Things I don't like:
1. Disappearance of the background art in the heading.
2. "Discussion" tab is right next to "Comments". This may be confusing to visitors, who will not immediately know the difference.
3. The bolding scheme in the Recent Comments sidebar, which is
Alicorn on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted
instead of
Alicorn on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted
(the current) or
Alicorn on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted
4. The fact that comment scores have been moved from the top of the comment boxes to the bottom. This makes visual scanning by score harder.
5. Upvote/Downvote/Agree/Disagree buttons are not clearly labeled. They should be labeled with words, as they are now, not pictures, and also put next to each other, to remind people that there are two categories of voting and prevent new users from noticing only one of them.
6. I'm not sure I like the two categories of voting -- a change in this area will change the existing status dynamics, to which my brain is already accustomed.
7. There seems to be more bright whiteness in the new design, as opposed to the "gray" feeling of the current scheme.
8. What's wrong with bullets?
Also: "Hall of Fame" is not a good substitute for "Top Contributors", since it implies that the people in it are no longer active. (Why bother to rename the list anyway? "Top Contributors" is a perfectly fine description.)
I didn't realize it was map/territory until now. I think it is clever, but it always felt a little odd and hard to read and I think I prefer the functionality of the new one.
If we go through with the double karma, let's at least collect statistics: given that a user voted something up/down on one karma, with what likelihood did they also vote it in the same direction on the other karma?
Maybe it'll be revealed that for most posts, most users either click neither or both, and in the same direction.
Maybe it's just a screenshot artifact, but did you change the calming LW green to a more blueish, unpleasant hue? If so, let me be the first to say They Changed It, Now It Sucks.
(No, I don't have anything more substantial to comment on.)
In the headers, the Singinst logo appears to be positioned lower than the FHI one, which is awkward-looking.
I didn't join in the bikeshedding on the first round of discussion, but I might as well now!
- Sorting by "Top" tends to disproportionately favor old posts. Is it possible to implement Wilson scoring ala Reddit?
- I liked the map/territory distinction in the old banner. The new ones look good, except that the background looks like grey fleece or lint to me.
- To my eye, too much padding around elements. Everything seems like it could be tightened up a little.
- The comment icons seem a little cartoony. I have no attachment on text vs icons, but not a fan of those particular ones.
- Are the tags gone from the sidebar? They are ugly as currently presented, but I don't see anything that would even take me to a list of tags.
I'm not thrilled with the voting etc. buttons having their text replaced with symbols. Will they at least have mouseover text explaining what they do?
The subscribe, save and report icons may be distracting, they're not things you need very often. They could be hidden in a submenu (that drop-down thing at the top right, in which case you wouldn't need icons any more), or be completely hidden (not greyed) when your mouse isn't over the comment's div.
The permalink icon could also be removed by instead making the time-and-date clickable (or it could be left as an icon - it's not very distracting - but put next to the time-and-date.
(Also, thank you a lot for your work! Sorry for just offering criticism, of course plenty of things are very neat, but that goes without saying)
Great work! I especially like the "new since last visit" highlight; that will help following conversations across multiple visits quite a bit. That said, as Armok_GoB observed,
There is something which seem more... cold and hard somewhat than the current aesthetic, which is bad, but otherwise it seems great.
I noticed that too. I'm not sure why, exactly, but I have a few hypotheses. It could be that the shade of green has changed (it's darker and more saturated now). I'm neutral on this change. Another big difference is that the sidebar has gre...
I'm rather skeptical and leaning towards "bad", but am not confident enough to vote either option. I say we give it a try.
Switch the symbols, thumbs up/down for good/bad post, plus/minus for agree/disagree. Thumb pointing is rating a performance, not voting to show agreement, while the jump form "me too" to "+" is fairly small. On some boards there even seems to be a convention of replying with "+1" to signify something like "I wanted to say that, too".
Not quite related to the redesign, but can the comment "Sort By" dropdown's values have a #comments anchor appended to them? When I change the way comments are sorted, I want to be start reading through them straight away, without having to scroll down.
This looks awesome. There is somehting which seem more... cold and hard somewhat than the current aesthetic, which is bad, but otherwise it seems great.
The single line motto in the main section header next to the two-lines of motto in the other two is a little disconcerting. Any reason not to have it match them?
Background image of the new header is much less dorky than the map and aerial photo but it causes a What Is It? reaction in me that causes me to examine it in detail to see if it signifies anything.
I'll probably suppress the background image with Adblock Plus like I do the current one. (Actually, there are two, one being a gradient.)
I think the header should look more like this. (The font difference is unintentional; I didn't have the same font)
Agreement/disagreement distinction is too simplistic, I think it's a bad idea to polarize along these lines. Do I agree with Luke's post on neuroscience and values, or do I disagree with it? What would that even mean? There are many comments for which the situation is similar. Do I "disagree" with a comment that boldly asserts the existence of God?
I propose that voting should be for quality and relevance of content.
Design sketches
1. Notes on differences between these images and what we're planning on implementing:
2. Meetup widget in sidebar, listing the 5 nearest meetups occurring in the next 2 weeks, linking to:
(something like right-click & "Open Image in new tab" will help here)
3. New headers: