Post subject: Feedback on the new layout?
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
I want feedback on the new layout of the site, showcased in April 1st 2008! Post it here.
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
Assuming that it stops talking to me and gets a bit faster, I think it looks pretty slick... though part of me will always miss the grey.
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5777
Location: Away
I like it for the most part. It does require some touchups, such as: 1) slightly increasing line spacing (it looks really cramped as it is now); 2) forcing line wrap earlier than it is now (over 10 words per line = hard to read); 3) removing or otherwise shortening redundant wording (if you had "XX hours, XX minutes and XX seconds" written on the screen of your wristwatch, you'd get pissed quite quickly); 4) slightly more optimal usage of page space. What I really miss is a sidepanel. I'll need time to get used to "toppanel".
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Experienced player (828)
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
Pros: - It doesn't look like 1998 anymore. - It shows a lot of promise (ie it's also lacking a lot of usability right now) - Proper identification of the players in team movies. - "Played by, published by" is a nice idea, as is the direct link to the comments for each movie. Cons: -Audio takes a long time to load. - Screenshots are basically worthless, as they are incredibly small and only show up on the specific movie page. If the "ratings" box were either moved to the right, or replaced by a screenshot, I think it would look a lot better (rather similar to the old layout). - Rerecords? Since this is TASvideos, it might be nice to show that they are actually tool assisted. In general the movie submission pages are lacking a ton of helpful information that was present in the old design. - Console pages currently list movies by date published, which is incredibly annoying. Alphabetical listings are much preferred. - Something needs to be done about the concept demos/hacks, other than just orphaning them. - New submissions don't get numbers, which is kinda odd, and it's impossible to tell how old a submission is at a quick glance (ie sub 239 is much much older than sub 1479) - Please get rid of the tags of "Nintendo Entertainment System", "Super Nintendo Entertainment System", etc in the submissions queue (or upcoming, whichever it ends up being). Acronyms were invented for a reason, and when the main page uses those acronyms for the links, I can't think of a reason why they would be included in the submission name. - The google ads are much more intrusive than before. Now they take up roughly 20% of the screen at times. I'm sure I'll think of more as time goes on and I explore more, but as it works right now, I think it's rather slow, harder to find information as quickly as possible, and hinders usability. However I think that it could be built into a very nice looking system with the appropriate tweaks.
Living Well Is The Best Revenge My Personal Page
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
Jump to letter would be preferable to page-based (is Super Mario Bros on page 5? 6? maybe 8? Won't know until I stumble upon it haphazardly!) and I would REALLY like the option to say, "load times be damned, show me all NES games at once!" I also miss the screenshots, but I won't kick and scream about their absence like I'm inclined to do about the first two points I mentioned.
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
Joined: 9/26/2007
Posts: 55
Location: Michigan
The main points of contention have already been covered, except that I miss the little randomly colored Mega Man that used to be in the upper left corner. Oh and I adblocked that flash voice thing the 2nd time it popped up. I understand how astoundingly courteous of you it was to put it there, yet I fail to understand exactly how the blind are going to enjoy watching videos of videogames being exploited beyond recognition.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
They will hear sound effects that tell what the player is doing, and they will know about how far the player has gotten in each level by when the music gets cut off! Don't you think?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5777
Location: Away
negjay wrote:
I understand how astoundingly courteous of you it was to put it there, yet I fail to understand exactly how the blind are going to enjoy watching videos of videogames being exploited beyond recognition.
