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Pastimes : SI Beta Site Launch - 7/01/99 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (1206)	8/2/1999 9:13:00 PM
From: Caroline	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2340

Colors While the beta colors used to be worse than they are today, they're still not nearly as friendly, warm and inviting as the classic colors. I don't know if color is the most important complaint. I'd put it on equal footing with the navigation, I think. Navigation The navigation requires me to move the mouse much more than on classic. The boxes around each message are in the middle of the screen. On the classic site, they are on the left. Do an alt-tab between these two pages to following along. It is very important to set your beta personal options as follows: Would you like the stocktalk messages to be displayed with a border? Yes. Would you like the stocktalk messages to be stretched to fit the window? No. Navigation Sample classic: Message 10778526 beta: beta.siliconinvestor.com Previous Next Respond alt-tabbing between the two, notice the "Previous Next Respond" is on the upper left and bottom left of the message box. Beta doesn't have "Previous Next Respond." It has "View Next 10 Messages Respond Previous Next." These options are shoved all the way to the right of the screen, they're in a different order than the classic site, and the font is much smaller. So I have to scroll all the way to the right when my eyes were focused on the middle of the screen to read the message. In the classic site, the message and navigation were on the left. One wasn't in the middle while the other was off to a side. Since there were only three choices, it took half of a half of a nanosecond to choose the "Next" link. On beta, it takes a complete thought to navigate to "Next" each time. That's expensive. View SubjectMarks from the middle of the thread The next decision: do I click "Next," or am I done with the thread and want to click "View SubjectMarks"? On the classic page, I know immediately if I'm done with the thread. As my eyes scan the left side of the screen, they land at the available or unavailable "Next" link. If "Next" is available, I click it. If "Next" is not available, the "View SubjectMarks" is right there, bigger than life, underneath the empty "Next" link, waiting for me to click that, instead. On the beta page, "Next" is all the way over to the right, but my eyes are in the middle of the page. It is not an even flow. Then, if "Next" is not available, I need to search out the tiny little "View SubjectMarks" link, somewhere below the empty "Next," hidden as white type on a gray background. That just doesn't stand out. ViewSubjectMarks from the last message Now, please navigate to the last message in the thread, both on beta and classic. Pretend you've navigated there by clicking "Next Next Next" through a thread. Now that you're at the last message of the thread, the expectation is that there are more messages. On classic, you go to click "Next" again, the link isn't there, so you travel down 1/2 inch and click "View SubjectMarks." On beta, you go to click "Next" again, the link isn't there, so your eyes travel down 1/2 inch from next and there's nothing there. So you look left, which is an unnatural movement for anyone who reads left-to-right. You find the "View SubjectMarks" hidden, white on gray (camouflaged), nowhere in the proximity of the "Next." Long messages lose text Now please notice what happens with a longer message: classic: Message 10778830 beta: beta.siliconinvestor.com On classic, the last two lines I can see without scrolling are: I think the attitude coming from the user community is worse than that of the R&D team, JMO. On beta, the last two lines I can see without scrolling are: was! Post #4 a month ago! We never talked about it and it wasn't addressed to Bryan but so what - it was there!!". As I scroll through hundreds of posts, those extra two lines add up to hundreds and hundreds of extra scrolls on beta that I would not have to do on classic. Any post that was once viewable in one shot is now viewable only with scrolling. On classic, an 18 line message is viewable without scrolling. On beta, I have to start scrolling at 15 lines. How many hundreds of times will I have to do an extra scroll just to read the last line of a 16 line message? ... [Because I know this will come up in response to this post, the answer is: 1024x768, 16 million colors, small fonts.] I hope this note begins to answer your questions. Regards, Caroline