DarkCampainger wrote:

IIRC, the new hub entry layout was designed to give the pages room to grow. Although I agree that the description and live/waiting tabs should be combined, the other tabs work nicely as seperate areas.

I missed the discussion before about the changes being made to hub pages, but I just went back and read it. It boiled down to people saying that they didn't like the changes, and Tom spouting off his typical "Well I don't make any money off of this so maybe I should just stop trying to make things better!" line to guilt them into shutting up.

From what I can see, the changes were made by a group of people who don't play the games on a regular basis, and therefore had no real concept of how to improve the design.


DarkCampainger wrote:

I think the reasoning behind keeping the description and live tabs seperate, though, was that most non-first time player just want to get into the game, and not scroll through (sometimes lengthy) descriptions.

I'd say that if game authors choose to risk losing players with long description, that's their call.


DarkCampainger wrote:

This is really just the best way to handle all of the new information, even though it may take time for both players and developers to get used to it.

I disagree with the premise. Requiring 5+ mouse clicks to access a page's worth of information about a game is not the best way to handle the information. All of this data could be displayed in an intuitive and easy-to-read fashion on a single page.

This isn't a case of having a knee-jerk reaction to the changes simply because they're different than what we're all used to. It's a case of the changes being implemented poorly and taking hub pages a few steps backwards rather than forward.

Well, in going back into the history and reading those posts, keep in mind that there were several variations before the design settled on what it is now. (Thankfully ACWraith has a screenshot :P)

Regardless, the main push for the change was the new medal system; there wasn't enough space on a single hub page to reasonably fit all of the medals, standings, and whatnot. Once that was implemented, the discussion pages soon followed.

There is no going back. You can't reasonably expect Tom, Lummox, and the other staff to just throw away their work because it complicates the design a little. How about trying to meet them halfway? Tom can be an amazingly reasonable guy when you don't pit yourself against him.

You've made a few recommendations towards a better design, but there are some problems. There isn't space to have "a separate smaller div off to the right." The current design, which keeps horizontal space use conservative, fits just perfectly within a 1024px width resolution, which is still widely in use. There's no way you could squish in a long div to the side of that and still have reasonable space to put together a description with images or tables, not to mention it would be 12 pages long and a pain in the arse to scroll through (you would inevitably end up with empty-page syndrome, where one div creates large amounts of empty space as it grows).

Even if Tom was somehow convinced to forgo the sidebar and attached ads on the left of the page, anything in that div would look squished and the page would be needlessly crowded.

So your biggest problem with the current layout seems to be that players are being sidestepped around your fine-tooled description and ushered into the game without pertinent information. The Now Live/Waiting List tab tends to be relatively short for a majority of games, perhaps it could be merged with the overview tab where the top server entry could be moved above the description, and the rest below. This would likely work for just about every game (even DMU, one of the largest games on BYOND) and would leave the description plainly visible to players interested in reading it. Proper link anchors would be needed to provide a quick alternative to scrolling to the lower servers, and some process would need to be determined for which server appears at the top. That's just my opinion, though. I have no doubt there are a number of flaws in it, as well; feel free to point them out so I can improve upon it :)

Also, keep in mind that number of clicks is the not the only deterrent, large pages of information and scrolling can take their toll on merely curious, yet potential players as well.


(Of course, it just occurred to me that an even simpler solution would just be to let developers prevent direct linking from the hub listings to the live tab, and instead have it go to the overview tab first!)

(Also, there's a spider on my wall! That's the second one this hour! Same kind, too. Gangly.)

If the guys asking for the host files can't take that extra two seconds to click on the overview tab and read, that's their problem, not a fault of the system.

The new hub pages are fine, I have nothing against them at all. Then again, I suppose I'm biased in a sense that I can click on tabs and navigate a website...

Tiberath wrote:

If the guys asking for the host files can't take that extra two seconds to click on the overview tab and read, that's their problem, not a fault of the system.

The subject at hand is the incompetent design of the new hub pages, not whether or not they can be navigated with a bit of effort.

If Google.com required people to click three pages over before getting to a search input, that site would never have become THE search engine. If iTunes playlists were hidden in a sub menu, most people would abandon the program in favor of a more user-friendly media player.

Design matters. I doubt that anyone wants to contest that. Function is only half of the equation.

