New forum layout?

[Norbert_B]

Just an important note regarding "oversimplifying". That is not necessary.

I downloaded and currently use "stylish" to expand the forums width only (so not for complete ni.com!) to 98% of my screen resolution.

I would expect the web team to be able to implement something else which only refers to the forum-pages!

Norbert

[Wolfgang]

I had mentioned it earlier but...

so here are two examples of the spell check popup. If I'm the only one having problems  i  wil stoppp usng a speel chek

. yes... there is text above and below helloj...

correct: it says: Undo corrections?

[Ray.R]

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@Darin.K wrote:

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@JordanG wrote:

The current industry standard for the web is to design for a resolution of 1024 x 768, as this is the most widely used resolution based on our research.

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I would like to see the source of that research (I expect it to be dated something like 2005).  My own empirical evidence provided by hundreds of uploaded VIs in the forums is that LV users tend to skew toward larger monitors.  Much larger monitors.

That resolution much more accurately reflects the minimum resolution a site will be viewed with.   "Industry Standard" subconsciously equates to lowest common denominator for me.  Having seen it with  my own eyes, you will have trouble convincing me that flowing the forums content with the width  is not a vast improvement.  The 960/980px is perfectly fine as a minimum width, that means no horizontal scrolling for the 0.5% of people with that size monitor.

I think two things can be equally true in this case.  The design of the website certainly leapt forward a great deal, and it landed somewhere in the 960-grid craze of 2007.  The community and the forums are two places where content and substance should prevail over style.

Each advance in the past 5+ years has given us more style, and when there is "fluff" added on the sides like sidebars and widgets it was tolerable because we could expand the width to take advantage of modern technology and maintain a decent size for the real content.  Now we have the fluff on the sides but we can no longer expand the width to compensate.

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I have to agree with Darin...   We tend to be non standard...  Never base facts done by research carried out by economists...  They will lead you astray....  most of the time..

Spoiler

okay.... all the time...

[GerdW]

Hi,

recently I got a message from my health insurance: They are proud to present their relaunched website!

And guess what: they explicitely mention to support all those different screen sizes of any mobile device!

The website also looks good on my laptop…

Seems an insurance doesn't need to obey to some "industry standard"! 😉

[RavensFan]

Must be private health insurance.  Any government website doesn't work for any screen resolution.

[GerdW]

Hi Raven,

nope, I'm in Germany: "standard" health insurance…

[tst]

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@JordanG wrote:

With that, our web designers have been leveraging industry standards and working slowly but surely toward creating a cohesive, consistent experience on all of ni.com (including the Community). 

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I forgot about this in my previous reply, so I will comment on this now. It's nice that they want to create a consistent experience, but they're actually going the wrong way - the community has annoyed me many times in the past because it doesn't use the whole width of the page properly, particularly as threads get longer. This makes it harder to read, not easier. I actually looked now and saw that I have the page zoomed there to compensate for that.

If anything, they should change the community pages so that the actual content can take up more of the page (for instance, by making the panels on the right collapsable or by placing them on the top or by splitting the content area into two so that it can fill the page once you're past that part). If you want, here's an example of a long thread in the community - https://decibel.ni.com/content/thread/19366

You can see that there's a lot of wasted space on the right and that the images are squashed and harder to see because of the limited space.

Please go back to the designers and explain to them that whatever their theories may be, they're actually hurting their users. I think that if you'll go back through this thread you won't find a single person who said they preferred the new layout. That may not be representative, because more people will tend to complain if something's wrong, but you're also welcome to have a poll on a couple of screenshots or live versions, and I think I can guess the results. Luckily, the immediate fix for this is easy (a single value in a CSS file). Tell them to do that and then they can go back and do their research.

At the very least, if you do find out that many people prefer the new layout, give those who are annoyed by this an option of using the full-width one.

[X.]

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@JordanG wrote:

Good morning,

My apologies for a bit of a late jump on this thread. I can always count on the passionate forum users to spot changes and bugs, so thank you for your thoroughness 

Firstly, I'd like to explain the reasoning for the fixed width as I know it is mentioned multiple times in this thread. I understand your frustration, but perhaps if I explain the reasoning behind the sizing, things will become a little more clear. Fixed width layouts allow a designer more direct control over how pages look in most situations. With that, our web designers have been leveraging industry standards and working slowly but surely toward creating a cohesive, consistent experience on all of ni.com (including the Community). 

The current industry standard for the web is to design for a resolution of 1024 x 768, as this is the most widely used resolution based on our research. If you alter your screen to that resolution you will notice the white space is minimal. While this can sometimes result in more whitespace and more vertical scrolling in larger monitors, we believe this is the best layout for all of ni.com and are striving for consistency throughout our entire site. If you have further questions regarding this decision, feel free to reach out to me personally.

A couple of updates on reported bugs:

1. Image Uploader Tool - this should be fixed and you should no longer have to scroll in the window to upload an image

2. Raised smileys and images - this should also be resolved

I will be following up on a few other reported issues on this thread later this afternoon.

Thanks for you patience,

Jordan

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It reminds me of NI's arguments to use Silverlight for their LAbVIEW Web UI Builder. That was a great success and of course users were bashed then just as they are now, when politely suggesting that NI had it backwards.

In other words: hogwash.

[X.]

As a side note, if you click on the microscopic "Notification"  link on the top right (actually middle of the window in my case, but right of the arbitrary block defined by NI), you get an old fashioned "full page width" screen.

If you click on the "United States" link (top left - with the same comment as above), you get a right -justified page.

There are a lot of these out-of-style pages all over the place on NI's website.

You've got a lot of work to make it all fit in your 1024x768 world folks...

[RobertoBozzolo]

I want to enroll in the list of non-satisfied users, mainly due to page dimensions related to actual screen size. Wide screens are now common (well, really is now difficult to find a 4:3 display...) and my experience is that people tend to use the wider space available.

Having said that, there's a bug in the profile page. Look at the picture below that compares JordanG and my profiles: it appears that Posts I Kudoed section adapts the user column width to the username lenght, with the effect of moving the dates out of available area.

(besides the fact that the subject column is too narrow: look at how "Congratula-tions" or "ClientTCPR-ead" words are splitted!)

Additionally, it seems to me that some terms in the profile page should be changed. Specifically, when I look at a user profile I see boxes titled My Top Kudoed Posts, Posts I kudoed, My kudoed Posts which are good if I am looking at my profile, while are misleading if I look at somebody else's profile. They should be changed in this case to "Top Kudoed Posts by XX" and so on the same as the bot "Latest Posts by XX" on top of the page.

And while we are on this matter, Private Messages box is misleading if I am looking at somebody else's profile, since they are My private messages while all other boxes refer to the user I am looking at!