Mod Browsing Overhaul Discussion

[JobiWanUK]

In the meantime, despite all this tinkering, every single time I try to upload a mod I get 'you do not have the required permissions to perform this action' and then get told my mod isn't published when it is, and I have to wait. It's been acknowledged as a bug several months ago yet you continue push new stuff without fixing the old stuff that's actually essential to be working correctly.

 

[JobiWanUK]

Also, Nexus, you might want to update your time settings to BST, it's still in GMT.

[nefariouslover]

2 hours ago, carpesangrea said:

I read the new post in its entirety.  It was a lot of words to say in the most patronizing way possible "we hear you, we know you hate it, but we're doing it anyway".  It didn't actually do anything whatsoever to alleviate the complaints people have had since the launch of the new layout.

Do these people think we're stupid?

100%

 

For those of us who've been online long enough, s#*!'s got a particular smell.

 

This smells like "We're fully committed, we're failing forward with this change no matter what, if our heels were any more dug in we'd need an earth mage to get them out".

 

 

 

If they can answer one simple question, I'd take everything I said back, and sit quietly and wait for the discourse to unfold:


What would it actually take for Nexus Mods Staff to admit they were wrong and fully roll back all the site UX/UI changes?

 

 

 

If there's no answer, or no realistic answer, and it's just some s#*! like "a catastrophic bug or issue with the new layout that we couldn't fix in a reasonable amount of time" then that's it folks, back up, pack up, show's over, literally pointless talking to these people, walk away and just never give them your money or support again, and start keeping an eye open for alternatives and competitors.

 

 

There's only one correct answer:  "We see now that we really need to do a poll with a much broader audience to see how they feel about the new UI/UX.  We'll put up a poll, spam you via email for a few weeks, glue it as a banner at the top of the website, put a reminder everytime you download a file, and provide users the ability to swap back and forth between the new and old UI/UX - We'll run that for a month, and then based on user feedback, which will be 100% transparent and public the whole time, we'll make a final decision". 

 

 

 

I very slightly know-ish some very big names in modding.  I went and tracked down some recent comments they've made regarding the changes, and feedback preceeding these changes.  I will not quote or hint at who they are or what exactly they said.  It boils down to "Wow, they didn't listen" and "Wow, they ignored feedback" - Directly contrary to this narrative that they've been collecting feedback for quite some time and that it was overwhelmingly positive.  It seems, from the comments I'm reading/seeing, from sources much more trustworthy than the people who've been speaking on behalf of Nexus so far, that even amongst people who were opted in and giving feedback, people were very frequently telling them that this was bad, to remove or revert this or that, etc.

 

 

Believe who you what, I guess.

 

But my 2c is that I put more stock in almost anyone or anything else other than an official mouthpiece telling me in a smug tone that everyone loves a thing while the thing is so universally reviled that every single post on the subject I've seen so far is people aggressively shitting on it and telling them to change it back.

Edited Tuesday at 02:01 AM by nefariouslover

[cyan49]

Luckily, I just found the Hot Jar survey and answered it, but after closing it, I remembered one thing to put in a bug report. On the mod page, including my mod, under Permissions and credits, Donation Points system, it says "Please log in to find out whether this mod is receiving Donation Points" but I am logged/signed in. The link leads to the following message: "You are already signed in." It's likely unrelated to the Mod Browsing Overhaul, but I can say with confidence that it at least happened after the site was updated.

[HeyYou]

23 minutes ago, nefariouslover said:

If they can answer one simple question, I'd take everything I said back, and sit quietly and wait for the discourse to unfold:


What would it actually take for Nexus Mods Staff to admit they were wrong and fully roll back all the site UX/UI changes?

That will never happen. Even when it is patently obvious to everyone else.

