Mod Browsing Overhaul Discussion

[Isguros]

38 minutes ago, Iluviel said:

40% of our users browse Nexus Mods on a mobile device, you're not the only user we are catering for. Whilst we always keep desktop users our focus (as modding happens on a desktop), we have to cater for everyone.

So 60% of your users solely use the desktop website and  never visit Nexus Mods on their phone, and only 40% use the phone site sometimes? And you've decided to get rid of the desktop website (virtually) entirely, even though you can't use your phone to install anything? At least on my phone I can turn on 'Desktop layout', sadly this can't be used when visiting your website on a desktop.

[Szkieletor]

I feel like most of the complaints are just "new bad, old good", though there is some good criticism here. I'm the kind of person to write custom userstyles to revert style changes on YouTube, because the purpose of those is usually to make the site less usable, for some reason. Nexus redesign is fine. It's got it's strengths, and some parts I liked better before. It's mostly similar to the old style, just a bit cleaner. The margins are fine, most pages are actually spread to the whole screen width on 1080p, and the margins feel smaller than previously on 1440p.

However, there's one particular reason I've returned to the old design after trying out the beta: the time range filter. The old one had a "from - to" setting, which I used to search for mods made after 2020. The reasoning is that I want to filter out a lot of the old, outdated mods, the "1 year" filter is too limited as I want to catch up with the last few years, and the "trending" view is too biased towards the last month or so. So setting it to "from 01-01-2020 to today" was my less-than-ideal, but functional compromise.
This is no longer possible, and setting the "timeRange" GET argument in the URL manually does nothing, as the API seems to only accept the dropdown values. The perfect solution would be two filters - "uploaded", and "last updated", with the current dropdown options, and a custom time range, like the old one.

And please, please, remove translations from "Mods requiring this file" list, they're already under their own header and pollute the list, or give us a "Required mods" filter setting. I'm begging on my knees.
This helps immensely when working with frameworks, body mods, and other stuff that builds off other mods. Just putting the name of a mod in search queries often brings up stuff that mentions "xxx is incompatible", or FAQ entries that go "xxx support? No", which are really good things to include in your mod description, but the exact opposite of what I'm trying to search for. It gets worse with mods using common words or acronyms, and so on.
I usually use "Mods requiring this file" to search for stuff like "PC Head Tracking and Voice Type" voice packs, but it's a pain in the ass and half the entries are translations I have explicitly filtered out in my preferences.

[RG1026]

Please give the option to revert this change. It feels so unintuitive and painful to both view and navigate. Ruining the user experience is how you get users to stop wanting to experience your platform

personally i dont even care if a reverted or "legacy" UI ends up being filled with bugs and being unsupported so it doesnt receive updates. just having the option there goes a long way

[Steinnuss]

53 minutes ago, Iluviel said:

There's quite a lot to unpack here, but I'll try to answer your points.
 

• We're actively monitoring P90/95/99 load times on all the new pages and they're performing well across the board, we had strict goals not to slow the pages down. This might be something with your specific setup, or perhaps some other issue that's hard to diagnose. Can you give us some vey specific examples of which page is slower for you? What browser are you using? Do you have an extensions installed?
• Sorry to hear that. Almost overwhelmingly the feedback has been positive, outside of this forum thread. We put surveys up on the pages for months and collected thousands of responses, 80% of which were positive. There's a feedback post here on this specific suggestion, but it only has 19 upvotes so we're not likely to knee-jerk and change this.
• Collections are instrumental in making modding easier for users who are new to modding, so it is important they are given prominence on the page. They were not in a separate tab before. We are considering some changes to this section though, to reduce the scroll down to "More Mods".
• The search is larger and more readable now, the feedback on this (to reiterate my point above) has been overwhelmingly positive outside of this forum thread. The old quick search also showed you a preview of your search, so that you can quickly find what your looking for and skip the full search results page.
• You can search games on a specific game's mod page, so you can go to another game's mod page quickly.

Thanks for the quick answer. I know you guys are getting bombarded with feedback, and sometimes people aren’t too nice about it.

 

I use Firefox and do have an ad blocker, but the issue only started with the page redesigns as far as I can tell. For me, it’s noticeable on the authors' page in the "Mods" section and on the main page with the "Trending Mods" and other media.

Maybe adding some color customization down the line could help? I’m not a web developer, so maybe it’s not worth the trouble, but I and a few others in this thread would appreciate it.

It’s good to hear that you want to adjust the "Popular Collections."

