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

To: Caroline who wrote (1214)	8/2/1999 10:21:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2340

I agree. Colors are no longer the important issue. These ones work OK. I'm surprised they ever were so important, but then, I liked the army brown and still prefer it to the current battleship gray. Great examples of navigation issues, Caroline. One of my frustrations in the beta process has been the lack of discussion from some who have simply said they don't like the new site and want the old one back. I think your analysis is very useful. You did a great job of explaining just what SI looks like to you. Both sites look different on my screen, but the beta looks more different. The reason: I use a narrow browser window. I don't like to open it wider than 640 pixels. Unfortunately, both SIs require a slightly wider screen than that, so I give both of them about 660 pixels. On the beta that's the size that will allow everything to fill the screen without a horizontal scroll bar. On the old site, it's the size of the yellow table box at the top of the screen. (The old site always puts a horizontal scroll bar because of the right-side navigation links, but I've learned to put up with that). My options are set for no boxes, since I find the vertical lines in the box on either site to distract from the horizontal reading of text. I set the option to stretch messages because I find the defined width messages to be too wide. I'd prefer more white space on either side of a stretched message to make them a bit narrower at 660 px, but have learned to deal with the less-than-ideal setting. But now that we have the substantial differences in settings clarified, I still find the new site far easier to navigate. Because of my window size, I'd have to scroll the whole screen to the left in order to even see the "Next" and "Previous" off on the edge there. But even with a wide window like what you specified, I find it necessary to scroll the mouse over half the screen distance to get from "Next" to "Respond" to "Next" again, and back up top to "Bookmarks". It's very inefficient, in my experience. On the new site, I find that my mouse stays in a narrow area, especially since I have "SubjectMarks" as my last toolbar item which puts it above the "Next" link. Even on my narrow screen, the "Next" button stays to the left of the text below it, so I don't have to pull the mouse away from the text in the way I do when using the old site. [It would require even less mouse movement if the new message count link were on the right side of the SubjectMarks list, but I've decided against making any such suggestion. I'm not making it now, but just suggesting that even I would like to see some changes, but will put up with some inefficencies.] As I mentioned, the old site always puts a horizontal scroll bar on the screen since I keep the window to minimal width (to the size of the yellow bar) so that I'm not wasting space on the screen. That scroll bar actually takes away most of the advantage of the extra three lines of text in the old site. When I use the old site in my preferred setup, I see just a half-line less text in the beta compared to the old one. So to emphasize: I am very pleased with navigation of the new site, but continue to appreciate your explanations. I think they will help develop ways to please even more users. Perhaps those who use a fixed message width would prefer to have them left-justified. I believe it's vital to keep the navigation links in their current order and keep them right justified (for all the reasons I stated weeks ago), but think there might be a way to make them work better for a wide window like what you use. I also prefer the smaller font size for the navigation links, largely because it contributes to what I see as a greater emphasis on the message text in the new site. I've mentioned other aspects of navigation before, like the customized toolbar that lets me put my most-used features within easy reach. [My screen, BTW, is 20-inch at 1280x1024, 64K colors, Small fonts.]