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

colporteur   Great question.  I thought it was just me that felt a little more disconnected - but I have attributed this to not figuring out the new site better.  It feels much bigger now - sort of "eating the elephant whole" instead of the bites I used to take.  I've used the Notifications > View All selection to retrace my most recent steps.

Thanks KSquared. I gravitate to the lighting bolt often. Sort of like a mooring pin for an anchor point. I like you analogy. I get the sense the environment is a lot bigger than I thought it was. Maybe new is the chance to explore.

I think if the main page would have slightly rearranged columns, and unification between the first page and the 'View more results' page so that it's all the same, then things would feel more comfortable.

I was thinking something like this (see mockup image below), it's not much different from what there is now, just a slight re-jig, but the main thing would be to have all activity, including comments etc, all on that first page, instead of having to click on "View more results", and also strip the fonts and images, or have the image as a tiny thumbnail to the left of the Title column, so that there's no distraction running the eye down the list of titles as there is now.

I don't know if any of this is possible, or what others think, this is just a purely selfish idea of what I'd like. Is it bad/good?

In terms of what works well, for me I really like the editor capabilities, the content looks cleaner, and the images come out sharper, and it all works pretty well for content creation I think. Although, it would be nice that a couple of the important editor tools were not buried in menus, i.e. Heading 1 should be a single click, instead of traversing Format->Formats->Headings. Also, the 'Normal' font size should be the equivalent of 'Large' font size by default for blogs and discussions I feel.. maybe it is my monitor/laptop screen issue.

Also, the default image size width of 640 should be (I feel) 1280 instead, it's a better compromise and people will soon get used to either having the most important part of their images on the left side (since a width of 1280 means only the left side of the image is visible in blogs until users click on the image), or content creators can resize back down to 640 width if they want their entire image to appear. It could be further refined later to allow the left, centre or right portion of the image to appear at the choice of the creator, until the image is clicked by the viewer.

It appears you have put some thought into improvements. I tend to not like something but don't go that one step further to determine a fix.

I'm speculating that some of the solutions for content display are to improve performance or at least that is what the vendor touts for their product. The performance appears to be hit or miss at the moment.

I have worked on system upgrade where there is a major shift in how things are done. User education becomes the important factor in the transition. The E14 community with its vast membership has had to teach itself this new system. In my case first learn what it is suppose to do when it does work and then what working means. If you are a member that has casual pariticipation I suggest you wouldn't feel the impact as great as an individual that has higher participation.

I'm still struggling and get the impression that participation is down. At least down to me because I am not looking at nearly the number of posts I did from the old site. Typically the activity counter had 7 to 8 entries and now I'm lucky if the lighting bolt has 1 entry. I'm chaulking it up to the season but that I feel is a weak excuse. I'm hoping for improvement.

BREAK...BREAK....

You commented on the editor. I see your posts are large(er) print than mine. In order to do that, I have to actually go into the editor option and switch to larger. I was wondering if you figured out how to change the defaults and say make larger the default vs normal.

I see other posts suffer from the micro print I'm using. I foget to go up the size. THe default font size needs some growth hormones in my opinion. [I made the print larger for this posts but it took effort:(]

Hi Sean,

I had to do it manually too : ( The default is definitely too tiny, compared to other websites.The larger text is perhaps slightly too large, but it's better than tiny.

Also, this would be nice to see changed; almost every single image needs resizing, for instance it chose a default of 429 pixels across, which is only an inch or two on any modern display or phone. So, I have to bring out the calculator each time, multiply the values by two, and then sit and wait while it does something with the numbers, and then click OK. 

I also agree that the font is too small. I do most of my work in HTML so inside a paragraph use a style command in which you change everything ie. font-size font-family, etc. 

<p style="font-size:24pt; font-color: blue; ">the dog jumped over the fox</p>

also for resizing photos just click on it the boxes will be in its corners grab one and more diagonally. during layout, you can change where the photo is  by right, left, etc. but really I use <img style="float: right/left; margin: (look this up CSS margin see https://www.w3schools.com/

by combining various CSS style commands you can achieve a blog.

~~Cris

BTW Hope everyone had a happy, happy holiday. 

Hi Cris,

I hope you are having great hols time too.
I didn't think of grabbing the corner to resize! This solves the image issue! : )

Also, good point that we could quickly edit the HTML, I'll try that on my next discussion or blog post.

The font size tinkering may seem okay on the website - but there seems to be an issue with the line spacing (perhaps it's fixed) on the e-mail notifications, so everyone with the larger text looks like this in the e-mails:

Perhaps something cstanton might want to look into?

- Gough

Hi Gough,

Good point, I guess it causes that issue : ( I've raised a line spacing issue within blogs/discussions on the Feedback & Support group, but I didn't realize e-mails also then had a knock-on effect as a result of selecting the larger font : (

Probably the Telligent guys are going to be thinking we are one fussy set of users, being so picky about our font sizes and spacing : )

Still, it can't be helped, we just like it the way we like it : )