I guess you also fail to notice the date.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Skilled player (1098)
Joined: 8/26/2006
Posts: 1139
Location: United Kingdom
Pros 1. 'Submit a movie' is in a more prominent place. 2. I like the idea of every movie page becoming a large article on the game/run. 3. Incorporation of avatars into the site's content is pretty cool. Cons 1. I think the main page is too dense. Showing recent publications is good, but Mystic Defender was published over a month ago... Perhaps the space could be put to better use by allowing more space for descriptions /screenshots of the most recent movies? 2. The movie entries are too verbose. Why say Mega Man 6 for the Nintendo Entertainment System played by Shinryuu, in 30 minutes and 54.55 seconds when you can say Mega Man 6 for the NES played by Shinryuu in 30:54.55 to the exact same effect? 3. Why have in the topbar both 'FAQ' and 'ARTICLES' when they both link to the same page. Shouldn't one suffice? 4. Why are author's real names no longer in the movie entries but required in the submission form? 5. I dislike how the submission queue has been named 'upcoming'. This is far more ambiguous and misleading than the phrase 'Submission Queue' as it implies that all submissions are about to be accepted and published which is untrue. 6. Remove 'The Cake Is A Lie!' from the bottom of every submission page. I don't see any reason why it is at all relevant. It's just a stupid addition imo. On the whole I prefered the old layout. It had more personality as opposed to the current one which looks like a clone of so many other sites out there (digg.com for an example). The new movie and submission pages I guess I can live with but I strongly dislike the new front page. I think a page with only the contents of the top bar would be best; simple, not cluttered yet informative.
Skilled player (1415)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
I generally have to agree with everything said so far: it's cramped and just doesn't seem as streamlined before. I can get used to no screenshots and the navigation bar being on top, but the movies just don't seem to be as... self-contained? Streamlined? Can't find the word I'm looking for... Other things: As superjupi and others have said, arrange the movies alphabetically and index them alphabetically. Bring the download links to the front again. I found that really convenient. The pages for the individual movies seem more haphazard than before. The old layout was pleasing to look at, easy to navigate, and well organized; as it stands right now, it's none of those. Yes, as others have said, the old title format was just better. It conveys the same information (heck, more with the submission number) in a more streamlined manner than what it is now. That being said, I do find myself rather fond of the forum avatars appearing next to the movies. That, and the ratings being more readily apparent. Well, that's it for my whining today! Hope you all have a happy April Fool's day! Edit: Just one last thing: I know it's a temporary deal attached to the day, but I have to admit I was impressed with the text reader. Not only was it insanely good at getting the intonation right, but the Biritish accent made it sound like a cyberman was reading the page for me! ;P
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
Needs less digg lookalike and colours. then I would seriously suggest that I like it. A bit. Maybe.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Active player (411)
Joined: 3/16/2004
Posts: 2623
Location: America, Québec
I am not sure. I can't edit my personal page, there's a fucking player at right-top that plays a stupid thing and submissions page don't show all submissions. I must click on a 2nd page link to see the remaining ones. And I guess there are extra things. But I hope it's an april fool day joke and the original layout will come back...
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
Phil wrote:
But I hope it's an april fool day joke and the original layout will come back...
That was my assumption, but I wanted to treat the serious details seriously just in case some of it was actually an honest change of format.
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
You guys' sense of humour is broken :)
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Post subject: TASVideos.org April Fools prank '08: The making of.
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
About the April Fools prank As I've explained earlier, for me as a webmaster the April Fools is a day to try out new controversial ideas and gauge people's reactions. If it's liked, it can be utilized later. If it's not worth being utilized later, it can be called a prank. Either way, it's a win-win situation. Of course the prank must be good-spirited. I've been wanting to create a comprehensive April Fools prank to the site for several years, but never really had time to create one. This year however, right before Easter, I happened to play with a speech synthesis system I hadn't tried before (espeak), and I got an idea -- I'll create an audio-only web site. The next weekend, I started working on it, and I created most of the new site in just about one day. Idea was born My original idea was to create an audio-only site. However, I realized that I need some HTML on it (to receive the links entered by the user). As I added it, I started thinking that a bare-bones text-version of the material being spoken would be good to have. As I pondered on the style for that text version, and the overall page, it little by little started taking shape of the redesign I had actually planned for this site for a year now. The site redesign idea I'm not particularly a fan of Digg, but I've paid attention to