Mod Browsing Overhaul Discussion

[iammetro]

The very first thing I did when logging back in for the first time in months was search the settings for a way to turn this new UI off. It's nowhere near as information dense as the previous version of the site, and I'm genuinely considering using custom CSS to just gut the site and fix it myself. This could be good, but please for the love of god let us toggle different sections on and off. I don't care what category the mod item is from, I don't care who made it, and I don't care when it was last updated. Those should be shown when I hover over an item, not constantly taking up space in the item's spot in the grid.

The item cards are so tall that on my 1440p monitor, I can fit at most 15 items on screen at once. I consider this a large waste of vertical space, and realistically horizontal as well since you could fit another two columns before running out of space. I come to the site to search for mods by title, and by thumbnail. The ability to turn off everything else would save a significant amount of space, allowing me to use the site better than I used to, since the left sidebar does look like it's a better option than the old UI. As it stands, I utterly despise the new layout, and feel like it's wasting my time just so that it can look nicer. Which it does, to be fair. The site looks much better visually, but again, my first reaction was "how can I turn this off?".

I don't mean to demean the work the UI guys have done, because they've clearly put a lot of work into it, but releasing it globally to everyone without an option to use the old UI is a missed chance. Your metrics can't measure what you aren't asking people. If you'd given them a chance to fall back to old.nexusmods or something, you'd get to literally see the ratio of active users who prefer the new UI, but without that you're just going to have to infer from complaints, and from active accounts becoming inactive, which is going to be difficult at best. Even something as simple as a popup along the top of the screen that asks outright "Do you like the new UI" with a thumbs up or a thumbs down would have been better than this.

However, to play devil's advocate, I went back to look at old screenshots, and I'm seeing a lot of the same things that I'm complaining about here. Sure, they were more information dense, but the old site actually has a lot of the same problems that the new one does. Perhaps we've all just accepted the old site's problems because we've been using it for a decade. The old site still had heaps of empty space, though it did have much smaller gaps between everything. I do somewhat miss the fade that the description used to have, where it would fade out closer to the cutoff point, to show whether there was more to the description or not. In fact, the old site might actually be worse for information density.

 

Here's a list of the changes I made in order to get the site looking a lot nicer in my opinion. Keep in mind that I'm not saying this is the correct solution, it's just what I want out of the site. Giving us the option to customize everything ourselves is the best solution, because then the people who want the current new UI can just keep those settings, but people who want the site to be denser can just adjust it themselves. Perhaps in a "View Options" or "Grid Options" menu whenever the grid is visible?

In .mods-grid: set both column-gap and row-gap to 0.5rem (they were 2rem and 2.5rem), and set grid-template-columns to repeat(auto-fill, minmax(14rem, 1fr)). (It was 16rem). This brought each card closer together while still leaving enough space to see the gap between them. It also shrunk the cards globally so that more could fit, without compromising the font size by globally zooming the page.

I disabled max-width in .next-container-fluid. I then disabled the creator, updated, and category elements. This brought the height of each card down to something a little more acceptable. Ideally, I would want that information to show up if I hover over the item, as I do like having that information available. Unfortunately, they just took far too much space vertically to justify keeping them. This won't be everyone's perfect layout, but it is a lot closer to mine. Disabling the max-width allows me to actually use the space that my monitor provides, which I understand the old site didn't have either, but it's incredibly nice to have it as an option.

 

A small flyout with that information (and potentially more), could be amazing. You could have the thumbnail cycle between the different screenshots provided for the file when hovering, as well as have a small flyout on the left or right side that shows a longer description, the release / update time, and the mod author. Ideally, if the mod author could be put in the lower right of the card where the downloads and likes are shown, that could work beautifully to keep that shown without a flyout. These changes meant that I could now fit 36 tiles on a single page at once, which is a massive improvement. The ability to change the sizes and spacing yourself, along with toggling what bits of information are shown, could achieve this effect or better. I wanted to also figure out a way of capping the description to only 3 lines as opposed to the 4/5 it currently has, but couldn't find where the height was set. I did find a min-height value, but changing it seemed to do nothing.

I've attached images with a before and an after as an example. It's perhaps a little too far, but it's readable and functional. perhaps most importantly, the after version is the kind of format that I can use to quickly browse for the mods that I want. The ideal solution is to give us options and sliders so that we can adjust these variables ourselves and save them to our account or even just local storage.

I feel like the new site could grow on me, with more customization added. It certainly has potential, but I don't think it's there yet.

[akrielboulve]

Long time lurker and quiet downloader I felt I must add my voice to the choir here.

As so many others have commented I HATE the new UI with the burning passion of 1000 suns. The image sizes are too small and why the hell do I want to read the description, when half of them are total meme nonsense or even foreign language? The old UI was PEAK, and you just had to "improve it" by ruining it. It's like you had the perfect cheesecake and then decided that there weren't enough pickles and onions mixed in there and now no one wants it. I checked your beta announcement page and either you are lying or you had utter sycophant yes men populating your surveys because everywhere I look there are people complaining about the UI and it's clear and objective inferiority to the previous UI. DO BETTER PLEASE...bad enough you're censoring perfectly fine and normal mods for political reasons, but this is just going to drive more people away, rather than bring them here.

