New design constructive feedback

[twowolves80]

Constructive is defined by answers.com as (in spoiler tags so as not to waste space):

 

Constructive feedback is letting people know in a helpful way how they are doing, and how their performance is being perceived. Constructive feedback can be positive (letting someone know they're doing well), negative (letting people know about ways in which they could do better), or neutral (just an objective observation or analysis).

There are two main elements that make feedback (particularly negative feedback) constructive.

1. The content of the feedback: Constructive feedback is specific, behavior or issue-focused (rather than a value judgment about the individual), based on what is observable (rather than assuming anything about the person's attitude or motivation), and includes some specific direction on how to make improvements if some are needed.

2. Most important, how the feedback is delivered. To be constructive, feedback should not be delivered in a manner that provokes resentment, resistance, defensiveness, hurt feelings, shame or a sense of failure. It means not backing the person into a corner with attacks. Honest doesn't mean tactless. This is where emotional intelligence really makes a difference.

 

With that definition in mind...

To the devs:

Hi. Thank you for your efforts. I appreciate all that has been done so far, and I can't wait to see the results on Vortex! [<---- started with a compliment]

I like the concept of the new site, but here's how I think it could be improved:

1. Make the pages for the Nexus look as they do when we shrink them down to 80%

2. Change the font size to increase the visual clarity as a result of the reduction (the dark gray text on gray boxes is fine, just needs to be bigger)

3. Make the Games section above the News and Announcements section a sidebar with a list of games instead of tiles (you could just do a single row of tiles in a scroll-box on the side so the tiles with their images are still there, but they're not emphasized as much over the News and Announcements)

4. Put a 1-second delay on the buttons on the top so that they don't immediately drop down into a selection box if you pan the mouse cursor across them. This will cause users to have to leave their cursor on the button to get them to drop down instead of just having the drop-downs appear.

5. Just a thought, not sure if it's do-able. How about an archives tab on the News section so that older news articles and site announcements could be accessed? You could even have a search function baked into that tab so that admins/moderators or forum power-users could quick-search articles they need.

[^ Next, put in very specific suggestions to both make the site better and discuss things I've noticed myself, without resorting to confrontational language]

I know you have a busy schedule with the release of Vortex coming up, not to mention the holidays, so I'm not expecting results overnight. Have a great holiday season and look forward to seeing the evolution of the Nexus! :)

[^ Finished with a note of encouragement (cuz devs like hearing that stuff for some mysterious reason) out of appreciation for the work being done, even if it's not always the direction I'd choose]

I believe that is how you give constructive feedback. Follow this format, and there should be no more need for the staff to trouble themselves with playing referee. Really, they shouldn't have to, anyway. We're all a community here. Part of a digital family. Why argue with my siblings? We both want the same thing: For Nexus to be the best damned website out there, bar none.

So here's to everyone in this thread and beyond, member and admin alike. Happy holidays to you all. Now, let's get out there and kick some death claw/dragon ass!

:P

[javic666]

I just returned to this site after a few months away. Seeing the new look compels me to respond.

 

First, a few caveats:

 

1. I’m using the site on a desktop PC with a widescreen monitor at 1920x1200 resolution, so please interpret my remarks in that context. I’m familiar with responsive design and so understand many of the tradeoffs required. But I don’t browse or download mods with my phone, so the benefits of this design approach for me are moot.
2. Apologies if I repeat points already made by other respondents. I made an effort to read or scan through the existing responses, but I didn't have time to fully read them all.
3. My remarks include many questions. That’s just my style. They’re rhetorical, reflecting my thought process as I interact with the site—see Steve Krug’s excellent book “Don’t Make Me Think”. No need for any answers.
4. The previous post about constructive feedback notwithstanding :smile: , most of my comments identify issues but don’t offer solutions. That’s because I’ve been on the receiving side of this kind of feedback many times. Constructing effective solutions to user interface issues typically requires a deeper understanding of the site’s design constraints (technical, political, and economic) and implementation than I currently have, so I’ll leave that to NexusMods.

 

Now on to my impressions…

 

My first reaction is “Whoa! What happened here?” but I soon realize what’s going on, so I’ll temper my first impressions to distinguish what to me seem like true issues from simple unfamiliarity. I also fully acknowledge I’m using this site for free, but it’s a very useful site and I’d like to see it succeed, so I’ll spend some time here to see if I can help out.