how simple its layout is and much meaningful content it manages to represent, all while being represented in fashionable web-2.0 style. A long time ago, I started wanting to redesign the TASVideos site in a similar style. In my opinion, the current site has major design problem that makes its representation suffer: It is primarily a Wiki, then a movie site. I wanted to change its focus: Content first, details after that. And of the content, movies first, articles later. So I want to make the front page into a list of movies. Other problems I want to fix with this include the long load times of movie listing pages containing everything of each movie. I'll post more about the ideas once I dig up some discussion I had with Adelikat a few months back. How was the speech created? Each page is first generated into HTML. Then a DOM parser is created, which will walk through the document, and pick up content that is interesting from a speech synthesis viewpoint, and construct a SSML message for Espeak to speak. SSML contains tags that can control the type of the voice. The whisper was done this way, for example. Then Espeak will be run, and the output (WAV) is passed to Lame, which will produce a MP3 file. Then the mp3 file is passed to Mencoder, which will produce an FLV file. Since MEncoder also requires a video stream, a dummy video stream is generated consisting of the mushroom icon being repeated as a PNG file. After MEncoder completes, Yamdi is run to add index into the FLV file. After the indexing is completed, the audio is ready for streaming. On the server, a background process is run, to send finished FLV files to another server with higher bandwidth, to avoid bandwidth exhaustion. This part of the process didn't work as well as I hoped. On the client side, a Flash player ripped from Youtube will pick up the FLV stream and play it back to the user. Miscellaneous One interesting part for me was to ensure that it pronounces properly every non-English word found on the site (or at least on the commonly accessed pages). This meant that it had to pronounce Russian, Finnish, French, and even Japanese names correctly according to the rules of those particular languages. Also words like "TAS", "TASVideos", "Bisqwit", "rerecord" etc., it has to pronounce according to the official or commonly accepted pronounciation. Fortunately, that was rather easy to do in espeak. Over the next few days, I created a dictionary of some 100 or 200 names and words into IPA. Examples of words in the list: "Torfi", "Tryczak", "Kyrsimys", "Densetsu", "Mario", "yoshi", "Lamoureux", "taser", "tasing", "tases", "anime". Each of them was entered either as an IPA string or a reference to another language's parser. Some words written in hiragana I added using the Finnish engine, since it was the closest to Japanese pronounciation. I guess it all worked pretty well because nobody complained to me about something non-English being pronounced wrong. I was quite giddy about this version. I had hard time shutting my mouth about it for a week. Things I wonder if anyone noticed * That the links spoken out by the voice could be entered on the Search bar ("enter number 15 to follow this link" means "type 15 and press enter to follow this link") * The cool 404 page that included a message in English, Finnish, French and Japanese * A Tour page * The "happy april fools day" whisper * The different language names one wonders how to pronounce * The "this page is way too long for me to read to you" message So what's going to stay and what not? Naturally, the aural version (speech synthesis) was a prank. Nothing more. It will never be heard again, at least not until another April Fools spirited day. The movie lengths were expressed in "nn minutes and mm seconds" because that's the only way the speech synthesis system would speak them out in a natural manner. Since the original intention of my prank was to provide audio only and a minimal text content, this fact stood out in the public version. Similarly, the console names (NES, N64) were spelled out (Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo 64) for the same reason: They sound better when spoken out in full rather than as abbreviations. Since I was short on time (I had only one weekend to work on this, and I spent most of it tuning the speech synthesis), there are many important features missing in this demonstration. Things such as lack of wiki functionality (page editing), lack of rerecord counts on the submission pages, bleak movie pages (I would actually want help in redesigning them) can be attributed to the lack of time. That, and also I wanted to minimize the amount of changing page content, so that the speech streams do not need to be regenerated every ten minutes. I added a high-pitched prosody for the word "games" out of whim. I think it sounded funny. Similarly for the phrase "The cake is a lie!" on the submission pages. Obviously, neither are going to stay. I appreciate all the feedback you gave and give to me about this redesign. I hope you had fun and saw behind the joke that there was actually a plan of a new, more usable site. I cannot make promises when it will be finished -- it may be next summer, or the next year, or something, depending on various things. But I have now experience, and you, the users (those who were alarm on this day), have at least some perception of what I have had in mind.
Active player (312)
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
hahah... I didn't notice anything. It it wasn't by this thread, I'd totally miss it.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself. It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success." - Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Drama, too long, didn't read, lol.
