New forum layout?

[RavensFan]

It looks like the upgrades that happened over the included and overhaul to the appearance of the NI site and also the forums.  I'm wondering how other people feel about it.

One thing I noticed is that it seems like it has shrunk the fonts of the lists and the messages themselves.  It's leaving extra white space to the left and right. for no apparent purpose.

Overall, it makes the forums slightly harder to read.  I liked the previous format better.

[johnsold]

I agree that it seems like there is less information on a page. The right and left margins are a waste.

The stuff at the bottom takes too much space to appear on every page.  I do not need a link to Investor Relations on the Reply to Message page! If you must have something down there, just make the parts in bold pop up menus with the other items.

The "title bar" at the top seems clean except the contrast is rather low on the NI name and logo. I might grow to like that part of the new look.

The real question is whether they fixed any of the functional problems.

Lynn

[RavensFan]

The font is definitely smaller.  Not by much, but I noticed it.  I took a screenshot of a forum window I still had open from earlier today before the change, and the font was 10 pixels high.  A screenshot of the new layout shows it 9 pixels high.

Another problem I see is that the icons that show the user ranking of the forum member, and those little graphics that show whether the message thread contains an attachment or image, are all sitting higher than the text next to them.  Previously, they were centered on the line with the text.  This means that in the new layout, any line that contains these graphics takes up that much more vertical space.  The appearance of the page now looks awkward.

[Darin.K]

Too much whitespace for sure, plenty of room for a larger font. I am not web guru, but even I could add a little font size selector to a page.

Side note: I am still adjusting to the chane of the title to Discussion Forums from NI Discussion Forums. I could type n into safari and it would instantly autocomplete, no longer.

[Wolfgang]

1) Here is a figure of what RavensFan mentioned, but there is more: if you go to view your Profile, the various fields 'Private Messages', 'Posts I Kudoed', 'Kudos given to' overlap and may become unreadable due to two texts printed on top of each other. I guess this can be fixed.

2) If you use the spell check, after finishing it will ask to undo corrections - with white font on light grey background, hello...

3) I am most concerned about the 'new' trend? of ever decreasing font size - I don't want to use my glasses to read a Web page, so please return to the old font size...

[apok]

let's hope it's spam proof now, it's getting reaaaally anoying..... 

[altenbach]

While the NI site has definitely received a major overhaul, the forum seems more or less the same to me. From an IP lookup, the forum is hosted on lithium servers, which is not the same as the rest of ni.com.

Cannot really tell if the font size has changed, because I use several different computers with very different resolutions.

[GerdW]

I can confirm the smaller fonts on FireFox too…

I don't like the new style in terms of used space: too much space on top wasted, too much space on bottom wasted. Too much whitespace to both sides wasted:

Why does the forum only use roughly half the width of the browser window? (Can somebody make a screenshot on those super high-res tabs or Retina displays when even on FullHD the site only uses 1000px width?)

Why does it use so much whitespace, but shrinks the table so that even may name and email address need s to wrap up in two lines?

While attiching this picture I also can confirm the screwed up "Attach image" dialog window, also scrolled to the right on FireFox27.0.1. After loading up the picture I could atleast reach all the buttons…

[Norbert_B]

I'm on the same page as Gerd as my firefox displays the forums the same way as seen in his screenshot.

Result is: posts are nearly double the length, headings take 2-3 lines while the old forums layout had it in a single line.

All in all i feel battered about the re-make of the forums and find it a huge step-back in usability.

Please revert the forums to the old style to keep it usable!

thanks,

Norbert

[GerdW]

Hi,

I really would like to know on what kind of computer the new forum style has been tested on!?

Did anybody care to test on FF or Chrome?

Did anybody care to test on FHD (or even bigger resolution) screens?

Did anybody care to test this on FHD screens set to "100% text size" on Windows?

Did anybody at NI approve that new design?

And to add to this nightmare: You still haven't fixed the error with uploading VIs. You made that even more worse as now I'm getting just a "Please correct the highlighted errors and try again." - but there is no highlighted error shown! Instead of showing the problem my VI attachment is simply ignored!