Redesign Launch - Stage 2 in progress

[Wasteed]

I actually like the new design, but i also have a hugh problem with it. The thing that is anoying me is, that the sort-options in the categories are now limited (or is it just not working yet?).

For example: I am searchin for Outfit Mods and want to sort it by most downloaded (or most endorsed), but they will not let me anymore.

[slippyguy]

In response to post #55257103. #55257298, #55258328, #55258513, #55258928, #55259153, #55259388, #55259853, #55305193, #55330208, #55334878, #55338158, #55338403, #55338453, #55339968 are all replies on the same post.

Darth Sidious wrote: I hope you will give us the option to keep the old design, I find it much more readable and more pleasant to use.

EHPDJFrANKy wrote: I think just the same. It would be really much appreciated.

Haladoon wrote: Same here. The new design is too damn huge. I also am not a fan of the new navigation, but it's just something I'll try to get use to as a modder and user. I know they are working hard on it. Even though, I personally don't think it's necessary from a visual perspective.

gentester wrote: I hope so as well. I really dislike the new design I did give it a fair go I think but reverted pretty quickly, it just doesn't feel as user friendly and welcoming. Sometimes 'New' isn't necessarily synonymous with 'Better'

TheOblivionCrew1 wrote: This happened the last time they did an update, when the current design(2012-2017 era, if I recall correctly when it was implemented) was the "new" design. We said the same thing then, didn't change the course of action unfortunately. On the whole it was rather strange, because the original layouts of the Nexus felt very PC friendly. The new designs got shifted for "multiple/universal" platforms, meaning mobile, which doesn't make any sense because there's no community for modding on any platforms other than PC(and the consoles have been hamstrung by Bethesda controlling the content and site for it, so I don't factor them in).

Maybe it's just a result of amateur web-building, and site layout design(maybe no one is a visual artist or professional in user-friendly design, which I can understand), but after some years of doing this I really question why they keep shooting for redesigns that don't seem to improve usability, all against frequent calls by their users to go back to the old layouts.

VictorDragonslayer wrote: The new design is good for viewing pictures, but awful for reading mod description and comments - they are too wide. Is it text length, overall gamma or whatever, but my eyes feel uncomfortable when I read something on the new design. It's still better than "Mom, I learned JS!" Bethesda.net, which is hard to navigate, but hiding changelog under "Logs" tab was a mistake - very few people will find it.

KamranMackey wrote: They probably won't. And IMO, there's nothing really wrong with the new design. I find it to be a lot more modern and easier to look at than the old design. The old design was alright, but I think the new one is so much better.

VictorDragonslayer wrote:

easier to look at

To look at pictures - yes, but, as I said, reading texts became harder, IMO. If people complain about readability, then it means that:
1) they are crybabies and should be disregarded;
2) font size/colour may not suit all users, so you may try to give several options to choose from.
Sadly, developers considered only the first option.

pacfish wrote: This was already answered by staff, moderators, admins (Dark), already. They will not be keeping the old design as the cost to maintain both versions of the site is "too costly"

The other problem with that is formatting issues for content creators between old and new site.

Darth Sidious wrote: Too costly? Why and how much? I dislike the new design so much I would pay to keep the old design.

pacfish wrote: You missed the other problem I listed. Things formatted for the new site don't translate well back to the old site and neither does translating old content to the new.

But in terms of cost, imagine performing all the changes twice. Which means twice the work and I do mean twice the work. Fixing a bug one one system only to have to turn around and fix it on another. HTML / JS don't have inheritance. There are ways to setup dynamic css code to try and manipulate the data being displayed but that has to be run on your end. It does exist and content creators have already released at least one version of this and posted a link in this forum.

It would be nice if nexusmods actually just made a mobile version of the site. Facebook has this. And while I know facebook has a lot larger market share and can afford to pay for a lot more features, facebook even has an app that just manipulates the data being requested to present the information on the screen differently (again user side) but it's not hard to make something like this. And to give you an idea about what this can be compared to, it's basically a fomod installer or a robot/spider crawling the webpages for information. Find this tag, put content in this location. Formatting of a description that a content creator posts would need new and stricter guidelines to make this change better but I think that's reasonable and can be solved with thumbnails.

Since I don't think Dark has any intention of having an app and instead intends on making a higher resource cost website (1 page on the new site is considerably larger than the old site [data caps//internet speed] and takes more memory to run) I don't see a possible solution. But I think an App + some UI tweaks would have been better than this dramatic overhaul. Even the last change wasn't this big of a difference.

slippyguy wrote: Ever notice how no other website has ever kept a former layout for any longer than a short transitional period? That's why they won't keep it.

Darth Sidious wrote: I read the other issue as well, but since I am not familiar with the details I didnt comment on it, however I dont know why ever redesign of a major website/portal I seen lately includes HUGE elements on the screen, less readability than the old design and similar gimmicks. What happened to the clean, readable and efficient design? I guess that is not "modern" enough any more.

