Man, I have a strong negative aesthetic reaction to the new frontpage that I struggle to articulate—the old one was just so pretty and aesthetic, in a way that feels totally lost! How hard would it be to have an option to revert to the old style?
Sigh. I do think we should reply to this. It is hard to do so well, but I will give it my best shot. Starting from the most important part of my reply:
We do have important things we have heard from new users about our site that we’re aiming to fix here. I do really appreciate the Book UI aesthetic, and have a huge amount of respect for Oliver Habryka for developing it while being an inexperienced designer and also being the project lead and a software developer. (That’s not a backhanded compliment! I genuinely love it!) Nevertheless, it is a constraining style, and it is hard for new users to navigate, as validated by my experience designing inside it, and by our user interviews.
How hard would it be to have an option to revert to the old style?
Very hard. Maintaining two consistent styles for everything is quite difficult. I speak to this briefly in my response about A/B testing. A less models-y, but maybe pretty persuasive answer: I expect if you have friends who have experience in frontend engineering and you ask them what they would do in my shoes, ≥75% of them would agree with me that we should not support multiple design styles.
The weakest part of my reply, but which I think is important to state, is that I, personally, love the new design style. I predict that, in 9 months, if we survey people and ask them whether they like the old design or new design better, ≥50% would reply that they like the new style better.
This comment helped clarify my feelings here. It’s not that the new style is bad, really—it’s unremarkably fine, and after a while I’ll probably stop noticing it. It’s that the old Forum was a really unusually beautiful website, and throwing that away feels quite sad to me.
Man, I have a strong negative aesthetic reaction to the new frontpage that I struggle to articulate—the old one was just so pretty and aesthetic, in a way that feels totally lost! How hard would it be to have an option to revert to the old style?
Sigh. I do think we should reply to this. It is hard to do so well, but I will give it my best shot. Starting from the most important part of my reply:
We do have important things we have heard from new users about our site that we’re aiming to fix here. I do really appreciate the Book UI aesthetic, and have a huge amount of respect for Oliver Habryka for developing it while being an inexperienced designer and also being the project lead and a software developer. (That’s not a backhanded compliment! I genuinely love it!) Nevertheless, it is a constraining style, and it is hard for new users to navigate, as validated by my experience designing inside it, and by our user interviews.
Very hard. Maintaining two consistent styles for everything is quite difficult. I speak to this briefly in my response about A/B testing. A less models-y, but maybe pretty persuasive answer: I expect if you have friends who have experience in frontend engineering and you ask them what they would do in my shoes, ≥75% of them would agree with me that we should not support multiple design styles.
The weakest part of my reply, but which I think is important to state, is that I, personally, love the new design style. I predict that, in 9 months, if we survey people and ask them whether they like the old design or new design better, ≥50% would reply that they like the new style better.
This comment helped clarify my feelings here. It’s not that the new style is bad, really—it’s unremarkably fine, and after a while I’ll probably stop noticing it. It’s that the old Forum was a really unusually beautiful website, and throwing that away feels quite sad to me.