 

First off, I notice the empty (or ad-filled) space at the top of the page (apparently at the top of every page). Making me scroll down on every page to get to content is a UI fundamental no-no (especially on small devices). To be fair, the old site had some of this too, but the ad space on the new site is bigger (according to my informal A/B comparison).

 

Simply finding the game in which I’m interested is now a minor pain in the butt. Clicking the “Games” button in the menu reveals a megamenu filled with “Empty favourite” tiles at the very bottom of which in tiny letters is the link for browsing games. (And BTW: I own several hundred games. Eight slots for my “favorites” among them is insufficient.) Browsing games should IMO be the easiest of easy things to do.

 

I’m not sure the new “Search” feature is an improvement. Historically, I’ve found myself more than anything else searching mod descriptions for key words. A bit of detective work (for something that should IMO be obvious) reveals this new search box searches only file names. So the ability to search descriptions is gone? Has the old “Advanced search” been removed entirely? That’s a great loss if so. If it’s only been hidden or moved, well, that’s kinda bad too. I use advanced search pretty much every time I visit the site; it's typically the first thing I do.

 

Navigating to a game’s mod page (Fallout 3 for this session) now shows me a pre-filtered subset of available mods (unlike the old site which shows all mods sorted in a default order). If I hadn’t been here before for this game, there’s a good chance I’d initially think this is all there is: seven mods available for Fallout 3. I guess “What’s New” is a reasonable place to start, but why is “Explore All Mods” a separate link at the right rather than another tab? I assume “Popular (All Time)” shows all mods (yes?) so what’s the difference between that and “Explore All Mods” that justifies the different treatment? I also notice the tabs offer sorting and filtering operations using one visual metaphor. Is that a good idea? Finally, what does “Popular” mean? The old site offered “Most downloaded” and “Most endorsed” as two objective ways to assess popularity and organize content. The more general and subjective term “Popular” is ambiguous and thus less usable (ambiguity is anathema to good UI design). Also, I’m not sure I understand the relationship between the tabs and the items in the “Mods” dropdown menu at the top. The two vehicles seem to offer the same content, but in different contexts. That to me is confusing (i.e., the content is named the same but looks different. Is it the same or not?)

 

The next thing I notice is the tiles for the mods themselves. They’re bigger, and fewer of them are shown (by my count, 20 per page now compared to 30 previously). Some of the additional information in the new tiles is helpful (date and size in particular are nice to have here, although not essential) but the fading text seems a waste of space to me. The previous site showed the entire summary in a popup on hover, but here I see only a few lines of readable text that might or might not help me to decide if a particular mod is of interest. I know that “hover” is one of those things we must give up for touch-screen users (at least until the technology advances further) but it’s an extremely useful gesture for mouse/trackball users and it would be great if it could persist here.

 

Finally, moving on to the page for a particular mod (FWIW I chose NMC’s Texture Pack for this experiment), things look fairly familiar (thank you). There’s the taller ad space at the top yet again. And I’m not sure why I need a carousel of the mod’s images here (taking up lots of space) when the images are all available (in a better format IMO) on the “Images” tab. And why do tags figure so prominently here? I sometimes use tags to find mods, but care little about what tags are assigned once a mod is found. Taken altogether, what I'm really interested in (mod details) is pretty far down the page here which isn't an optimal arrangement. Finally, the only other minor annoyance I see is on the “Files” tab where individual items are now quite a bit taller thus requiring more scrolling to see them all (I presume it’s another “responsive” concession to accommodate fat fingers).

 

Overall, IMHO it’s not too bad as redesigns go (I’ve seen much worse). The old design had problems too as others have pointed out. The tradeoffs for responsive design here are as frustrating for desktop users as on most sites and applications these days, making things accessible for users of small-footprint device at the cost of increased tedium (additional clicking and/or scrolling) for desktop users. I've accepted that as simply the current (primitive) state of the art.

 

On the other hand, there seems to be a rather widespread waste of screen space throughout this new site design (ad space, mod images and tags, to name a few) and you can’t blame responsive design for that. And there seems to be more “noise” here than in the previous design. (That’s subjective I know. With more time, I could probably be more specific.) Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the main work flow of this site (for mod users as opposed to authors) seems pretty simple: find game; find mod; download mod; leave. Optimize the site for this task first. Everything else is secondary.