Former player
Joined: 10/6/2007
Posts: 330
Location: B.C Canada
I enjoyed it because the voice made things funny. Like in the Majora's mask submission comments when it said "Link seldom takes shit" (or something like that) And in my Looney Tunes comments when it said "I did some neat dodging to keep it interesting, and killed lots of enemies" I laughed really hard at that one.
Tub
Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377
Well, some stupid plugin that shall remain nameless crashed my browser three times today, but apart from that it was a nice prank and shows some very promising design ideas. :) forgive me if some of the wording below is inappropriate or seems demanding/commanding, it's 1 am and I don't want to spend the time improving my tone when I should be improving the message. Things I like: - using the avatars is a great idea, being greeted by my doggie just makes me feel welcome. It's amazing how much such a simple addition can change the perception of the site. They're also nice on the "played by.."-text, but probably need to be a bit bigger than that to be useful. - the permanently available search box is just a consequence of the digg-ripoff, but nevertheless a good addition that should be kept. - The tour for newbies, why oh why didn't we have one before? Of course that needs to be fleshed out instead of just linking back to the FAQ, but IMHO that'd be a good addition. Things I really don't like: - it looks like web 2.0. A soul-less machine, aggregating some kind of content, relying on user-votes to filter out the crap. TASVideos is not one of those sites, there are wips and reviews, submissions, discussions, votes, judging etc, resulting in high quality content. Don't deliver the message that our quality control is based on user votes! The user votes are an important part of deciding if a movie is worth your time, so I'm all for keeping them, but in the new layout they're the most prominent thing, implying that you should skim over the votes first, then look at the rest of it. I think the screenshots did a great job of giving a quick hint if a movie is worth your time, especially if you don't know the game. So keep the screenshots. They also deliver the message that someone cared for every single bit of content by hand-picking a screenshot. And they look nice. - please don't go down the "... (read more)"-path. Cutting descriptions off mid-sentence is the second sign of a soulless machine. The basic assumption that the most vital pieces of information are stored in the first few sentences is fundamentally flawed. If the descriptions need to be shortened to fit the layout, we'll need to reword the descriptions instead of cutting them off. - cramped front-page. Think about the use-cases: a) a regular user visits, probably via bookmark. That should be the majority of visits, and they're only interested in the recent additions (a couple of days) as well as quick navigation to wherever they want to go: probably the forums, otherwise the search-box. b) a semi-regular user visits and wants to catch up with the releases since his last visit. He needs exactly the information as currently present: ~15 recent submission and links to page 2, 3, etc. But remember that this is not a prominent use case. c) First-time-visitors. Not a prominent use-case either, but still important to cater for. We need to quickly communicate the purpose of the site, instead of clubbing them to death with a wall of text. It's non-trivial to keep the user until he clicks "see the tour", so bring back the one-sentence-description before the tour-link, and tune down on any other content that might distract him from noticing those two important bits. I think the old FrontPage did a good job of providing exactly that, hinting every user into the right direction and being a starting point for all the different use cases. What you made the new front-page is overkill for almost everyone, IMHO that would be better behind the "more"-link below the Recent Submission box - any user interested in that can still bookmark exactly that page. - sorting everything by date. Another sign of web 2.0, "keep the cheap content coming, forget about the old stuff." OK for news sites and maybe digg, not ok if you actually try to make old content accessible. Publication time doesn't really matter on tasvideos, there's no indication that newer movies are radically better than older (non-obsoleted) ones, so sorting by time delivers the wrong message again. I don't think sorting by date has any value outside of "Recent publications" for repeated visitors. With the ever-growing amount of publications, the biggest hurdle to overcome is to make the content accessible, to give users the means to find what they want without drowning in a flood of information. To do so, they need a good search engine, meaningful filters and a strong grouping of content. Grouping by system, then alphabet is a good way to find your favourite game of younger days. To prevent the System-pages from growing too much, an additional grouping by game would be nice, but that's probably still not within reach. Minor things I don't like: - movie-details. The old page had some coloured backgrounds: you were visually guided to the description first, when you decided to watch the movie you'd quickly find the download-links after that. The new page lacks this kind of visual guidance and I need to actually look for the description. (Of course I'm used to finding the description in the white field, so this point might be less of a problem than I think right now. Still, I think colouring the sections again would be an improvement.) - Before, there was no information available about the publisher. Now that information is right on the front-page, next to the runner. IMHO the encoders/publishers should be listed somewhere, but less prominently than the runner. - throw away buzz-words like "upcoming" and "downloads". The most fitting word I know is submissions, and there is no download-section. - the phrase "played by xxx" is misleading. Maybe fall back to a simple (yet dull) "created by"? - "submit new". It's rarely used, it should never be used before going through some other pages (FAQ, SubmissionInstructions) and thus really doesn't need a place in the global menu. A link to Helping.html titled "How to contribute" might be more appropriate.
