kat1004

So ACCESSIBILITY feedback gets put in the AESTHETIC thread... Very appropriate...

The new search is extremely overwhelming and disorienting. The rest of the changes to the site can be made almost tolerable through Stylish or other extensions (though should not HAVE to be dealt with in such a way), but there is no way for a user for whom the new search is overwhelming, overstimulating, distressing, and disorienting to fix this significant accessibility problem. If it can't be brought back as the only search, because the unnecessary update is extremely important to you guys (or maybe there's a "real" reason to keep something that makes users click more things and have a big box pop up in their face even when it's OVERWHELMING and OVERSTIMULATING), then at least bring the dropdown back as an ACCESSIBILITY OPTION for users for whom it is a necessity.

I don't have your particular eye problems - I have my own that are partially related to my mental disability - but oh my god, that is headache-inducing. Even without the weird JPEG artifacting from the screenshot, I'd have a hard time reading that... ironically, the JPEG artifacting actually makes it *easier* to read. It's frustrating that the guidelines (GUIDELINES, NOT RULES) Nexus's designers went with... very clearly only cater to one specific kind of visual disability and don't seem to take into account mental disabilities like autism and ADHD. Side note: Speaking as an AuDHD user, PLEASE give us back the old dropdown search instead of this new, distressing, overstimulating popup search. I have to go directly to the main advanced search page to look anything up now because of how overstimulated the new search makes me. I am BEGGING to get back the feature that's ACTUALLY ACCESSIBLE. (caps for emphasis, not for yelling)

My god. I just read that update post and it felt so disingenuous. They may finally bring back the unique game art for each game from the previous, previous site (ca. 2012)... but they don't seem to be willing to address people who want the old-style quick search dropdown back because the new one is blatantly obtrusive and unwieldy. They claim their new color scheme is for accessibility, and ignore the people who've come out (myself included) to say that the new color scheme is inaccessible due to causing severe headaches, sometimes to the point of migraines. "We understand that very high contrast can lead to eye strain or headaches for SOME"... Yeah, and that "some" is literally anyone who doesn't actively need it. This so-called "refresh" does nothing but keep UI designer paychecks justified and try to force a mobile look on PC users. It's irritating, cumbersome, and downright unpleasant to use. And we get to just sit here and deal with it because mobile users are so much more important.

So then have Nexus run a real poll, one that isn't based on an untrustworthy website that adblockers, not users, have deemed unsafe and blocked. One that everyone, not just a fraction of a percent of users, can answer. Have it locked so only logged in users who have existed for more than... say, a couple days to a couple weeks can fill it out, so there's a guarantee that only real accounts can answer the poll in order to minimize poll fraud (users filing out the poll multiple times. And display the results publicly so that people don't get upset at the utter lack of real transparency - which is a lot of our issues with the HotJar poll outside of it being an untrustworthy site. There seems to be no transparency. If a real poll shows similar results, I'll still be upset at the drastic drop in usability, but I'll shut up and take it (and use Stylish... which really shouldn't be necessary to make a site usable for the majority but here we are) and I'm sure a lot of other people would too.

The popup search window is unwieldy and unpleasant to use. Please at least consider an option to switch back to the way Quick Search used to function.

Harming the users who use the site most frequently because they weren't randomly picked from a hat to risk their computers' safety is... very much not a good look in general. I NEVER said anything about those being "disqualifying factors" though, so don't put words in my keyboard. They should run an actual poll though, one that gets feedback from as many users as possible. See how popular the changes actually are.

The issue with HotJar is that a lot of users use adblockers, and it's generally blocked by said adblockers for being untrustworthy. The users you're getting feedback from are either casual users who don't go on the site often and don't have adblockers, or people who thought it was worth the potential risk to their computers/privacy. Run a poll that doesn't run on HotJar, see what the actual feedback is.

If they're going to work with someone with impaired vision to verify their designs, they should make three "skins" for the site. One for a light-mode, one for a "pseudo-dark" mode based on the old UI's color scheme, and one high-contrast for vision-impaired users. The vast majority of people who use this site aren't vision-impaired - or at least, not to the extent that they actively need a high-contrast color scheme - so why harm the majority of users for the sake of the minority? I'm speaking as someone for whom vision-impairment is a well known issue due to having grown up with a vision-impaired parent who did need high-contrast to see (and used the BUILT-IN high contrast color scheme WINDOWS has), but also as someone for whom this new color scheme - even with their extremely minimal tweaking - is physically painful, to the point of not being able to use the site for more than 20 minutes at a time.

A lot of the issues I have would be solved by reverting to the old Nexus colors. Like... a lot. Not all, for sure, the extreme amount of wasted space isn't going to be fixed by a simple palette swap back to the old, but at least it'd fix my inability to use the site for more than a couple minutes.

It really feels like they're hardly listening to anyone who has disabilities, to be honest. 'The vast majority are "fine" with the changes (or at least indifferent, because one reason or another - maybe they don't use the site often enough to care) so we'll tweak our color scheme to be just slightly "better".' The forums are only slightly better, the tweaks we've been shown in miniscule screenshots are only slightly better, and there's no real word on if they're actually going to fix anything. I genuinely was about to start doing a new NV playthrough when they pushed through this new UI, but I can't even look at the mod side of the site long enough to decide what mods to get anymore.

I used to browse the mod side of Nexus daily after work. This changed screenshot isn't enough to give an opinion on. I still cannot comprehend why the design team decided to go from a pleasant enough color palette that didn't cause eye strain or migraines to this painful, headache-inducing abomination. And yes, it's an abomination. Even this small screenshot still gives me a headache.

The fact that the site is now high-contrast is a serious issue. There's a reason high-contrast has always been a client-side option built into operating systems - it's not accessible in the slightest for the majority of people due to eye strain. If people need high-contrast, they don't just need it for one site. They need it for the majority of their computer-using experience. Which is why it's specifically built into the operating system as an accessibility option. Building high-contrast directly into a website causes more issues than it cures. Improving accessibility would be reverting the color scheme to the previous layout's color scheme, which was relatively decent. Neither too dark nor too light, and even if it was still ugly, it didn't cause migraines. It didn't cause eye strain. It wasn't inaccessible to people with health issues.

If they actually take the feedback related to health concerns into consideration, that'll be nice. As of the change to the new layout, though, I physically can't use the site without taking migraine relief medication. And that shouldn't be a requirement for such a popular website.

Will you guys be addressing people who have physical and/or health issues with using the new design? Because there are a lot of us complaining about headaches, migraines, eye strain, etc regarding using the new design.