Take Youtube redesign for example, it made things bigger which means less content on the screen and less readability, same goes for menus on Youtube that suddenly arent clean and easily readable by a casual glance, new Youtube merely takes up more screen space, it isnt prettier and it doesnt add any new special functionality, thank God that Youtube can be restored to the old version. Why tech companies behind certain websites continually reinvent the wheel with their redesigns is beyond me, seems the only purpose of some redesigns is to make it new for the sake of the new and that developers can earn their paychecks.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Youtube still has old design available for those who want it and it has been around for quite a while now which hopefully means the old design is here to stay as an option. I agree that for most websites the old design is discarded and new one literally forced upon their users, even though the old design was clean, looking good and perfectly functional, that often happens to websites of various news agencies.

Exoclyps wrote: New one is just too huge. I had to set browser to 60% size to be able to use the site.

The new YouTube design is WIP, it will become mandatory when they decide its ready, just like every other design in the past 11 or so years. Nobody wants to support two different layouts. Edited November 19, 2017 by slippyguy

[tacitus59]

Please allow us a bit more choice on the front page - like totally removing the media section (which as far as I can tell consists mainly of NSFW content). And why we are on that if a mod has a NSFW picture which shows up on the front page - we should have an option to hide it ON THE FRONT PAGE. Right now we only have the ability to block an author to control this stuff. I prefer not to do that because I sometimes want these mods but having a thong/butt-crack or an elf wearing pasties on the front page is annoying especially now that its in a giant format. Edited November 19, 2017 by tacitus59

[VulpesHilarianus]

 

In response to post #55305648. #55306153, #55309998 are all replies on the same post.

 

 

 

VulpesHilarianus wrote:

Did some searching using a couple of different metrics. According to Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Quantcast Nexus Mods had a major traffic decrease when the website redesign launched. Also according to Alexa and Quantcast only 44% of users are switching to the new layout. Many are choosing old.nexusmods.com to use the site. For the Wayback Machine in the months of October and November the most popular saved versions were the old Nexus layout, with less than 1/3 being the new layout. People don't like it. I urge you, please, delay the launch of the redesign until the usability issues are sorted out. The massive amounts of wasted space, lack of contrasts, abhorrent element sizing, and focus on mobile for a PC-centric website are making people uncomfortable and having them avoid the site.

 

EDIT: Also the forums are screwing up and not letting me post the entire comment.

pacfish wrote: I'm one of the 44% that are using the new site and don't like it. But I'm trying to make it better with feedback. I also want to point out that the old site is the default. "nexusmods.com" is the old version and doesn't force the user to switch. There is an annoying button at the top that even the old.nexusmods.com has plastered on it.

 

I don't think they'll release an unfinished product, they don't have a publishing company racing to make a return on the investment... But then there's Fallout 4 which took 5 years and is plagued with bugs, Starcraft 2 which is mostly bug free but has a limited game engine (supporting very small files in comparison to other games) and took 10 years, and HalfLife 3 which according to a Fallout 4 cartoon, is still in development in 2077.

HomicidalGrouse wrote: Pretty much all links spread all over the internet lead back to the normal nexusmods domain.

 

Of course the vast majority of people who visit the site will be using that one, and not the rd domain used to preview the new site.

According to Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Quantcast Nexus Mods had a major traffic decrease when the website redesign launched

 

Uh...? I'm looking at Alexa (which you take with a big pinch of salt as it only tracks people who have installed their toolbar), where there's been a steady decline since January of this year and SimilarWeb (whose tracking code we don't use, so is wildly inaccurate) is showing an uptick in September and October compared to previous months.

 

Of the three, Quantcast is the only one that tracks accurately and the tracking code for Quantcast isn't tracking the redesign site right now (seriously, check the site source code. No tracking code on rd.nexusmods.com for quantcast). As such, anyone using the redesign is not being tracked on Quantcast, which is a lot of traffic. So yeah, there's going to be a downtick compared to previous months.

 

Inspite of this, October 2017 still had 18m page views more than October 2016 according to Quantcast, despite declining traffic on the back of Fallout 4 getting older and despite the fact RD isn't being tracked on Quantcast yet.

 

So when you say "major traffic decrease" I don't know WTF you're talking about, but it renders everything else you're saying as moot when the stats you're basing it off are just plain wrong.

 

Look at the graphs. Alexa and Quantcast show a usage drop right around October 22nd through the 29th, which is about when the redesign launched. Some of that might be due to outages, but traffic has stayed low since the high in September, almost down to where it was in March, and is continuing to plateau then drop over and over again. Considering the mod scene for Stardew Valley just picked up in the last few months, along with the announcement of a few major mods for New Vegas, (old) Skyrim, and Fallout 4, traffic should be higher than that. This is taking into account the massive influx of traffic the announcement and implementation of Creation Club back in July has caused.

[SummonTheDaedra]

In response to post #55257103. #55257298, #55258328, #55258513, #55258928, #55259153, #55259388, #55259853, #55305193, #55330208, #55334878, #55338158, #55338403, #55338453, #55339968, #55342353 are all replies on the same post.

Darth Sidious wrote: I hope you will give us the option to keep the old design, I find it much more readable and more pleasant to use.

EHPDJFrANKy wrote: I think just the same. It would be really much appreciated.

