What have you discovered that has improved your user experience at the new E14 Community site?

Greetings all,

I've been very sorry to hear that the new site experience is disappointing and difficult for so many of you. Firstly, we know there are some performance/stability issues which we are working very hard to remedy as our top priority and expect to have a fix release going in this week. I suspect that a lot of the reduction in interaction is a result of this so that is what we are trying to address first. However, I want you all to know that not only cstanton but I and my development team are actively paying attention to the comments here and in Feedback and Support and will be doing our best to find ways to address and improve the site UX/UI based on your input as quickly as we can.

A little bit of background on the new platform project - our previous platform went end of life, so we had no choice but to migrate to a new one. We did our best to select a platform that kept a lot of the same positives as the old one, and also, from a development point of view, preserved the flexibility we needed to add/update features that are unique to us (like RoadTests, Design Challenges, additional options in the RTE, etc). The one we have selected was the best of the available options. 

There are definitely some changes in how this platform handles specific things that are site-wide which are not ideal. Due to the timeframe in which we had to complete the migration (based on the deadline of the old platform ending) we prioritized certain things above others to get the release out in time, and with (we hoped) as few issues for our members as possible. I will be the first to admit that there were more problems after launch than we expected - in particular with the site performance. We didn't see some of these issues in our pre-release load testing so it's been a struggle for us to find/fix them and it's taken much longer than I would have liked.

I appreciate you all bearing with us, posting both your frustrations and any improvements/positives you've found, and trying to help each other navigate the changes. I have not posted until now as I knew that Chris was on top of responding to member issues, and my team and I have been focusing on getting the performance issues resolved. However, seeing the comments in this thread, I wanted to ensure that you know that your voices are being heard and we will continue to work on improvements to this new platform so we can give you the kind of experience here on element14 that you deserve. We were on the old platform for 12 years, and it definitely took us some time to find all of the quirks of that platform and remediate as many of them as we could. This new platform is, unfortunately, no exception. We implemented as many of the features from the previous site as we were able in the time we had, and fixed as many of the issues we identified in this one as we could, but we know we didn't get to them all, and frankly, we're still learning/finding some of those things out as well. We have releases planned monthly going forward, and are adding in patch releases when there is an urgent fix needed (like the one this week), so keep the feedback coming. Chris and company will be helping to triage and prioritize the feedback we get for inclusion in each of our releases in 2022.

I hope you all had a good holiday season with your respective families and friends - to the degree that COVID allowed  - in whatever way you celebrate. Or if you don't celebrate this holiday, or weren't able to as you usually do, I hope that you at least had a bit of quiet and a rest.

Sincerely,

Christy

Head of Community Platform and Development

Christy, To put it bluntly, this seems like an Alpha Release. So here are my gripes:

• the home page is just ads and junk. when I log in I should see a bar somewhere with my stuff.
• font selection is a mess please use FONT SIZES.  regular/large/huge LOL
• navigation area mess. 
• permission is a mess why do we need them anyway. If I am reading a random post, I can't comment without being part of some group. this itself can be stupid. 
• ok, the editor. it just blows chunks, what part of the galaxy did it come from????  why can't you just give us a real HTML /CSS editor (as eBay does).

~~ Cris

Hi Cris,

On the flip side, if there is too much control of fonts etc., then some (not you, but I bet others will) will misuse it or copy-paste strange styles, because people will (as they do now) start using fonts with serifs (I saw a blog post with that) which just looks weird when all the other text on every page is sans-serif, and so on. One source of the problem I bet, is that a lot of academic papers still use serifs, which for sure looks nice if everything else on the page is a similar style (but it isn't), and then people try writing online articles in that style, and it looks bizarre when every other article on the site has sans-serif style.

The solution for that seems to be to only allow to give intent (e.g. for the user to signal important stuff, code, headings) and let element14 web experts figure out how to best convey the intent, and if people object, then for users to suggest changes to how the intent is conveyed, such as bigger text, line spacings and so on. However currently, the editor allows selection of font family and so on, which is more than intent, so it breaks this idea. Still, like you I'm glad we can at least change font size somewhat, because the current default is small on my computer (resisting changing the zoom setting in Chrome for now!).

Another case in point is what Jan Cumps nicely did on the old site, which was to have a kind of highlight section with an image and some text in a box. I think that's a good argument for users to request such a thing, i.e. the intent being something like "bringing key text and content to attention within a larger article" or similar. Then, if (say) element14 team decided to do that with a specific border and make it slide onto the page then we wouldn't need to know how to do that, and at the end of the year, all of Jan's articles could be automatically summed up onto a yearly page, containing just those boxes, and he wouldn't need to do a thing extra. This is just an example, not suggesting it should be done like that! : )

I am a fan of Jan's yellow text boxes 

I am a fan of Jan's yellow text boxes