[WndMll]

11 minutes ago, iammetro said:

I don't mean to demean the work the UI guys have done, because they've clearly put a lot of work into it

Sorry but this sentence is Misinformation, there has been hardly if any work put into this. It is a 1 week hackjob or at least heavily appears that way with absurd amounts of missing and broken features that worked perfectly fine before the new UI update which that had many months to fix in Open Beta.

They actively had to put effort forth to manage to break the Sort by Newest function. There is plenty more than just that, but all within the same vein of "How did you f*#@ up something that simple?"

Edited 12 hours ago by WndMll

[werdna55]

HELLO!?? where is the date sort/filter option?? this needs to come back.

here's a scenario for ya:

1. game gets huge update... say 1 year and 6 months ago.

2. want to see the mods that came out right when it dropped.

3. nah bro, it's either 1 year or THE WHOLE THING

4. time is wasted trying to look for the mods (more ad revenue I guess)

  - - - - this must be it huh? waste everyone's time so you squeeze out a few cents per minute. 

 

[BigYoda69]

hi guys really enjoying the new UI! it works great with my mobile (which I obviously do most of my modding on) like seriously who on earth is still using the desktop site regularly anyway? I tried logging onto my computer today just to see how the new site looks and it's great! I love the new low information density style as it used to be really exhausting doing all that reading but I still found myself missing the real slick mobile feel I get on my phone then after roughly 40 minutes of browsing I noticed the new site has two giant empty bars on either side! so that's why I have a suggestion:

on the left bar let us log into tiktok and on the right bar Instagram reels, that way we can watch slime videos and subway surfers all while doing our modding! I really hope they look into this just one more way nexus can step into the future.

 

[TheSiphon]

I have to say that I'd prefer to use the old UI.

When the UI update rolled out, you could use the old UI by removing the "games/" from the URL, but even that got removed. That's just intentionally screwing over users.

[CrimsonVision]

First ever post, I've been quite content with not writing anything because for the most part its been fine.

The new UI uses less than 60% of my actual screen space and  all I see is "Trending mods". Sure I can see the words "popular collections" at the very bottom of the screen but I cant actually see any of the collections themselves. Not that I have ever made use of them nor plan to.
Like... Come on. Ya'll gotta be on something real potent to think this is a good landing page.... 6 mods?

Also I aint exactly a HUGE fan of the HUGE grey bar at the top of the screen that has a very tiny video about mods (I assume since i cant freaking tell).
Feels like it's... Completely pointless? I'm sure its for ad space that isnt quite there yet or something but... yaknow. Dont? You're already wasting space in other places for ads.

Lets get to that other wasted space then.
If I scroll down to check the "More Mods" tab I'm met with roughly 8 full mod thumbnails that are entirely visible and 4 halves of mods, if the mod title is only one line long I can read the whole thing but not if its longer. There's clearly enough space on my monitor to simply push these 4 halves to the 2 rows above though and I have to wonder... Why is it like this?
Its for ads ofc, I get that, ads are a necessary evil but even with the ad I'm seeing included you can still push these 4 to the rows above, stop wasting a ton of space between the mod thumbnails, there's literally no need for that amount of space inbetween. The websites main use is going to be for desktop. I get that mobile users BROWSE the website but desktop users USE it, their needs are ultimately far more important and it feels like this is being forgotten.
2 second mockup, this still reserves your precious ad space and makes the site a tiny bit less awful. Hell, you could push all the thumbnails all the way to the left side of the screen and fit an even bigger ad in there if you really wanted.
Now I've had a go on the site on my mobile and yeah it works okay I suppose but it exhibits the same issues. Trending mods take up twice the space meaning you only see 2 mods on your screen and there are 6 total so I have to scroll 3 full screens to get past them only to land on the collections which I previously mentioned PERSONALLY have no interest in/use for.
The larger issue however is that it is an entirely pointless update for the mobile app because the actual browsing the mod list was never an issue, you could check the mods out much better before. The issue was that once you were on the mod page itself and the way to navigate its "tabs" is what I feel always felt bad and that has not changed. I still have to use the same dropdown menu to get the posts/images for when I have questions or wanna know more. You've literally solved nothing for the mobile user.
 

Now the search options. I dont personally see any point in having it look outside of the particular game you are on but for those who want that? I'm happy for them.
What I think you should do is provide the option to JUST search by mod or whatever and enable some way to make it the default option (if there is a way I am not seeing it).
The search box itself can become very cluttered because you include all the other search options which I have absolutely no use for.

All in all, this is a mess. It may have some functionality that is an improvement but in every single regard the visual design is a downgrade.

[boyoyolo]

How to display mods as a list? Being able to read descriptions of mods is very useful and it seems the new UI removes that ability

[shizuneko]

Just add an option for people to revert to old layout. Got a general feeling there's a bunch of very insecure people responsible for Nexus UI who desperately are trying to "make their name". Catering to mobile users is an idiotic statement since you don't download mods on mobile.

[Darkleon54]

You still need to adress this issue.

Why is the default option on "All content" when browsing the SKYRIM part of the site. Why not show by default SSE mods on SSE pages etc...

"All content" and "Games" should be the last options on the list.