m00
Editor, Expert player (2071)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3282
I liked the new layout, but the speech synthesizer slowed down the page and usability was poor (e.g. you couldn't edit pages or submissions). The speech synthesizer does not pronounce French language well.
Former player
Joined: 10/6/2007
Posts: 330
Location: B.C Canada
I liked how at the end of every author's comments, it would say in a higher voice THE CAKE IS A LIE!
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
Bisqwit, did you happen to archive the new layout, so others (me) could jog their memory and give you some feedback? If not, it would be greatly appreciated if you did ;) (even jpgs would work for me)
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Tub
Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377
well, he posted it in a public IRC channel, so I assume it's ok if I post it here: http://tasvideos.org/aural/
m00
Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332
I really like the "upcoming" page, though it isn't immediately obvious that the "other" listing will display rejected submissions.
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
I will type as I go. I do not like how things are not in a specific spot. i.e. the rating for a movie is in antartica while the actual movie text is in the north pole. The lack of anything more than stock graphics makes the site look tacky. I understand that this is just a possibility, but something major needs to be done to make the site anything more than looking like a stock website, that happens to focus on TASing. The color scheme confuses me. Nothing is easily picked out (Green text on a green background, for instance) so I was thoroughly confused as to where I would find <this> button. I HATE a) non-alphebetized lists of published movies b) more than one page for said movies. Actually, one of the greatest features of your site, IMO, is how all the movies are directly on one page. No hunting is necessary, since you only have to scroll down. I do realize that some dial ups could have problems, but you give some you take some. I need a screen shot of a game. Text does not emphasize the movie, nor does it help the viewer. If I played Aladdin in my youth, I would have fond memories of that... however, if I had forgotten all about the game, a text link will not jog my memory. Visual cues help people remember things, and games are no different. Does the publisher matter? I <3 adelikat and dehacked and every other coder and publisher who do a TON of hard work for this site, but, from a n00b perspective, I would care more that JXQ made this movie (and I would want to see more JXQ)... but probably not more movies encoded by publisher/coder "a". I do not think that the stip of bisqwit saying hello is necessary, especially if it displays the same message in the same space for ALL pages. Repetition will get old quickly. I do not think that the selection part (green on green text) is very discriptive for the "other" section. other could mean regular speedruns or it could mean other, failed runs. "Articles" should be written as "FAQS", as it was before. this is more descriptive of the true purpose, IMO, of that page. Actually, why is there both a FAQ button (blue on blue) and an Article button? The blue on blue part is handy, especially with a sign in space right on the front page. That should stay ;) That is all for now, as I said these are my first impressions, and I wrote things as I saw them. No offense, Bisqwit, is meant; I am trying to be subjective and give some no bullshit opinions.
Dromiceius wrote:
I really like the "upcoming" page, though it isn't immediately obvious that the "other" listing will display rejected submissions.
That being said, I think that the "canceled" text should also be in red, or another bright color, to indicate what happened. It took me 10 seconds to figure out why Gods was in the Other section. There should be another name for either the first other section (green on green part) or the other section that denotes gruefood...
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Joined: 7/28/2005
Posts: 339
I honestly think the current site is fine. The new one is simply sensory overload and looks totally cluttered. Then again, I'm biased against "web 2.0" stuff since I think it's nasty.