Haladoon wrote: Same here. The new design is too damn huge. I also am not a fan of the new navigation, but it's just something I'll try to get use to as a modder and user. I know they are working hard on it. Even though, I personally don't think it's necessary from a visual perspective.

gentester wrote: I hope so as well. I really dislike the new design I did give it a fair go I think but reverted pretty quickly, it just doesn't feel as user friendly and welcoming. Sometimes 'New' isn't necessarily synonymous with 'Better'

TheOblivionCrew1 wrote: This happened the last time they did an update, when the current design(2012-2017 era, if I recall correctly when it was implemented) was the "new" design. We said the same thing then, didn't change the course of action unfortunately. On the whole it was rather strange, because the original layouts of the Nexus felt very PC friendly. The new designs got shifted for "multiple/universal" platforms, meaning mobile, which doesn't make any sense because there's no community for modding on any platforms other than PC(and the consoles have been hamstrung by Bethesda controlling the content and site for it, so I don't factor them in).

Maybe it's just a result of amateur web-building, and site layout design(maybe no one is a visual artist or professional in user-friendly design, which I can understand), but after some years of doing this I really question why they keep shooting for redesigns that don't seem to improve usability, all against frequent calls by their users to go back to the old layouts.

VictorDragonslayer wrote: The new design is good for viewing pictures, but awful for reading mod description and comments - they are too wide. Is it text length, overall gamma or whatever, but my eyes feel uncomfortable when I read something on the new design. It's still better than "Mom, I learned JS!" Bethesda.net, which is hard to navigate, but hiding changelog under "Logs" tab was a mistake - very few people will find it.

KamranMackey wrote: They probably won't. And IMO, there's nothing really wrong with the new design. I find it to be a lot more modern and easier to look at than the old design. The old design was alright, but I think the new one is so much better.

VictorDragonslayer wrote:

easier to look at

To look at pictures - yes, but, as I said, reading texts became harder, IMO. If people complain about readability, then it means that:
1) they are crybabies and should be disregarded;
2) font size/colour may not suit all users, so you may try to give several options to choose from.
Sadly, developers considered only the first option.

pacfish wrote: This was already answered by staff, moderators, admins (Dark), already. They will not be keeping the old design as the cost to maintain both versions of the site is "too costly"

The other problem with that is formatting issues for content creators between old and new site.

Darth Sidious wrote: Too costly? Why and how much? I dislike the new design so much I would pay to keep the old design.

pacfish wrote: You missed the other problem I listed. Things formatted for the new site don't translate well back to the old site and neither does translating old content to the new.

But in terms of cost, imagine performing all the changes twice. Which means twice the work and I do mean twice the work. Fixing a bug one one system only to have to turn around and fix it on another. HTML / JS don't have inheritance. There are ways to setup dynamic css code to try and manipulate the data being displayed but that has to be run on your end. It does exist and content creators have already released at least one version of this and posted a link in this forum.

It would be nice if nexusmods actually just made a mobile version of the site. Facebook has this. And while I know facebook has a lot larger market share and can afford to pay for a lot more features, facebook even has an app that just manipulates the data being requested to present the information on the screen differently (again user side) but it's not hard to make something like this. And to give you an idea about what this can be compared to, it's basically a fomod installer or a robot/spider crawling the webpages for information. Find this tag, put content in this location. Formatting of a description that a content creator posts would need new and stricter guidelines to make this change better but I think that's reasonable and can be solved with thumbnails.

Since I don't think Dark has any intention of having an app and instead intends on making a higher resource cost website (1 page on the new site is considerably larger than the old site [data caps//internet speed] and takes more memory to run) I don't see a possible solution. But I think an App + some UI tweaks would have been better than this dramatic overhaul. Even the last change wasn't this big of a difference.

slippyguy wrote: Ever notice how no other website has ever kept a former layout for any longer than a short transitional period? That's why they won't keep it.

Darth Sidious wrote: I read the other issue as well, but since I am not familiar with the details I didnt comment on it, however I dont know why ever redesign of a major website/portal I seen lately includes HUGE elements on the screen, less readability than the old design and similar gimmicks. What happened to the clean, readable and efficient design? I guess that is not "modern" enough any more.

Take Youtube redesign for example, it made things bigger which means less content on the screen and less readability, same goes for menus on Youtube that suddenly arent clean and easily readable by a casual glance, new Youtube merely takes up more screen space, it isnt prettier and it doesnt add any new special functionality, thank God that Youtube can be restored to the old version. Why tech companies behind certain websites continually reinvent the wheel with their redesigns is beyond me, seems the only purpose of some redesigns is to make it new for the sake of the new and that developers can earn their paychecks.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Youtube still has old design available for those who want it and it has been around for quite a while now which hopefully means the old design is here to stay as an option. I agree that for most websites the old design is discarded and new one literally forced upon their users, even though the old design was clean, looking good and perfectly functional, that often happens to websites of various news agencies.

Exoclyps wrote: New one is just too huge. I had to set browser to 60% size to be able to use the site.

slippyguy wrote: The new YouTube design is WIP, it will become mandatory when they decide its ready, just like every other design in the past 11 or so years. Nobody wants to support two different layouts.

@slippyguy Microsoft backed out on the Metro UI after severe user backlash, first in 8.1 they introduced the option of getting the normal desktop and in 10 they returned "classic" start menu that can be expanded to Metro-like UI if the user wants to. And we are talking about a whole operating system, not just one website.