Hi Silk,

Thanks for the constructive criticism as usual. I actually try to take into account lots of factors when making a major design change, but I agree that I'm not a great designer.

I will say that since we enacted this change our hub traffic has risen quite a bit, and we have more players than ever. That may be coincidental but with our non-trivial userbase we can usually see an impact when making these sorts of changes.

I am always willing to backtrack stuff out if I feel it hurts the system. In fact, Lummox JR just spent about a month implementing a major change that, upon reviewing, we've decided to shelve. That was difficult (and my fault as a manager to not realize sooner), but some good things came out of it. Regarding this hub change, I'm sure it'll go through some iterations and good things will come out of that too. I think overall the site is improving constantly, even though we catch hell for it.

I felt the hub pages needed a change because as we were squeezing in more information (from the screenshots to videos to medals to, eventually, events) they were getting too compacted. Also, from our stats we saw that the majority of users were just jumping right to the live games anchor, so it seemed illogical to constantly bombard them with everything else. However, I can see that new users are probably missing out on the overview or some important links (like the download) so we can improve on that.

Well, some of these results are hard to quantify, but it appears that we're getting more people joining games through the hub than before. This isn't too surprising since we link them there. But it's a tradeoff between confusing people by not showing them the description up front or by not showing them the "join" up front. Even big bold links or tabs don't do the trick sometimes.

I understand your gripe, and agree with you, but I don't think this will be that hard to fix within the current system. DarkCampainger's suggestion of merging the Overview with the Live tabs might work, or we could come up with some related compromise. I'll have to bust out my notes, because I swear that some of our earlier public iterations worked something like this. I don't want to revert to the old page for the reasons I've mentioned here and in the various threads on the topic. Basically it just boils down to having expanding info presented on the hub and being forced to conform to a small space.

Customizing the hub pages is too much work, and I'm not sure it's for the best since I'd like to have some consistency from page to page (one of the reasons I prefer this new layout to the old-- it's easier for repeat-visitors to find stuff).

Tom wrote:

DarkCampainger's suggestion of merging the Overview with the Live tabs might work, or we could come up with some related compromise. ... Basically it just boils down to having expanding info presented on the hub and being forced to conform to a small space.

To me the biggest issue is getting the description front-and-center. As you mentioned, even just merging the Overview and Live tabs would be a huge improvement.


Tom wrote:

Customizing the hub pages is too much work, and I'm not sure it's for the best since I'd like to have some consistency from page to page

That make sense; I figured that you prefer a consistent look across all hub entries.

Anyway, it's good to know that you are actively aware of all of this stuff. Thanks for taking the time to respond to this.

I think having the overview on the live page (whether above or below) makes sense for a great many games, but there are a lot of cases (featuring long descriptions or lots of servers) where it doesn't quite work. Also, like I said, repeat-visitors really aren't interested in this info. You are really catering to newcomers, to "make a sale".

So I think the best solution is to ensure that first-time visitors always see the overview page. We can do this by tracking when they download or connect to an instance of the game. I think it's highly unlikely many people read the description after they bother to download or play a game; but they can always get to it if they need to. We could try to make the tabs stand out better too.

But I'll keep giving this thought and take in suggestions.

Tom wrote:

I think having the overview on the live page (whether above or below) makes sense for a great many games, but there are a lot of cases (featuring long descriptions or lots of servers) where it doesn't quite work.

I guess what I'm not getting is the root of your aversion to having the overview grouped in with the live panel. If the overview is wasted on repeat visitors, then what does it matter if it sits below the live games? If most potential players aren't clicking on the overview tab anyway, then at least they can see the info right away when they click on the game for the first time.

I personally think that the Game Overview is much more important than you believe it to be; both for newcomers and repeat visitors. I think that this is more than a matter of a difference in taste; the way that the new hub pages are setup goes against the design logic behind every other game browser I've seen.

If you visit any other website that offers games for download, the game description is always right there along with the download/join link. If I'm browsing for games on iTunes and I click on a title, it displays all of the pertinent information on a single page for ease of viewing. The same thing goes for Steam, Impulse, GoG and any other game browser out there.


The Naked Ninja wrote:

And as tom says all the time it's improved hub traffic, so why fix something that isn't broken?

As Tom explained, the likely reason that people seem to be joining more games is because clicking on a game takes you directly to the Games Live listing. When it comes to properly organizing and displaying the pertinent information, the design is in need of work.