[caladier1]

Used the site for a good while happily discovering mods and applying them to games. This change has me feeling like I am fighting the website UI and searches to do what was very quick before, find new and updated mods, read brief descriptions, and then if interesting look closer. Missing the comments search as well, usually a good place to research conflicts between mods or things to tweak. Now there is more clicking and scrolling to get to or search for where I am wanting to go.  Additionally the site theme changes to background and text are exhausting to look at over a period of time.  There's less information on the game pages probably due to the increased space where everything is so far apart now. Also an odd to me priority on collections vs new and updated mods.

I've been able resolve most of this with the CSS mod changes to mod the modding web site, thanks to the community for this, helps to make reading site pages not exhausting so quickly.

If it was a good user experience change the change itself would be intuitive, have less clicking scrolling to get to where a user is wanting to go, feature parity, and we or at least probably myself at least wouldn't be here talking about it or thinking about the UI/UX in any way. I would much prefer to just be happily discovering mods and applying them to games.

[Khaalis]

7 hours ago, HadToRegister said:

Most sites I use have a Mobile Version and a Desktop version, or have a Mobile APP.

Ah but that requires double the inve$tment...

[Khaalis]

5 hours ago, carpesangrea said:

I read the new post in its entirety.  It was a lot of words to say in the most patronizing way possible "we hear you, we know you hate it, but we're doing it anyway".  It didn't actually do anything whatsoever to alleviate the complaints people have had since the launch of the new layout.

Do these people think we're stupid?

I've been telling this to people for days. STOP grousing about the change. It will change nothing. This decision was made long ago (at least a year if not more)  and set into concrete the minute they started putting $$$ into the development. Whether we like it or not doesn't matter. The changes are here and the best we can hope for is enough pressure on specific topics to get small changes made to improve the hot mess we have.

I do UX/UI design for apps as part of my job and trust me, you can't get blood from a stone. If some senior "web designer" or 'managerial type' says "This is the way we want the design" regardless of what the UX/UI specialists tell them, you're going to end up with a bad design. 

[morrighubadb]

1. Can we tag the mods by language so that if you speak Portuguese or Romanian or whatever, you can find mods in your language and I, who do not speak either of those, can exclude them from my searches so that they don't show up unless no other results are found? 
   1. Example:  Right now 7 of the 20 mods on the first page are in other languages.  
   2. Since the language is often mentioned in either the images or the description, AI to tag them should be extremely helpful.  
   3. We can vote on the correctness of the tags which should help to train the AI.  
2. Better searches - 
   1. Ability to tag the 14-year-old fantasy "consort" mods, bikini armor, etc. 
   2. AI would be great at tagging these based on the images provided in the upload.  That way I can exclude it from my searches.  For those that want this kind of tripe, having it tagged properly should take you right to it.  We both win.  
   3. Have an easter egg tag for things like the Skyrim mud crab merchant, idiot son, corgi follower, etc.  
   4. Batman in Skyrim is not lore friendly.  Figure out how to tag mods that aren't lore friendly for the purists among us.  
   5. Skyrim Waltz is NOT an adult mod.  It's literally waltzing just like you see on Dancing with the Stars.  Ya'll need a better handle on what is and is not "adult".  Seriously...  Especially since the naked, overly endowed followers aren't adult... Just sayin'.
3. Can you offer a few themes?  Maybe a high-contrast option as well as light, dark, and etc.?  It should be a matter of just applying the correct color codes to the CSS style sheet.  You are using CSS styles, right???
   1. Maybe consider doing something like Slack, where give users a UI to set various styles to suit themselves.  
4. I second the comment about the dates for things.  I play Skyrim mostly and a mod that was great in its day is often no longer the best choice.  Example - FNIS, Nemesis, and Pandora.  Very little actually requires FNIS these days.  Nemesis superseded it and now Pandora is superseding both of them, but still has some issues to work out.  Since Pandora is in active development, I expect that Pandora will become a much better, more modern choice.  
5. Collect modder resources and offer some on line training on how to mod your game properly.  Reddit has been filling this gap for a while, but much of the Reddit community there is becoming somewhat toxic due to frustration from the constant flood of noob questions.
   1. The misuse of tools like WryeBash, NifScope, etc. is an on-going problem and creates a lot of frustration for users and for the community who tries to support them only to find out that the noob is source of his own woe. 
   2. Crashlogger or Trainwreck should be part of every single Skyrim collection by default.  I'm sure that other games have similar tools.  If the collection author wants to remove it, make them take an extra step or two to remove it prior to publishing the collection for others to consume.  
6. Filter out potentially broken mods or give me a search to do that myself.  Many mods are beautiful but have issues.
   1. LOOT is often quite useful at finding mods with "wild edits"   If LOOT can do it, why not Nexus?   
   2. I just had to remove a shield mod from my load order because the nav meshes in the mod were causing the game to crash to the desktop when I'd approach certain locations.  Why in the heck does a new in-game object need nav meshes? 
   3. I've also had this happen with a custom follower and for the same reason - nav meshes. Not sure why my custom follower needed to have nav meshes, but there it is.  If you're not adding places to the game, what good is mucking about with the nav meshes?
7. Create a community for modders themselves and police it a bit to keep it from becoming so nasty and toxic.  
   1. I can't tell you how many modders I've seen leave recently due to the pouty, demanding, or just plain nasty comments.  
   2. I've also seen modders who basically responded with "F U" when a bug is reported, who hide or remove any hint of criticism no matter how carefully its couched or how accurate it is, or who just plain flatly deny that they might possibly have a bug in their mod.  No one wants to admit that they might have an ugly baby.  I get that, but that's not what's being said.  Bugs happen because things don't always interact with the game, the game engine, or other mods in ways that can be anticipated.  Accept that and move on from it.  
8. Shaders, lighting, LODs, and ENBs also seem to be pretty problematic, at least for Skyrim and probably other games too.  
   1. Some suggested settings, mods, etc. might be useful.  
9. Give me a place to back up & restore my load order from LOOT.  It should be a simple, text based file that should compress nicely.  Give me a few iterations of it with premium and perhaps 1 with the free account.  