While most websites like to force new designs on their users the example of Windows shows users can influence decisions if they really want to, but when it comes to websites most people will just be grumpy for a while and continue using the services of the website effectively falling in line with a sigh "thats life", sharp decline in the number of users and supporters of a website would force the owners of a website to reconsider their decisions, but that rarely happens as most people are not willing to sacrifice something (using services of a website) to achieve their goals. Some are, but not enough of them to make a difference.

That is why small websites or services that dont have hundreds of thousands or millions of users are lot more careful about changing things, big websites can afford to annoy a portion of their users because their user base is large enough plus they know most of those that are not satisfied will still fall in line and continue using their website or their services because there is little to no alternative to what they provide. Edited November 19, 2017 by Darth Sidious

[lithiumfox]

In response to post #55257103. #55257298, #55258328, #55258513, #55258928, #55259153, #55259388, #55259853, #55305193, #55330208, #55334878, #55338158, #55338403, #55338453, #55339968, #55342353, #55357393 are all replies on the same post.

Darth Sidious wrote: I hope you will give us the option to keep the old design, I find it much more readable and more pleasant to use.

EHPDJFrANKy wrote: I think just the same. It would be really much appreciated.

Haladoon wrote: Same here. The new design is too damn huge. I also am not a fan of the new navigation, but it's just something I'll try to get use to as a modder and user. I know they are working hard on it. Even though, I personally don't think it's necessary from a visual perspective.

gentester wrote: I hope so as well. I really dislike the new design I did give it a fair go I think but reverted pretty quickly, it just doesn't feel as user friendly and welcoming. Sometimes 'New' isn't necessarily synonymous with 'Better'

TheOblivionCrew1 wrote: This happened the last time they did an update, when the current design(2012-2017 era, if I recall correctly when it was implemented) was the "new" design. We said the same thing then, didn't change the course of action unfortunately. On the whole it was rather strange, because the original layouts of the Nexus felt very PC friendly. The new designs got shifted for "multiple/universal" platforms, meaning mobile, which doesn't make any sense because there's no community for modding on any platforms other than PC(and the consoles have been hamstrung by Bethesda controlling the content and site for it, so I don't factor them in).

Maybe it's just a result of amateur web-building, and site layout design(maybe no one is a visual artist or professional in user-friendly design, which I can understand), but after some years of doing this I really question why they keep shooting for redesigns that don't seem to improve usability, all against frequent calls by their users to go back to the old layouts.

VictorDragonslayer wrote: The new design is good for viewing pictures, but awful for reading mod description and comments - they are too wide. Is it text length, overall gamma or whatever, but my eyes feel uncomfortable when I read something on the new design. It's still better than "Mom, I learned JS!" Bethesda.net, which is hard to navigate, but hiding changelog under "Logs" tab was a mistake - very few people will find it.

KamranMackey wrote: They probably won't. And IMO, there's nothing really wrong with the new design. I find it to be a lot more modern and easier to look at than the old design. The old design was alright, but I think the new one is so much better.

VictorDragonslayer wrote:

easier to look at

To look at pictures - yes, but, as I said, reading texts became harder, IMO. If people complain about readability, then it means that:
1) they are crybabies and should be disregarded;
2) font size/colour may not suit all users, so you may try to give several options to choose from.
Sadly, developers considered only the first option.

pacfish wrote: This was already answered by staff, moderators, admins (Dark), already. They will not be keeping the old design as the cost to maintain both versions of the site is "too costly"

The other problem with that is formatting issues for content creators between old and new site.

Darth Sidious wrote: Too costly? Why and how much? I dislike the new design so much I would pay to keep the old design.

pacfish wrote: You missed the other problem I listed. Things formatted for the new site don't translate well back to the old site and neither does translating old content to the new.

But in terms of cost, imagine performing all the changes twice. Which means twice the work and I do mean twice the work. Fixing a bug one one system only to have to turn around and fix it on another. HTML / JS don't have inheritance. There are ways to setup dynamic css code to try and manipulate the data being displayed but that has to be run on your end. It does exist and content creators have already released at least one version of this and posted a link in this forum.

It would be nice if nexusmods actually just made a mobile version of the site. Facebook has this. And while I know facebook has a lot larger market share and can afford to pay for a lot more features, facebook even has an app that just manipulates the data being requested to present the information on the screen differently (again user side) but it's not hard to make something like this. And to give you an idea about what this can be compared to, it's basically a fomod installer or a robot/spider crawling the webpages for information. Find this tag, put content in this location. Formatting of a description that a content creator posts would need new and stricter guidelines to make this change better but I think that's reasonable and can be solved with thumbnails.

Since I don't think Dark has any intention of having an app and instead intends on making a higher resource cost website (1 page on the new site is considerably larger than the old site [data caps//internet speed] and takes more memory to run) I don't see a possible solution. But I think an App + some UI tweaks would have been better than this dramatic overhaul. Even the last change wasn't this big of a difference.

slippyguy wrote: Ever notice how no other website has ever kept a former layout for any longer than a short transitional period? That's why they won't keep it.