 

Despite my earlier resignation, the one place here where IMO the “responsive” tradeoff goes too far is in the mod browsing page, where the tiles are unnecessarily large (much larger I think than is needed to be “finger ready”) and the number of tiles shown per page is reduced. Of course, the latter constraint can apparently be lifted by paying money, revealing another instance of a common justification for redesign: increased revenue. C’est la vie. And now that net neutrality is gone, wait until NexusMods starts paying ISPs for decent download speeds. But I digress…

 

Finally, I’ll ask (as a practicing user experience professional for many years) if you have done or have plans to do any usability testing for the new site design? Soliciting opinions is easy and free, but research clearly shows that what humans say they do (or like) and what they actually do (or like) are often only loosely related (and frequently at odds). If the goal is to make the site better (as opposed to just making it different, or meeting an arbitrary standard of “responsiveness”), usability testing is a good way to determine objectively if you’ve succeeded or not.

 

P.S. A number of other respondents in this thread have criticized the flat design aesthetic. Yeah, I dislike it too. It’s what we get when graphic design takes priority over usability (a tension almost as old as the computer interface). But that’s the current style. And I use the word “style” intentionally. Like hem lines and lapel widths, just wait a bit and it’ll change. In the meantime, get used to “prospecting” to find out if something’s clickable or not. Sigh. :confused:

[twowolves80]

1. The previous post about constructive feedback notwithstanding :smile: , most of my comments identify issues but don’t offer solutions. That’s because I’ve been on the receiving side of this kind of feedback many times. Constructing effective solutions to user interface issues typically requires a deeper understanding of the site’s design constraints (technical, political, and economic) and implementation than I currently have, so I’ll leave that to NexusMods.

lol You're all good, mang. Your attention to detail is astounding, and I, as a user, appreciate these comments more because even if they don't offer solutions, they stimulate the gray matter and cause me to see other things that could use addressing. So kudos to you. It doesn't even have to be a long one like yours. But these details will be critical in the coming weeks after Vortex is released and the dev turns her attention to the site.

 

Yes, that's right, the dev isn't working on the site right now, so we all have to be patient. How do I know? Who am I that I have access to such information? lol Why, I'm frickin' twowiki, the wonder-dog. Haven't you heard? :P Sorry, inside joke.

 

Here's what Dark0ne said in the thread found here:

 

Over the next few weeks we will assess how much traffic the redesign site is getting and the bugs we're receiving. If we think we've had enough testing data and we've cleared our bug backlog we will then switch the sites around; nexusmods.com will point to the new redesign and you will be able to switch back to the old design temporarily during this period. We will then monitor this as another testing phase and, once we're happy with how things have progressed, we will finally turn off the old design completely and everyone will be forced on to the new design. At this point the old design will not be coming back and will not be usable ever again. Hence why it makes sense for you to try and use the new design as much as possible so you get used to it sooner rather than later.

 

A note on the UI, UX and overall look. When we started this process we worked with a professional designer to create the initial mockups because we didn't have a full-time designer ourselves. The designer we worked with was great, but naturally as we didn't have him full-time and our work on the code took way longer than initially anticipated, it meant that he could only go so far. As such, the current design on the new site is, I'd say, 75% the designer's, following good UI/UX principles and 25% ours, without expert supervision (and likely lacking good UI/UX principles). We've had to change or add functionality that was missed in the original mockups that was not done by a UI/UX professional and as such, we're aware there are some areas of the site that, already, could do with the touch of an expert. Thankfully, our very own UI and UX designer has begun working from our office now. Her initial focus is going to be solely on Vortex, the mod manager to replace NMM. I can tell you right now, I'm extremely excited about her work from what I've seen so far and I think she's going to do great things for both Vortex and the Nexus Mods sites.

 

Once we're happy with Vortex she will move her focus on to the sites. I tell you this for two reasons. To inform you we're aware there are a few UI/UX issues with the redesign at this time, and to let you know that it will be resolved to an expert level at some point in the not too distant future. We won't be making any changes to the design until she is able to give it her full attention in a couple of month's time and, while we know some of you are budding UI and UX people yourselves and love to share your feedback with us, we'll obviously not be touching anything major until our own expert is ready.

 

I think some of this addresses a couple of your rhetorical questions (which I agree with). I don't think Dark0ne is trying to force people to pay for ad-free usage, but I can understand your point, too. I don't mind paying the $2 (even though it was a gift to me--let's not be hypocritical, twowolves) simply because it's an investment in a community that for me, is often the only socializing I do.

