Club redesign: First impressions ... and a summary
For several months Chess.com's developers have prepared a club redesign: Now it's released to 8,000 Beta testers. At first glance the entire project is just another disappointment: It creates intentionally disadvantages for active clubs, consists mostly of hot air and stays without relevant advantages. Doing nothing would have been better for clubs and their admins. The current design isn't great, but it works and is by far more flexible to serve the very different kind of clubs on Chess.com.
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If you open a club page you'll get currently e.g. this:
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Clubs can choose to show either "Info" or "Upcoming Events" as default and many of them are using links to help their members finding relevant content.
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The redesign replaces "Location" (not used in the above example) with the first lines from "Info" (without any option to format text).
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Number of members, foundation day and information about ongoing activities disappeared in favor of a "Live chat" button.
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That's, what will get instead:
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Already at first glance this doesn't create any relevant advantage. If, for some reason, a "Live chat" button needs to be included, it would have been enough to take away information about ongoing matches and vote chess games.
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The decision to devalorize the "Info" section is a tough blow for many active clubs. With a lot of originality and love for thousands of details club admins have used this description to present their clubs.
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The question arises, why it looks to be necessary to start a club redesign with such an unnecessary and disrespectful looking decision?
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What was "Info" until now, will be taken by "Current Events". Clubs will loose their ability to decide, which of both sides should be default. It's not so easy to understand the advantage of this forced presentation of "Current Events". Clubs might have none or hundreds of them and surely there should be a way to consult them in all their details. But why should such a list replace in all clubs their usual "Info" section?
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If the intention is to bring more attention to current events, it would have been enough to let club admins decide, which two of these three options ("Info", "Upcoming Events" and "Current Events") they would like to show to their members, wouldn’t it?
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In the next part we'll get "Forums"/"Notes" with Forums as default. Until now we had the choice to show "Chat and Notes", "Notes and Chat", "Chat", "Notes" or "Nothing". All these options disappeared.
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Assuming, that a button for "Chat" creates a more appropriate appearance and that there might be some good reasons to promote "Forums", the remaining question still is: Why should it be necessary to force all clubs to show a list of forums and to prevent them to continue with notes as default?
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It would be possible to continue for a long time with such comparisons, it would be easy to mention tons of inconsistencies, of unnecessary new difficulties for admins to do their job or to note all the work, which still needs to be done to complete one day this redesign.
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Just one example for an "improved" detail: If admins send challenges to daily match to another club, they will find them under "Daily matches" on the bottom of the list (click once, scroll down). The improvement: Click "Play" on the left side, now choose the button "Tournaments" (hein?) and then "+ Club Event" (as to create a new event) and then they will see a new option "Seeks/Challenges", which shows their daily match as a live match. Sounds, that no one had a few minutes to explain developers, what club admins usually do ... before letting them "redesign" more than 100,000 clubs.
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Don't know, who has demanded this approach for a club redesign. For me it's difficult to imagine, what kind of clubs will be served better by stripping options and adding arbitrary decisions like the ones shown above (and once again: They are only some first of many more arbitrary decisions).
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As already written in the intro: Doing nothing would have been better for clubs and their admins. The current design isn't great, but it works and is by far more flexible to serve the very different clubs on Chess.com.
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The most annoying part of the whole thing: Clubs, their admins and leagues on Chess.com are facing a lot of increasing difficulties, which have not been addressed for a long time (here are a few examples). Instead of giving them some "Help and Support", Chess.com let developers do a lot of work to create a "club redesign", which just add another (luckily minor) problem to their already and steadily increasing list.