[ozoak]

So the design is ... awful.

Information density is a massive step back, and to what? Accommodate the instanced visits from people who get Nexusmods page results while doing searches on their phones? No-one on a phone is, or ever was, 'browsing' nexusmods seriously.

It is *less* responsive than before.

This conversation is hard to follow, but I gather some polling was randomly offered to users for a period of time when visiting the site, the polling was in pop-ups which are often blocked by privacy or adblocking browser tools, there were limited polling slots, and the results of the polling outside of a small insight (below) became immediately private once poll-slots were exhausted.

https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13510484-mod-browsing-overhaul-rollout/#comment-130496079

"Game listing pages scored 4.4/5 (113 responses)
Mod listing pages scored 4.3/5 (756 responses)
Game home pages scored 4.0/5 (1,219 responses)"

If the above numbers are to be believed, is that a maximum possible total of 2088 individuals responded to the polls?
There are according to the main page nearing 61 million users (60,994,488). I assume that's registered users, not including the randoms who stumble to the site through search results.

Admins of this site cannot possibly be surprised that users are rejecting the conclusions drawn from that sampling. I have to imagine that the polling was offered to people who opted into the Beta site, because otherwise how would a person know their answer to whatever questions were asked.

I would have thought more relevant stats than a poll would have been, for a start:
* how many people opted in to the Beta?
* what was the Beta retention rate? ie: how many people stayed in the Beta
* what was the engagement level of people opted in to Beta? ie: what was their usage level

A certain amount of, perhaps justified, hubris might come in to play. I mean after all, even if everyone hated it, where are they going to go with such a deep pool of mods available.

I would imagine the best way to actually gauge user feedback, if these threads are not moving the needle, would be to re-poll users with more appropriate methods and participant qualification. If the expectation is to have vocal users believe that they are a vocal minority, it might be best to adequately demonstrate that, not just hand wave it away with results from what I understand a lot of people feel was a terribly flawed poll.