Darth Sidious wrote: I read the other issue as well, but since I am not familiar with the details I didnt comment on it, however I dont know why ever redesign of a major website/portal I seen lately includes HUGE elements on the screen, less readability than the old design and similar gimmicks. What happened to the clean, readable and efficient design? I guess that is not "modern" enough any more.

Take Youtube redesign for example, it made things bigger which means less content on the screen and less readability, same goes for menus on Youtube that suddenly arent clean and easily readable by a casual glance, new Youtube merely takes up more screen space, it isnt prettier and it doesnt add any new special functionality, thank God that Youtube can be restored to the old version. Why tech companies behind certain websites continually reinvent the wheel with their redesigns is beyond me, seems the only purpose of some redesigns is to make it new for the sake of the new and that developers can earn their paychecks.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Youtube still has old design available for those who want it and it has been around for quite a while now which hopefully means the old design is here to stay as an option. I agree that for most websites the old design is discarded and new one literally forced upon their users, even though the old design was clean, looking good and perfectly functional, that often happens to websites of various news agencies.

Exoclyps wrote: New one is just too huge. I had to set browser to 60% size to be able to use the site.

slippyguy wrote: The new YouTube design is WIP, it will become mandatory when they decide its ready, just like every other design in the past 11 or so years. Nobody wants to support two different layouts.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Microsoft backed out on the Metro UI after severe user backlash, first in 8.1 they introduced the option of getting the normal desktop and in 10 they returned "classic" start menu that can be expanded to Metro-like UI if the user wants to. And we are talking about a whole operating system, not just one website.

While most websites like to force new designs on their users the example of Windows shows users can influence decisions if they really want to, but when it comes to websites most people will just be grumpy for a while and continue using the services of the website effectively falling in line with a sigh "thats life", sharp decline in the number of users and supporters of a website would force the owners of a website to reconsider their decisions, but that rarely happens as most people are not willing to sacrifice something (using services of a website) to achieve their goals. Some are, but not enough of them to make a difference.

That is why small websites or services that dont have hundreds of thousands or millions of users are lot more careful about changing things, big websites can afford to annoy a portion of their users because their user base is large enough plus they know most of those that are not satisfied will still fall in line and continue using their website or their services because there is little to no alternative to what they provide.

As I proceed to respond to you on my phone....

[slippyguy]

In response to post #55257103. #55257298, #55258328, #55258513, #55258928, #55259153, #55259388, #55259853, #55305193, #55330208, #55334878, #55338158, #55338403, #55338453, #55339968, #55342353, #55357393, #55364788 are all replies on the same post.

Darth Sidious wrote: I hope you will give us the option to keep the old design, I find it much more readable and more pleasant to use.

EHPDJFrANKy wrote: I think just the same. It would be really much appreciated.

Haladoon wrote: Same here. The new design is too damn huge. I also am not a fan of the new navigation, but it's just something I'll try to get use to as a modder and user. I know they are working hard on it. Even though, I personally don't think it's necessary from a visual perspective.

gentester wrote: I hope so as well. I really dislike the new design I did give it a fair go I think but reverted pretty quickly, it just doesn't feel as user friendly and welcoming. Sometimes 'New' isn't necessarily synonymous with 'Better'

TheOblivionCrew1 wrote: This happened the last time they did an update, when the current design(2012-2017 era, if I recall correctly when it was implemented) was the "new" design. We said the same thing then, didn't change the course of action unfortunately. On the whole it was rather strange, because the original layouts of the Nexus felt very PC friendly. The new designs got shifted for "multiple/universal" platforms, meaning mobile, which doesn't make any sense because there's no community for modding on any platforms other than PC(and the consoles have been hamstrung by Bethesda controlling the content and site for it, so I don't factor them in).

Maybe it's just a result of amateur web-building, and site layout design(maybe no one is a visual artist or professional in user-friendly design, which I can understand), but after some years of doing this I really question why they keep shooting for redesigns that don't seem to improve usability, all against frequent calls by their users to go back to the old layouts.

VictorDragonslayer wrote: The new design is good for viewing pictures, but awful for reading mod description and comments - they are too wide. Is it text length, overall gamma or whatever, but my eyes feel uncomfortable when I read something on the new design. It's still better than "Mom, I learned JS!" Bethesda.net, which is hard to navigate, but hiding changelog under "Logs" tab was a mistake - very few people will find it.

KamranMackey wrote: They probably won't. And IMO, there's nothing really wrong with the new design. I find it to be a lot more modern and easier to look at than the old design. The old design was alright, but I think the new one is so much better.

VictorDragonslayer wrote:

easier to look at

To look at pictures - yes, but, as I said, reading texts became harder, IMO. If people complain about readability, then it means that:
1) they are crybabies and should be disregarded;
2) font size/colour may not suit all users, so you may try to give several options to choose from.
Sadly, developers considered only the first option.

pacfish wrote: This was already answered by staff, moderators, admins (Dark), already. They will not be keeping the old design as the cost to maintain both versions of the site is "too costly"

The other problem with that is formatting issues for content creators between old and new site.

Darth Sidious wrote: Too costly? Why and how much? I dislike the new design so much I would pay to keep the old design.

pacfish wrote: You missed the other problem I listed. Things formatted for the new site don't translate well back to the old site and neither does translating old content to the new.

