Dear list,
I have been reviewing a lot of the feedback we have from UserVoice. This as
been valuable in identifying some serious problems we have with our beta
website. Thanks to Peter Cowburn, Paul Dragoonis and anyone else involved
for getting UserVoice up and running.
I have some major updates pending to beta PHP.net that address many of the
feedback items. I have not yet pushed because it creates some new problems
and I don't want feedback from users on it just yet since I know what some
of the big issues are.
Some highlights and lowlights:
- *I stuck the header to the top of the screen at all times. *This
required a few changes such as shrinking its overal vertical size. I also
went ahead and gave it the dark-grey color of the dropdown menu and the
footer.
- The dropdown menu now interacts strangely if you've scrolled. This
can be fixable, but there has been a lot of feedback on the dropdown menu
that is hard to fix. *I vote we remove the dropdown menu**.* We don't
have one currently and so it isn't a usability regression if we
remove it.
If we can work a better implementation then we can add it back in. This
would possibly mean we need to add an item or two to the main navigation
but I'm fine with that.
- *I moved the "parent" navigation items out of the layout-menu (on the
left) and into a breadcrumbs bar. *This came from a suggestion from the
uservoice feedback and I think it works really well. This also strengthens
the layout-menu because it's more clear what the menu is for: related
functions.
- *I reduced the margins on many items. *This one was painful to me but
I really had to choose between shrinking the margins and shrinking the base
font-size which I will not do. Thus I gave in and removed some of the
whitespace. This means some items that were originally separated by
whitespace might need something else to help separate them (such as a
border).
- *The layout-menu is now grey instead of purple.* Combined with the
dark header across the page this really gives the page more variety in
color and contrast. A very common piece of feedback was the lack of color,
excess whitespace and lacking contrast.
- *The homepage looks worse than ever.* Not quite sure what to do about
it; I'll think about it over the next day or so.
If you have ideas on how to fix any of these problems please let me know.
There are also a few minor problems such as the PHP logo now being barely
visible that I need to touch up before I push these changes; I don't want a
bunch of UserVoice feedback saying the PHP logo is hard to see.
The changes can be viewed at http://leviathon.homenet.org/ when my server
is up -- it's hit and miss right now because of active development. You can
find a small gallery of screenshots that illustrate these changes at
http://imgur.com/a/4ZoWo#0
If you absolutely hate these changes, please let me know that as well; I'm
open to feedback both good and ill.
Cheers,
Levi Morrison
