New Site Design Feedback

Thanks for all efforts.

There are many things i love in new design.

The biggest problem remaining is with my iphone-4 with Safari. i think you already know what i mean. it's almost impossible to use it now. and i wish it will be fixed very soon, as i can't always catch a PC to do my administration jobs for my groups.

Thanks in advance to Staff for fixing my problem! 

I agree strongly with Denverhigh.. have been saying along, ALL the text is too weak.. nothing is strong on the pages.. there's no contrast,  no sharpness, no brightness. It's wishy washy. I also agree the text size could go a fraction larger, though I can live with the size that it is, but at the very  least there needs to  be some solid black on these pages.. mixing grey with light font coloured text just keeps it all looking dull.

+1

it would be very very useful for group admins to have a sound alert when someone join or leave the group chatroom.  

its good to have changes , been saying it since i have joined. finally u guys did it. thanks

posting still doesn't work from Firefox 3.6. Please help :)

Erik,

You say it's not technically possible to go back to the old design. In terms of coding, and barring resetting the servers, you're probably right. But in terms of the interface, you can probably create a lot of options that grab the original layout for those who want to.

A list would be:
- make the order of alerts customizable. Now it is tournament games, vote chess, team matches, messages, group activity, comments (don't know where you put individual games, as I have no current alerts on those). Some of us will focus on tournament games and want those on top. Other will want team matches there, other comments (in fact, serious vote chess revolves around those) - so there's not going to be one order that makes everyone happy. So make it customizable! Add an up and down arrow for each category.

- add a menu option that gives the menus as a single column. There's simply no way the same ease-of-use can be had with a single layout for both mobile devices and 24 inch screens.

- make recommended themes for different browsers. I repeat: for IE the new design simply doesn't work, and that begins with the color scheme. You can promote chrome all you want, not everyone has actually the choice of a browser on each device, thanks to their IT department. In particular, we need at least a theme that offers more contrast - in colors, with black edges, etc.

Those three things would go a long way already. To put it bluntly: the annoyance factor needs to decrease by a lot before my renewal is up. If you don't want to go back to the old code, then make sure you eliminate most of the pain by adding customization.

You don't have to sacrifice a 'clean' look by adding more contrast and definition. It's getting the balance right. At the moment the balance is not right. It doesn't need major changes made, just a few tweaks will make a world of difference. 

If it was not broken, why fix it?

fix it? they broke it!!!

Hi Erik, glad to see that some of the main issues were changed and also themes, can't concetrate on my play without my theme though . I wanted to memtion that I don't see my logo. No borders of the Content, Recent activities. And my name on my profile is Green (which was yellow, after I set up the theme, it's very funny when all letters are White and Yellow, and suddenly something is Green (??????)). The same issue with colours are in Group's profiles, I think the colours should be shown as the themes are set.

I usually use black themes, so my letters are Bright colours (eg. White, Light Blue...) and they are not visible on white tabs (eg. Quotes, Recent Activities, Tab in an echess game, Tournaments and Events Calendar...) and even Tactic Trainer's tabs, it's really frustrating to border whole page to read something inside the tab. I will be happy if it would be black just like my theme.

Not all groups are shown in the Profile, I wanted to check out my groups, but there were only few groups shown in the profile. I think full list like before would be better. 

I very like the new Alerts tab, it very suits to the whole page now, very beautiful. But could be message, notes be above the games? I had to scroll down too much cause I have many games in progress and I want to check my messages first.

These are all issues currently I am facing with. 

In the other hand, new design is very nice, I very like how all things are on one page. 

I do think that it would be wise to allow members, especially paying ones, to chose which one they like best. I know they do that on forums and such and so I wouldn't imagine it'd be too difficult to do that on here.

Personally, I love the new layout and if given a choice, I'd stick with this one. But it'd be nice to allow other paying members to choose.

One very small thing that still bothers me: in online chess and vote chess games, contrary to the old design, the time left is now given as "3 Days", "13 Hours" or "27 Minutes" with the first letters of the time units being capitalized. It's not a start of a sentence nor are time units proper nouns, so it would be at least grammatically correct to use lowercase letters. As said, it's not a big issue, but it looks sort of dumb to me.

Not only would knowing the browser be useful, but also what version. They won't support every version of every browser.

The Daily Puzzle link in the Learn menu points to the forums page.

There is a problem with the chess boards. The pieces and the last move highlight are out of alignment with the squares on the board. When you move the pieces on the board the edges of the squares behind them become broken. I think the chequerboard pattern is slightly the wrong size.

EDIT: I figured this one out. My browser page was zoomed in a little bit. When I zeroed it, it looks fine again. 

(on the stats page and tactics trainer) The graph that plots rating changes over time is blank until you click one of time period links underneath it. I think it is supposed to display the last 90 days by default.

I'm using google chrome 17.0.963.83 m. The graph problem does not occur on firefox.

Thanks for all the hard work.

Here's still a few bugs that I have noticed, both linked with vote chess:

1) You can't flip the board/see the move list etc. in the analysis board of vote chess

2) Chess Wizard diagram application doesn't work at all for me. I get to the first step where I choose "Game or sequence of moves", but after I click "Continue" then the window fails and just goes blank, except for the Cancel-button and a link that reads "Chess Wizard" that takes me back to the first step.

can we get an option to change those orange links and the green headers and maybe let us use a different logo at the bottom of the page. otherwise, I'm fine with everything else. great job but that orange and green just don't go together too well.

This is amazing... this is the best feedback here 

cant get dailey puzzel to come up