Mod Browsing Overhaul Open Beta

[deckou]

Cool theme but I hate the orange color for Skyrim SE , it hurts my eyes and didn't really like it , but everything else is great

[LummoxJR]

First impressions (all on desktop, not mobile):

On the individual mod page, things look pretty decent except for the title font, which is too wide and a bit ugly. The old font being slim had many advantages, including being able to show longer titles. Inter is too much like Helvetica/Arial in all the wrong ways. Switch to something slimmer. It doesn't have to be Bebas Neue like before (although that font was great), but it's just way too wide right now. Otherwise I don't really have any big problems with it.

The page where I browse mods, however, is terrible. The experience is a massive downgrade. For reference, I view mods in the last-updated order by default.

Here are the bad parts, the main theme of which is WASTED SCREEN REAL ESTATE, especially in the vertical dimension.

• The header at the top of the page is completely wasted space. It should be vertically slim, no more than 30px high. The new header is 124px including padding, which is way too much. Nobody needs this.
• The new listings for the mods are too big. I used to be able to see 2 rows of mods per scroll; now I can only see 1 1/2. This is unacceptable, and results mainly from the following:
  • Vertical padding in the entire block below the mod image is excessive. It's 0.75rem on top and 1.25rem on the bottom, but it should be 0.5rem for both.
  • Too much padding is below the author. 0.5rem should be reduced to 0.2.
  • The individual sections for mod category, updated/uploaded, have more excessive padding. Again this should be dropped from 0.5rem to 0.2.
  • The mod title is too large. 1.125rem is too big; 1rem is better.
  • The line-height of the description at 1.5 is nice and readable, but wastes too much space; the standard 1.2 is inadequate. A compromise of 1.35 buys back some space. This also helps with the mod title when it wraps to more than one line.
  • Despite all I've said above, a limit of 4 lines for description text is often inadequate; change the -webkit-line-clamp to 5 instead of 4. It does undo some of the vertical space saving, but it's important.
  • Nuke the min-height on the mod listing. It's currently set to 28rem. Without it, a small amount of precious space is recovered.
  • The very bottom line with the endorsements/downloads/size has a min-height of 2rem which is wasting more space. 1.35rem is much cleaner.
  • There's too much spacing between grid rows. The column spacing is fine, but the excessive row gap wastes vertical space. 2.5rem is absolutely insane; drop it down to 1rem and no one's going to mind.
  • (Enacting all of the above changes gets me nearly back to 2 rows per scroll. I can live with nearly.)
• Right below the top page header, there's a ridiculous amount of vertical padding on the filter column and the main results area. Reduce it from 1.5rem down to 0.5rem, which is all anyone needs. 1rem if you must.
• Below the sort options at the top, there's even more useless padding.
• "Some mods may be hidden based on your content blocking settings" appears below the result count and the sort options. This is wasting more space. Put it in between the result count and the sort options, where you have a ton of empty space.
• At the bottom, there's a gigantic margin below the grid, before the pagination section. 2.5rem is too much. However, I do kinda think 1rem is too little. 1.5rem seems just right.
• The last-updated time for each mod doesn't show a date; it shows "<time> ago". As nice as that is in some ways, it's useless if I'm trying to see all mods that updated since a specific day. The only way to tell is to mouse over it, which isn't great. I can live with this but I'd prefer some customization or something.

So that's the bad. Let's go over the good:

• Despite the loss of more vertical space it entails, I do like the larger images. Despite my massive concerns about vertical space, I think you can get even better results by dropping the grid column gap from 2rem to 1.5rem, which only costs a couple of vertical pixels.
• The filters being on the side are really nice. It's intuitive. I like that hiding them presents even more mods per row.

Bottom line: Treat vertical space like gold and expend it wisely. Right now it creates a severely downgraded experience.

[Ze6rah]

Not a fan of the blurry background

[ArxVallium]

JustThatKing,

 

The General Feedback link wasn't working for me so I'll say this here instead:

 

I think that mods which offer translations and/or patches of existing works should have their own featured sections/repositories/pages/tabs altogether separated from the front page of the website. These mods are plentiful and usually end up cluttering the front page (especially of highly modded games like Skyrim Special Edition) which I find takes away exposure from brand new and original mods. I don't think that translation and patch files are undeserving of being recognized (far from it). But I think this solution is mutually beneficial to both original brand new mods and translation/patches of existing works. It's just a little disheartening to release a mod that has been in development for weeks-years and have it buried from the sight of users on the front page of SSE Nexus in the first 6-24 hours of release. Separating the translation and patch files from regular files might ease this constant flood of uploads and lack of exposure for larger more original works.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for reaching out to the community for feedback!

 

Cheers,

 

-Arx

[bzlm2]

Better! Much better!

[Smoothlias1]

Normally I'm very critical of modern UI's, but this time I like it!

What I do miss in this Beta is the game page's wallpaper in the background. I loved that, it not only shows which game page you're viewing, but also gets you in the mood, and adds a personal touch to the page. Now it's just generic shades of grey everywhere.

I think that's an important quality that should not be overlooked, and hope it will get picked up later down the line.

[chickacola]

I can't speak much to the design because the lag of the beta is absolutely unbearable. It's making the site borderline unusable. Are other people experiencing this? Is it a known issue being worked on? I never have lag on websites, this is bizarre.

[Swordofthedragon]

Maybe add mod of month feature to the front page to encourage voting.

Having the same search features but only for tracked mods would be nice too. Skyrim been out for awhile and doubt I'm the only one with a multiple pages of tracked mods.

[Squirrel97]

I had hoped that updated mods would also get some more visibility.

There are at least 6 suggestions on the feedback board that asked for more visibility for updated mods:

https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/3002/mod-update-visibility

https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/767/more-exposure-for-recently-updated-mods

https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/1426/updated-mods

https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/1693/better-showcase-updated-mods

https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/2676/default-homepage-feed-should-be-new-and-recently-updated-mods

https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/3512/make-updated-mods-section-easier-to-come-across

Another thing: What about when one person uploads many mods on the same day and then pushes everyone else off the front page? BellCube made a suggestion for how to fix this here: https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/686/aggregate-upload-batches-in-new-sections that I agree with. This could be done for updated mods as well maybe.

Edited Tuesday at 11:50 PM by Squirrel97

[Firuu]

Okay, the Feedback things don't show up even though I have Ad blocker disabled for Nexus and the General Feedback/Quick Search sites do not load when I click on them, even without any add-ons.

Little chance this gets seen at all, but, better than just staying quiet.

Here we go:

• Site performance is awful. Scroll is very sluggish and laggy compared to the old site.
• Upper Area showing the Game Title uses too much space, as already pointed out by others.
• I don't care about Collections. Don't want them displayed on the games "front page" - especially not that high. Singular mods are more important than collections.
  Needs option to either move it or disable it.
• Missing "Display" for mod browser. Especially the Big Tiles option is a must.

Spoiler

 

• Front page actually wastes a lot of space to the left and right in comparison to the old design? (This is on 2560x1440)
  // Turns out this is actually my fault. I have a 120% zoom applied to the old page, which didn't transfer over to the Beta page. Sorry.
  They pretty much cover the same space.

• The new Background is actually making it hard to focus on the important parts being displayed, for some reason.
• New Design also doesn't separate very well between different sections of the site e.g. Top mods, More Mods, Media - which makes it really hard to focus on the part you want.
  A more visible line between sections would already be a huge improvement. The sections having their own background would be appreciated.

Overall, I know people don't adapt easily to new things, but so far I don't really see how the new design improves the User Experience.

Edited 23 hours ago by Firuu
Correction