Mod Browsing Overhaul Discussion

[Maurice825]

Whoa, I did not see this update coming, and I do not feel any type of natural flow to it. Every item seems to be too big on my screen (1980x1080).

and everything seems to be less clustered, as before we had a small preview window(hot mods), and the the mod list directly below it. (Or something like that, im trying to explain/sketch the image)

 

This gave me a quick summary of what i might have missed in since my last visit.

Right now i feel like its just thumbnails, which are too large and they make it more time consuming to find/scroll through mods or hot mods like i used to do.

I do not feel like i have an overview of anything, there is no summary. There probably is, but it doesnt feel like it to me.

I would like to add, that normally i am not one to compain, as i see a lot of hard work has gone into this, and load times have improved.

For me, the old and reliable Nexus feel is gone, which is what nexus made nexus unique in my opinion, and which was my reasoning to keep using it.

Edit: I forgot to add; I used the colors which underlined things previously for navigation. it made the site more accessible. I'm missing the color accents, in those navigational aids. Without them the site is way less easier to use for me.

[Isguros]

14 minutes ago, Iluviel said:

The filters on the left are actually expanded and open by default now, rather than hidden.

Thanks for the clarification on the search filters. I'm trying to understand better the exact problem you're having. Would you be able to provide an example search that isn't returning the mod you're looking for?

So you could have solved the problem you yourself brought up by just expanding the previous filters by default, but instead opted to poopify this part as well...

Anyway the search filter example: If I wanted to search for anything involving ENBs, I'd open the filters tab, scroll down to the search parameters, and... that's all, cause there is no keyword/title search parameter.

[dionysist]

Do I look at Nexus on my phone? Yes. Do I want Nexus mods to cater to mobile? Absolutely not. I use Nexus mods primarily on PC. The primary focus should be to cater to PC users, and to show as much information as possible on an average 1080 monitor. I do not need massive thumbnails when I view Trending mods and can only see 10 mods. A single page could easily show me 40 mods.

Please change the entire layout to offer more information and less image focused. If I want to see screenshots of a mod I will click into the screenshots section for that mod.

[zloybelka]

11 hours ago, Imperial2000 said:

Zooming the page out does not help at all.

Ah, that's because you're never supposed to zoom out on this new design. You're ONLY ever supposed to ZOOM IN  When your display turns into a mock-up tablet/phone at smth like 150% site scale, the layout becomes somewhat less painful to look at, although in no way more efficient ofc

[Arethiel]

This design update makes it worse to browse mods in every conceivable way. Less mods per page, there's clearly some changes to trending since the results are different, the "let's apply the same color to everything" design choice, a lot of the pages don't actually scale to anything correctly meaning 50% of the page is just unused blank space in 4k (and everything is massive on 1080p) and meaning it takes twice as much scrolling to get to the bottom of the page. It's clear that the design of this was done by someone who doesn't use the site extensively or only uses the search feature (which in some ways is better though the results page does again just have the same issue as the rest of the site not displaying enough results per page, additionally have another window popup for quick search is pointless, it adds nothing).  Additionally, the test group was evidently of people who don't browse for mods.

This is the kind of change for the sake of change, without any thought as to if it actually improves the experience as a whole, that kills publicly traded companies and software vendors and it's sad to see it here. 

[HadToRegister]

5 hours ago, Iluviel said:

all I can say is the majority of people do and anyone complaining about them in this thread is in a vocal minority. Our data proves this, I hope that as a developer with 21 years experience you'll appreciate a data driven approach.

 

I think you need to take a statistics class, because in the thread, it's been said that 40% of people access this site on MOBILE, so you're changing the site to cater to THEM.
Last I checked, 40% wasn't a MAJORITY.
40% isn't even a passing grade in Schools and College.

All I'd like to see is the quick search return to the old style, where I could stay on the game page, and just use the drop-down search results to quickly right-click to queue up the pages by using “Open in new tab”.
The new features took something away that was fast, convenient, and efficient, and replaced it with a slow, clunky, bloated, and unnecessary UI.

I DO, however, kind of like the new “Mod Page” with the checkbox filters to the left, to easily switch between filters, but that's the only somewhat positive thing I've found about the new changes, because there's still a lot of wasted space on that page as well with the huge tiles.

Everything else, just like Google and Facebook constantly redesign their UI in order to “Justify their job”, is really wasteful, spacewise, and efficiency wise, it's just poor design.
It's as if today's UI “Designers” think they get paid by the MILE, for making people using their Mouse Scroll Wheels and Mouse Movements.
The more and more I have to scroll down a page, the more and more memory the Bowser tab starts taking up.
We've all seen it happen on Steam, when you get that endless list of games, that keep appearing at the bottom of the screen until your browser bogs down.

Take a look at GooglePlay.
On Mobile, You have to tap SEARCH at the BOTTOM of the Screen, then enter your search at the TOP of the screen in the search bar.
WHY? Who decided that was a good design?

The Widening of the main Menu Bar, really should match with the width of the mods on the page, rather than going all the way across the page, like STEAM does.
Users are used to the rest of the page being contained in a thinner width area, (Like Nexus always has been), but then you look up and the Main Menu, which is now stretched across the entire page. It just looks like someone is randomly flipping switches on the UI to see what each thing does.

[Arethiel]

5 hours ago, Iluviel said:

The game home page you're complaining about is just that, a home page for all of the content on Nexus Mods related to games. That includes mods, collections, images, videos and news. If we ever add more content types, they're going to get added too.

For the record, The pages are slower, or at least they feel slower, in a click to display to the user sort of situation compared to the old theme. 

The other problem is that there's so much unused space it takes an excessive amount of scrolls to get to other content to begin with and there's fewer mods and other content on the page to begin with because, seemingly, the page doesn't scale correctly: 

[Iluviel]

3 minutes ago, HadToRegister said:

All I'd like to see is the quick search return to the old style, where I could stay on the game page, and just use the drop-down search results to quickly right-click to queue up the pages by using “Open in new tab”.
The new features took something away that was fast, convenient, and efficient, and replaced it with a slow, clunky, bloated, and unnecessary UI.

I know you're quite frustrated, but hopefully I can help with this particular point. I've attached a short video showing what you're describing.

From the homepage, I opened the search, entered a keyword, used 'CTRL + Left Click' and 'Right Click + Open in new tab', queued up multiple pages in the browser, closed the search and remained on the same page.

Does this help with what you're trying to do?

[Zer00Ragnar]

I really think that the lack of option to browse mods by name it's not cool... typing the mod's name on the description option it's not the same

[Iluviel]

7 minutes ago, Zer00Ragnar said:

I really think that the lack of option to browse mods by name it's not cool... typing the mod's name on the description option it's not the same

1 hour ago, Isguros said:

So you could have solved the problem you yourself brought up by just expanding the previous filters by default, but instead opted to poopify this part as well...

Anyway the search filter example: If I wanted to search for anything involving ENBs, I'd open the filters tab, scroll down to the search parameters, and... that's all, cause there is no keyword/title search parameter.

We're working on improving this by making the search look at keywords in the title, summary and description. Historically, search only ever looked at title. The 'Description contains...' field will be more robust and look at all keywords on a mod, becoming a 'Keywords' filter.

This will be coming soon.