 

Cheers! :)

[TheDevian]

Aside from the ugly, bulky, and clunky, windows metro-looking design that lazy people everywhere are copying, as many people have already stated... My biggest problems with it are that I can no longer follow bookmarks to certain pages, like my files page for example, without using the pull-down menu after the page fully loads and I scroll down (which is actually even worse on a phone), the way the page keeps jumping around as it loads (moves right as I try to click on something, several times), and if I use tabs or the pull-down menus to browse between pages, as is required, then using the 'back' button doesn't change anything until you go all of the way back, but browsing that way does rack up forward clicks. I want my back button to actually go back, and actually change the page to the last one I was on, not just go back in the browser, but not change anything on the page. I am disabled, and the more times I have to click on things, the more pain I have to endure, I really do not like adding extra complexity for no reason. Change for the sake of change is pointless, for change to be effective, it needs to be an improvement, otherwise, like in the evolution analogy from before, you simply end up with one of the many extinct examples, 'failed mutations' as it were.

 

What is with the attitudes (rhetorical question)? Here is a bit more constructive criticism. If you are just going to respond with sarcasm and vitriol, then don't bother, you are the ones not being constructive, and are more or less 'off topic', creating the argument, making it worse, however you want to look at it. This is why the creators are not supposed to be the ones who respond in these feedback situations. You need a neutral party who does not act like they care either way, you cannot take these things personally, especially on the net, just silently watch behind the 'two-way mirror' that is the forum. If you really want to know numbers, once you are ready, put up a poll you have to click on to get into the site, 'good', 'bad', 'indifferent, leaning this way or that', and give a place for written feedback for the people who DO want to give specifics. Otherwise, stop talking about this % of that, or which silent majority is bigger. You can only work with what you have, anything else isn't relevant, you are just blowing smoke.

 

The person who first said 'customer' was a premium member, that means that was exactly what they were, and all of us are consumers.

 

I know being told what you worked on sucks, well sucks, been there, done that, countless times, but you have to take it all into perspective, it is all part of life. Most people are not going to like what you do, no matter what it is, especially on the internet, unless you are in a very sheltered environment. Most people won't be specific, and don't want to stand out that way. Someone just saying they don't like something is still useful feedback, even if being told specifics helps us a lot more, it all adds up.

[Deleted3680043User]

Personally I think the new website design is really nice, as I learn to navigate about I'm realizing just how old and tired the original one was getting. Especially love the new screenshot system for mods.

[Deleted3680043User]

A number of other respondents in this thread have criticized the flat design aesthetic. Yeah, I dislike it too. It’s what we get when graphic design takes priority over usability (a tension almost as old as the computer interface).

I'm guessing that living mostly in Mac OS and only doing Fallout 4 on my windows 10 boot disk I'm pretty used the 'flat' UI design, but the nexus site couldn't be further from that colorless aesthetic, I find it clean and easy to navigate and quite visually pleasing.

[twowolves80]

 

A number of other respondents in this thread have criticized the flat design aesthetic. Yeah, I dislike it too. It’s what we get when graphic design takes priority over usability (a tension almost as old as the computer interface).

I'm guessing that living mostly in Mac OS and only doing Fallout 4 on my windows 10 boot disk I'm pretty used the 'flat' UI design, but the nexus site couldn't be further from that colorless aesthetic, I find it clean and easy to navigate and quite visually pleasing.

 

Yeah, the more I use it, the more I like it, too. Especially on my MacBook. I use the Mac for browsing and hanging out on the forums, and it works pretty well, some of the glitchiness aside. Granted, I have the new site page set to 80% in my Firefox browser, but overall, I'm pretty happy with the direction it's going. Those oddball bugs mentioned by TheDevian are likely to get worked out in a month or two after Vortex is released. So just hang in there. Once Vortex is released, I think we'll see a lot faster response to site bugs and whatnot compared to the slow trickle of fixes we've been seeing.

[UsaliaCurryBunny]

Please tell me how to go back to the old style, the new one is annoying, You just did the same thing that google, microsoft and youtube does...

 

When something is working just fine and the user is already used to it... you screw it.

[zcul]

If it can be implemented on the new site, I would like
either
to have sticky comments in the mods' POSTS tab being collapsable
or
have stickies visible only on the mods' first comment/posts pages.

[kenobi1]

IDK if this has been brought up in the time since I commented last (that was 12 pages ago and I'm not wading through all that :P) But the comments section of mod pages seems to be...incredibly unresponsive/slow.

 

When posting a new comment and hitting the submit button, nothing happens or changes...so I hit submit again...nothing...but when I refresh the page itself, my comment has been double posted, so obviously the site registered both button pushes. Same deal with editing a comment already made, only refreshing the page will show the changes, and even then, only sometimes.