The issue I have with the search bar is more that it covers the entire screen, which can be a bit disorienting when quickly opening and closing the search function. I guess I can live with it, though.

I wouldn’t be mad if the option to search for another game quickly stays, since it doesn’t bother me too much I just found it a bit weird.

Overall, thanks for all your work. I know it’s really hard to engage with the user base while also translating feedback into actionable changes.

 

Maybe it would help if you opened an official FAQ on the main site listing the main complaints along with explanations. 

Apart from the forum, there aren’t many places to get info on why certain things were changed.

 

[WndMll]

First time I've ever used the forums as far as I can remember just to say that this redesign is awful. Wasted space, soulless and devoid of colour, despite wasted space everything looks overly large and the spacing between everything doesn't help as I like to see more things on screen not less. Like I don't want to sound mean but it's pretty vomit worthy just to look at, give us the option to revert or undo this entirely. Clearly more people don't like it than people that do like it.

[OTK7]

The previous design was much better and more grouped.
Now I don't even want to spend a long time looking for something
Thank you for imposing bad taste on others.

[lupus00]

 

I would love to get option to chose between list (kinda old way) and tiles (new) setting in browse mods section - this is probably my only complain so far.

[Tegolex]

10 minutes ago, OTK7 said:

Now I don't even want to spend a long time looking for something

I agree, it was fun to see what modders do and how they change the game.

Now, I just want to download what I need and  alt+f4.

I hope someone finds a way to revert to the old version. For now we can use the old versions of mods page

Another detail lot of users first or second comments everything was okay before this

 

Edited Tuesday at 03:17 PM by Tegolex

[StarRiseShine]

Nexus is always pretty hard to use (no light mode, comment search gone, then back, then gone, filtering tags not always useful) but wow, I've never needed to take the size of my screen down. I usually use 125% on my browser (yes, I need new glasses), but I have it set to 80% now just for Nexus. 

Please, let us have better options for the main screen. Smaller pics for all categories, (light mode, please), more mods across a row, options remove whichever part we don't care to see. I love Jayserpa, but I don't need to see collections every time. Trending mods doesn't need to take up 100% of above the fold real estate. If you're trying to cater to mobile folks, I get it, but shouldn't you be designing to various screen sizes responsively? It feels mobile first and mobile only.

[Iluviel]

29 minutes ago, Szkieletor said:

I feel like most of the complaints are just "new bad, old good", though there is some good criticism here. I'm the kind of person to write custom userstyles to revert style changes on YouTube, because the purpose of those is usually to make the site less usable, for some reason. Nexus redesign is fine. It's got it's strengths, and some parts I liked better before. It's mostly similar to the old style, just a bit cleaner. The margins are fine, most pages are actually spread to the whole screen width on 1080p, and the margins feel smaller than previously on 1440p.

However, there's one particular reason I've returned to the old design after trying out the beta: the time range filter. The old one had a "from - to" setting, which I used to search for mods made after 2020. The reasoning is that I want to filter out a lot of the old, outdated mods, the "1 year" filter is too limited as I want to catch up with the last few years, and the "trending" view is too biased towards the last month or so. So setting it to "from 01-01-2020 to today" was my less-than-ideal, but functional compromise.
This is no longer possible, and setting the "timeRange" GET argument in the URL manually does nothing, as the API seems to only accept the dropdown values. The perfect solution would be two filters - "uploaded", and "last updated", with the current dropdown options, and a custom time range, like the old one.

And please, please, remove translations from "Mods requiring this file" list, they're already under their own header and pollute the list, or give us a "Required mods" filter setting. I'm begging on my knees.
This helps immensely when working with frameworks, body mods, and other stuff that builds off other mods. Just putting the name of a mod in search queries often brings up stuff that mentions "xxx is incompatible", or FAQ entries that go "xxx support? No", which are really good things to include in your mod description, but the exact opposite of what I'm trying to search for. It gets worse with mods using common words or acronyms, and so on.
I usually use "Mods requiring this file" to search for stuff like "PC Head Tracking and Voice Type" voice packs, but it's a pain in the ass and half the entries are translations I have explicitly filtered out in my preferences.

Thanks for the constructive and pointed feedback. This is very useful.

Agreed on the date range filter, we're working on getting that back in now. It'll reappear as soon as we're able to add it.

The translations specifically within the "mods requiring this file" feedback is new for me and interesting. We'll certainly discuss this and have a think about what is possible.