But in terms of cost, imagine performing all the changes twice. Which means twice the work and I do mean twice the work. Fixing a bug one one system only to have to turn around and fix it on another. HTML / JS don't have inheritance. There are ways to setup dynamic css code to try and manipulate the data being displayed but that has to be run on your end. It does exist and content creators have already released at least one version of this and posted a link in this forum.

It would be nice if nexusmods actually just made a mobile version of the site. Facebook has this. And while I know facebook has a lot larger market share and can afford to pay for a lot more features, facebook even has an app that just manipulates the data being requested to present the information on the screen differently (again user side) but it's not hard to make something like this. And to give you an idea about what this can be compared to, it's basically a fomod installer or a robot/spider crawling the webpages for information. Find this tag, put content in this location. Formatting of a description that a content creator posts would need new and stricter guidelines to make this change better but I think that's reasonable and can be solved with thumbnails.

Since I don't think Dark has any intention of having an app and instead intends on making a higher resource cost website (1 page on the new site is considerably larger than the old site [data caps//internet speed] and takes more memory to run) I don't see a possible solution. But I think an App + some UI tweaks would have been better than this dramatic overhaul. Even the last change wasn't this big of a difference.

slippyguy wrote: Ever notice how no other website has ever kept a former layout for any longer than a short transitional period? That's why they won't keep it.

Darth Sidious wrote: I read the other issue as well, but since I am not familiar with the details I didnt comment on it, however I dont know why ever redesign of a major website/portal I seen lately includes HUGE elements on the screen, less readability than the old design and similar gimmicks. What happened to the clean, readable and efficient design? I guess that is not "modern" enough any more.

Take Youtube redesign for example, it made things bigger which means less content on the screen and less readability, same goes for menus on Youtube that suddenly arent clean and easily readable by a casual glance, new Youtube merely takes up more screen space, it isnt prettier and it doesnt add any new special functionality, thank God that Youtube can be restored to the old version. Why tech companies behind certain websites continually reinvent the wheel with their redesigns is beyond me, seems the only purpose of some redesigns is to make it new for the sake of the new and that developers can earn their paychecks.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Youtube still has old design available for those who want it and it has been around for quite a while now which hopefully means the old design is here to stay as an option. I agree that for most websites the old design is discarded and new one literally forced upon their users, even though the old design was clean, looking good and perfectly functional, that often happens to websites of various news agencies.

Exoclyps wrote: New one is just too huge. I had to set browser to 60% size to be able to use the site.

slippyguy wrote: The new YouTube design is WIP, it will become mandatory when they decide its ready, just like every other design in the past 11 or so years. Nobody wants to support two different layouts.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Microsoft backed out on the Metro UI after severe user backlash, first in 8.1 they introduced the option of getting the normal desktop and in 10 they returned "classic" start menu that can be expanded to Metro-like UI if the user wants to. And we are talking about a whole operating system, not just one website.

While most websites like to force new designs on their users the example of Windows shows users can influence decisions if they really want to, but when it comes to websites most people will just be grumpy for a while and continue using the services of the website effectively falling in line with a sigh "thats life", sharp decline in the number of users and supporters of a website would force the owners of a website to reconsider their decisions, but that rarely happens as most people are not willing to sacrifice something (using services of a website) to achieve their goals. Some are, but not enough of them to make a difference.

That is why small websites or services that dont have hundreds of thousands or millions of users are lot more careful about changing things, big websites can afford to annoy a portion of their users because their user base is large enough plus they know most of those that are not satisfied will still fall in line and continue using their website or their services because there is little to no alternative to what they provide.

lithiumfox wrote: As I proceed to respond to you on my phone....

The fullscreen start menu is to provide an experience tailored for tablet users, and thus worth the extra work of supporting two different layouts. The Metro UI also spans much further than the start menu, and is still mandatory, by the way.

Supporting two entire website layouts (effectively doubling the work of maintenance and updates) purely for cosmetic reasons is just nonsense. Edited November 19, 2017 by slippyguy

[GlassDeviant]

Having a problem with linking to the new site. If I do a search and then attempt to copy the URL and paste it...anywhere...I get SFA because the new site doesn't include the search text parameter in the link, so I can't refer lazy mod users to a nexus search for anything to do with a particular keyword, such as "heimskr", "riften" or "khajiit".

[Dark0ne]

In response to post #55353638.

VulpesHilarianus wrote:

 

In response to post #55305648. #55306153, #55309998 are all replies on the same post.

VulpesHilarianus wrote:

Did some searching using a couple of different metrics. According to Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Quantcast Nexus Mods had a major traffic decrease when the website redesign launched. Also according to Alexa and Quantcast only 44% of users are switching to the new layout. Many are choosing old.nexusmods.com to use the site. For the Wayback Machine in the months of October and November the most popular saved versions were the old Nexus layout, with less than 1/3 being the new layout. People don't like it. I urge you, please, delay the launch of the redesign until the usability issues are sorted out. The massive amounts of wasted space, lack of contrasts, abhorrent element sizing, and focus on mobile for a PC-centric website are making people uncomfortable and having them avoid the site.

