature is an improvement. Historically, I’ve found myself more than anything else searching mod descriptions for key words. A bit of detective work (for something that should IMO be obvious) reveals this new search box searches only file names. So the ability to search descriptions is gone? Has the old “Advanced search” been removed entirely? That’s a great loss if so. If it’s only been hidden or moved, well, that’s kinda bad too. I use advanced search pretty much every time I visit the site; it's typically the first thing I do. Navigating to a game’s mod page (Fallout 3 for this session) now shows me a pre-filtered subset of available mods (unlike the old site which shows all mods sorted in a default order). If I hadn’t been here before for this game, there’s a good chance I’d initially think this is all there is: seven mods available for Fallout 3. I guess “What’s New” is a reasonable place to start, but why is “Explore All Mods” a separate link at the right rather than another tab? I assume “Popular (All Time)” shows all mods (yes?) so what’s the difference between that and “Explore All Mods” that justifies the different treatment? I also notice the tabs offer sorting and filtering operations using one visual metaphor. Is that a good idea? Finally, what does “Popular” mean? The old site offered “Most downloaded” and “Most endorsed” as two objective ways to assess popularity and organize content. The more general and subjective term “Popular” is ambiguous and thus less usable (ambiguity is anathema to good UI design). Also, I’m not sure I understand the relationship between the tabs and the items in the “Mods” dropdown menu at the top. The two vehicles seem to offer the same content, but in different contexts. That to me is confusing (i.e., the content is named the same but looks different. Is it the same or not?) The next thing I notice is the tiles for the mods themselves. They’re bigger, and fewer of them are shown (by my count, 20 per page now compared to 30 previously). Some of the additional information in the new tiles is helpful (date and size in particular are nice to have here, although not essential) but the fading text seems a waste of space to me. The previous site showed the entire summary in a popup on hover, but here I see only a few lines of readable text that might or might not help me to decide if a particular mod is of interest. I know that “hover” is one of those things we must give up for touch-screen users (at least until the technology advances further) but it’s an extremely useful gesture for mouse/trackball users and it would be great if it could persist here. Finally, moving on to the page for a particular mod (FWIW I chose NMC’s Texture Pack for this experiment), things look fairly familiar (thank you). There’s the taller ad space at the top yet again. And I’m not sure why I need a carousel of the mod’s images here (taking up lots of space) when the images are all available (in a better format IMO) on the “Images” tab. And why do tags figure so prominently here? I sometimes use tags to find mods, but care little about what tags are assigned once a mod is found. Taken altogether, what I'm really interested in (mod details) is pretty far down the page here which isn't an optimal arrangement. Finally, the only other minor annoyance I see is on the “Files” tab where individual items are now quite a bit taller thus requiring more scrolling to see them all (I presume it’s another “responsive” concession to accommodate fat fingers). Overall, IMHO it’s not too bad as redesigns go (I’ve seen much worse). The old design had problems too as others have pointed out. The tradeoffs for responsive design here are as frustrating for desktop users as on most sites and applications these days, making things accessible for users of small-footprint device at the cost of increased tedium (additional clicking and/or scrolling) for desktop users. I've accepted that as simply the current (primitive) state of the art. On the other hand, there seems to be a rather widespread waste of screen space throughout this new site design (ad space, mod images and tags, to name a few) and you can’t blame responsive design for that. And there seems to be more “noise” here than in the previous design. (That’s subjective I know. With more time, I could probably be more specific.) Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the main work flow of this site (for mod users as opposed to authors) seems pretty simple: find game; find mod; download mod; leave. Optimize the site for this task first. Everything else is secondary. Despite my earlier resignation, the one place here where IMO the “responsive” tradeoff goes too far is in the mod browsing page, where the tiles are unnecessarily large (much larger I think than is needed to be “finger ready”) and the number of tiles shown per page is reduced. Of course, the latter constraint can apparently be lifted by paying money, revealing another instance of a common justification for redesign: increased revenue. C’est la vie. And now that net neutrality is gone, wait until NexusMods starts paying ISPs for decent download speeds. But I digress… Finally, I’ll ask (as a practicing user experience professional for many years) if you have done or have plans to do any usability testing for the new site design? Soliciting opinions is easy and free, but research clearly shows that what humans say they do (or like) and what they actually do (or like) are often only loosely related (and frequently at odds). If the goal is to make the site better (as opposed to just making it different, or meeting an arbitrary standard of “responsiveness”), usability testing is a good way to determine objectively if you’ve succeeded or not. P.S. A number of other respondents in this thread have criticized the flat design aesthetic. Yeah, I dislike it too. It’s what we get when graphic design takes priority over usability (a tension almost as old as the computer interface). But that’s the current style. And I use the word “style” intentionally. Like hem lines and lapel widths, just wait a bit and it’ll change. In the meantime, get used to “prospecting” to find out if something’s clickable or not. Sigh. :confused: