Help me find UI issues on OGA
Monday, March 31, 2014 - 11:39
Hey folks. Since I'm kind of on a roll, I thought it might be a good time to try and address UI issues on OGA. If anything looks bad, doesn't work, or needs to be reorganized in some way, reply to this and let me know and I'll see if I can fix it.
Note that there are a few things that I can't/won't be dealing with in the near future:
- A re-theme of the site -- It's just not feasible at the moment with the amount of time (and money) I have available.
- There are too many fields on the art submit form -- While this is a frequent complaint, it's also a frequent complaint that we don't ask for enough info on art submissions. I'm asking people to fill out the absolute bare minimum of what we need in order to be useful. If you have ideas for the art submission form that don't involve removing fields, I'm all ears.
Bart
Comments
Well there is this oddity I've run across with iOS (and it stuck around after I migrated to a newer iPhone/iOS version). Not really that major, but it makes site navigation really annoying with iCrap - clicking on links/buttons in Content pages makes OGA go into Rave Mode instead of actually opening the link about half the time, unless I select 'Open in New Tab' (or sometimes, turn my phone sideways to force an orientation/layout change). Otherwise, I've never had an issue with any other browser - works perfectly in literally everything else, so I usually just browse from my desktop or Android these days.
Of course, considering I've never seen anyone else report it, I'm still open to the possibility that I'm either insane or doing it wrong.
These bug me:
Oh, and another thing that my previous post illustrates nicely:
Images too wide for the layout get clipped even when there's plenty of empty space beside them. It'd be nice if they allways spilled over the empty space, not just when hovering.
Not exactly an issue, but: As someone who likes to use the /latest page as entrypoint, I would like to have the "recent comments" box on left sidebar, preferably under "active forum topics" and above the 2 collection boxes. On the start page, I think this order (pulling the recent comments a bit up) makes more sense too.
Also, not sure if intended or not: On latest art page, main block, why is the order: 3D - 2D - all mixed - Music - Sounds - Textures? I would find it more systematic if the mixed box is either on top or bottom.
Also, what Surt says, images wider than the main block could maybe resized and turn into a link that would open the image in full size in next tab on click (I'm doing that manually with context menu now, to circumvent the problem). Or surts solution, but then, I dont have that empty space on right side (1024x768 here). So not sure where the real root of the problem is - or which fix is easier.
Simiar and related to the issues surt point out, but I just noticed this:
http://screencast.com/t/a2mYR9lbfn
Why are the headers on posts like this sitting directly on the left side of the page? It just looks off, I think there's plenty of room and they could be given some more spacing on the left side.
I also think that the user name's, joined, post dates and avatars need more space from the left side of the page as well.
Alignment issue
http://www.imagebam.com/image/19280e318272885
Bart's art showing below blog
http://www.imagebam.com/image/4155d4318272723
"Popular this week" and "Latest art" both go to the same url /latest
It's been like that for years though, not sure if intentional.
Thx for the "recent comments" change, it is so intuitive now, I didnt even realize until I went from /latest to mainpage and thought "Oh you have seen the comments already"
So, quick update on this stuff:
@MoikMellah: I don't own an iDevice (and can't really afford to go buy one at the moment), so I'm not sure how to go about testing and fixing this. I've disabled a Drupal setting that minifies and caches the theme css and javascript, so it should be easier for people to poke and prod at them now. If someone can submit a fix that doesn't break anything else, I'll add it.
@surt: Fixing that is going to involve a lot of effort and testing. I know it drives some people crazy, but unfortunately the fix will involve some major changes site theme. For the record, the page used to extend outward as wide as the browser would go, and while I get occasional complaints about it not doing that now, I got a flood of complaints when it did, because the blog, forum, and comment text widened as well, and that made it difficult to read. If I'm going to fix this, I'll need to be intelligent about how the layout works so that I can avoid those issues. I'll see what I can do about the wide images, though.
@riidom: The blocks needed to be reorganized a bit, and your suggestion spurred that on. All the blocks now show up on the latest page if you scroll down enough. I also removed the superfluous donate block.