EDIT: Also the forums are screwing up and not letting me post the entire comment.

pacfish wrote: I'm one of the 44% that are using the new site and don't like it. But I'm trying to make it better with feedback. I also want to point out that the old site is the default. "nexusmods.com" is the old version and doesn't force the user to switch. There is an annoying button at the top that even the old.nexusmods.com has plastered on it.

I don't think they'll release an unfinished product, they don't have a publishing company racing to make a return on the investment... But then there's Fallout 4 which took 5 years and is plagued with bugs, Starcraft 2 which is mostly bug free but has a limited game engine (supporting very small files in comparison to other games) and took 10 years, and HalfLife 3 which according to a Fallout 4 cartoon, is still in development in 2077.

HomicidalGrouse wrote: Pretty much all links spread all over the internet lead back to the normal nexusmods domain.

Of course the vast majority of people who visit the site will be using that one, and not the rd domain used to preview the new site.

According to Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Quantcast Nexus Mods had a major traffic decrease when the website redesign launched

Uh...? I'm looking at Alexa (which you take with a big pinch of salt as it only tracks people who have installed their toolbar), where there's been a steady decline since January of this year and SimilarWeb (whose tracking code we don't use, so is wildly inaccurate) is showing an uptick in September and October compared to previous months.

Of the three, Quantcast is the only one that tracks accurately and the tracking code for Quantcast isn't tracking the redesign site right now (seriously, check the site source code. No tracking code on rd.nexusmods.com for quantcast). As such, anyone using the redesign is not being tracked on Quantcast, which is a lot of traffic. So yeah, there's going to be a downtick compared to previous months.

Inspite of this, October 2017 still had 18m page views more than October 2016 according to Quantcast, despite declining traffic on the back of Fallout 4 getting older and despite the fact RD isn't being tracked on Quantcast yet.

So when you say "major traffic decrease" I don't know WTF you're talking about, but it renders everything else you're saying as moot when the stats you're basing it off are just plain wrong.

 

Look at the graphs. Alexa and Quantcast show a usage drop right around October 22nd through the 29th, which is about when the redesign launched. Some of that might be due to outages, but traffic has stayed low since the high in September, almost down to where it was in March, and is continuing to plateau then drop over and over again. Considering the mod scene for Stardew Valley just picked up in the last few months, along with the announcement of a few major mods for New Vegas, (old) Skyrim, and Fallout 4, traffic should be higher than that. This is taking into account the massive influx of traffic the announcement and implementation of Creation Club back in July has caused.

So you're just going to ignore the part where I said the tracking code for Quantcast isn't actually on the redesign website yet? That "major" dip you're seeing is actually people choosing to use the redesign site.

Okie dokie! My time is wasted here. Edited November 20, 2017 by Dark0ne

[SummonTheDaedra]

In response to post #55257103. #55257298, #55258328, #55258513, #55258928, #55259153, #55259388, #55259853, #55305193, #55330208, #55334878, #55338158, #55338403, #55338453, #55339968, #55342353, #55357393, #55364788, #55364973 are all replies on the same post.

Darth Sidious wrote: I hope you will give us the option to keep the old design, I find it much more readable and more pleasant to use.

EHPDJFrANKy wrote: I think just the same. It would be really much appreciated.

Haladoon wrote: Same here. The new design is too damn huge. I also am not a fan of the new navigation, but it's just something I'll try to get use to as a modder and user. I know they are working hard on it. Even though, I personally don't think it's necessary from a visual perspective.

gentester wrote: I hope so as well. I really dislike the new design I did give it a fair go I think but reverted pretty quickly, it just doesn't feel as user friendly and welcoming. Sometimes 'New' isn't necessarily synonymous with 'Better'

TheOblivionCrew1 wrote: This happened the last time they did an update, when the current design(2012-2017 era, if I recall correctly when it was implemented) was the "new" design. We said the same thing then, didn't change the course of action unfortunately. On the whole it was rather strange, because the original layouts of the Nexus felt very PC friendly. The new designs got shifted for "multiple/universal" platforms, meaning mobile, which doesn't make any sense because there's no community for modding on any platforms other than PC(and the consoles have been hamstrung by Bethesda controlling the content and site for it, so I don't factor them in).

Maybe it's just a result of amateur web-building, and site layout design(maybe no one is a visual artist or professional in user-friendly design, which I can understand), but after some years of doing this I really question why they keep shooting for redesigns that don't seem to improve usability, all against frequent calls by their users to go back to the old layouts.

VictorDragonslayer wrote: The new design is good for viewing pictures, but awful for reading mod description and comments - they are too wide. Is it text length, overall gamma or whatever, but my eyes feel uncomfortable when I read something on the new design. It's still better than "Mom, I learned JS!" Bethesda.net, which is hard to navigate, but hiding changelog under "Logs" tab was a mistake - very few people will find it.

KamranMackey wrote: They probably won't. And IMO, there's nothing really wrong with the new design. I find it to be a lot more modern and easier to look at than the old design. The old design was alright, but I think the new one is so much better.