@JaidynReiman: I Tweaked the page headers so they shouldn't do that anymore. Let me know if you see some that I missed.
@Botanic: Just added a fix. Hopefully it doesn't break everything else. :)
@catmanjan: When I come up with a "hotness" algorithm for arts, popular will link to a different page.
Nice, thanks for all these updates!
The headers do look a lot better now, that's a good improvement.
Seems when people are uploading on a high latency connection its really slow, could use resumable.js or MultiPortUpload to make it so that it not only resumes but sends multipul chunks at once so high latency is less of an issue
Disabling rich text always produces a text with HTML paragraph tags.
On the other hand, pure-text paragraph formatting (line feeds and double line feeds) are removed by the enable-disable rich text cycle.
This is really annoying when re-editing submissions: Entering the EDIT form has an implicit "enable rich text" and after disabling that, one has to spend some time fixing the broken formatting.
@caeles: Sorry about that. I just made it possible to permanently toggle using the rich text editor in your user profile. While this doesn't fix the bug itself, it should at least serve as a work-around.
When I browse a category, such as 2D Art, i often see items being repeated multiple times in a row.
When a music or sound effect file is played it would be convenient if other playing sounds would stop. So you don't have to manually stop the previous one before starting the next.
@ace491:
The duplicates in art browsing is a known bug. A complete rewrite of the search function is planned.
I like the idea about automatically stopping other playing music. I'll see if I can fix that in the next day or so.
I think this could be fixed without too much effort:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/bug-collect-into-css-error
Noticed a few issues with the 'Submit Art' page:
1) The page itself is <TITLE>'d incorrectly as "Create Art".
2) If you don't select an 'Art Type' when trying to submit, the background of that section turns light pink. White text on light pink is REALLY hard to read.
3) The available text and links for the Creative Commons licenses need to be updated to version 4.0.
Also, I second the suggestion from @Botanic to use resumable uploads. i had to upload each of the images for my Lunar Rock submission individually because the .zip upload kept timing out.
1) The page itself is <TITLE>'d incorrectly as "Create Art".
Shouldn't be too hard to fix that.
2) If you don't select an 'Art Type' when trying to submit, the background of that section turns light pink. White text on light pink is REALLY hard to read.
That's annoying. I'll fix it.
3) The available text and links for the Creative Commons licenses need to be updated to version 4.0.
I've asked people to keep me informed when Debian Legal and/or the FSF comment on whether the CC 4.0 licenses are acceptable free software licenses. Until I hear one way or another, I'm not going to put them on OGA.
As for resumable uploads, there's a Drupal project for this, but apparently it's not complete yet. If people want to check on this from time to time and let me know if there's a real release, I'd appreciate it:
https://drupal.org/sandbox/hatsch/2210207
@CruzR: Per the other thread, I'm not sure why it worked for me and not for you, but it's fixed. :)
@cron: Fixed the submit art page title and the unreadable error text.
@ace491: Sounds should now stop when you play another sound on the same page.
If any of these things appear to revert back to their old issues, please let me know. I think we're having some caching issues and after certain theme changes, the cache ends up needing to be flushed twice. You should also be able to force-reload (CTRL-SHIFT-R) and fix it that way.
if you want a prebuilt drupal module you can use https://drupal.org/project/plupload its using a older ver of plupload but they working on it
I just figured a .js was easier as it shouldnt be that hard to use it with OGA (knock on wood) :D
Great job on stopping sounds and great job on the site overall!
Another minor problem is that when you start and stop a music file really fast, before it finishes loading and plays, it plays anyway even though it shows its stopped.
Not an issue so much, but it would be nice if the main page of a subbmission had a "last updated" timestamp so you wouldn't have to go to the revisions page to check this. The text of the most recent revision could be nice as well.
An oddity
After going to a page on OpenGameArt, out of curiosity the first thought in my mind is to press the "Tab" key.
Then "Skip to main content" appears above Sara, what purpose does it have?
rh0, it might be a little late to answer this, but Skip to main content is designed for users of screenreaders and other non-standard browsers.