VictorDragonslayer wrote:

easier to look at

To look at pictures - yes, but, as I said, reading texts became harder, IMO. If people complain about readability, then it means that:
1) they are crybabies and should be disregarded;
2) font size/colour may not suit all users, so you may try to give several options to choose from.
Sadly, developers considered only the first option.

pacfish wrote: This was already answered by staff, moderators, admins (Dark), already. They will not be keeping the old design as the cost to maintain both versions of the site is "too costly"

The other problem with that is formatting issues for content creators between old and new site.

Darth Sidious wrote: Too costly? Why and how much? I dislike the new design so much I would pay to keep the old design.

pacfish wrote: You missed the other problem I listed. Things formatted for the new site don't translate well back to the old site and neither does translating old content to the new.

But in terms of cost, imagine performing all the changes twice. Which means twice the work and I do mean twice the work. Fixing a bug one one system only to have to turn around and fix it on another. HTML / JS don't have inheritance. There are ways to setup dynamic css code to try and manipulate the data being displayed but that has to be run on your end. It does exist and content creators have already released at least one version of this and posted a link in this forum.

It would be nice if nexusmods actually just made a mobile version of the site. Facebook has this. And while I know facebook has a lot larger market share and can afford to pay for a lot more features, facebook even has an app that just manipulates the data being requested to present the information on the screen differently (again user side) but it's not hard to make something like this. And to give you an idea about what this can be compared to, it's basically a fomod installer or a robot/spider crawling the webpages for information. Find this tag, put content in this location. Formatting of a description that a content creator posts would need new and stricter guidelines to make this change better but I think that's reasonable and can be solved with thumbnails.

Since I don't think Dark has any intention of having an app and instead intends on making a higher resource cost website (1 page on the new site is considerably larger than the old site [data caps//internet speed] and takes more memory to run) I don't see a possible solution. But I think an App + some UI tweaks would have been better than this dramatic overhaul. Even the last change wasn't this big of a difference.

slippyguy wrote: Ever notice how no other website has ever kept a former layout for any longer than a short transitional period? That's why they won't keep it.

Darth Sidious wrote: I read the other issue as well, but since I am not familiar with the details I didnt comment on it, however I dont know why ever redesign of a major website/portal I seen lately includes HUGE elements on the screen, less readability than the old design and similar gimmicks. What happened to the clean, readable and efficient design? I guess that is not "modern" enough any more.

Take Youtube redesign for example, it made things bigger which means less content on the screen and less readability, same goes for menus on Youtube that suddenly arent clean and easily readable by a casual glance, new Youtube merely takes up more screen space, it isnt prettier and it doesnt add any new special functionality, thank God that Youtube can be restored to the old version. Why tech companies behind certain websites continually reinvent the wheel with their redesigns is beyond me, seems the only purpose of some redesigns is to make it new for the sake of the new and that developers can earn their paychecks.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Youtube still has old design available for those who want it and it has been around for quite a while now which hopefully means the old design is here to stay as an option. I agree that for most websites the old design is discarded and new one literally forced upon their users, even though the old design was clean, looking good and perfectly functional, that often happens to websites of various news agencies.

Exoclyps wrote: New one is just too huge. I had to set browser to 60% size to be able to use the site.

slippyguy wrote: The new YouTube design is WIP, it will become mandatory when they decide its ready, just like every other design in the past 11 or so years. Nobody wants to support two different layouts.

Darth Sidious wrote: @slippyguy Microsoft backed out on the Metro UI after severe user backlash, first in 8.1 they introduced the option of getting the normal desktop and in 10 they returned "classic" start menu that can be expanded to Metro-like UI if the user wants to. And we are talking about a whole operating system, not just one website.

While most websites like to force new designs on their users the example of Windows shows users can influence decisions if they really want to, but when it comes to websites most people will just be grumpy for a while and continue using the services of the website effectively falling in line with a sigh "thats life", sharp decline in the number of users and supporters of a website would force the owners of a website to reconsider their decisions, but that rarely happens as most people are not willing to sacrifice something (using services of a website) to achieve their goals. Some are, but not enough of them to make a difference.

That is why small websites or services that dont have hundreds of thousands or millions of users are lot more careful about changing things, big websites can afford to annoy a portion of their users because their user base is large enough plus they know most of those that are not satisfied will still fall in line and continue using their website or their services because there is little to no alternative to what they provide.

lithiumfox wrote: As I proceed to respond to you on my phone....

slippyguy wrote: The fullscreen start menu is to provide an experience tailored for tablet users, and thus worth the extra work of supporting two different layouts. The Metro UI also spans much further than the start menu, and is still mandatory, by the way.

Supporting two entire website layouts (effectively doubling the work of maintenance and updates) purely for cosmetic reasons is just nonsense.

Purely cosmetic reasons? Making half of your users angry at your design is hardly just cosmetic reasons plus a giant like Google can maintain two layouts with extreme ease, that is nothing for a giant like that, they are maintaining far more complicated things than one website layout. And for example they are maintaining two layouts for their search engine, the usual one and the one when you turn off javascript. And that is not the only example of some website maintaining two layouts, most dont care for user feedback, but some do.

The fact Metro UI is still present does not invalidate my comment at all, they defaulted to classic start menu after users raged against new interface, users got what they wanted and that is the point I was making with that example. Edited November 20, 2017 by Darth Sidious