Q: We're back.

I have another observation relating to the psychological effect of the new design. In the previous version, the replies followed the original post directly, possibly beginning with some promoted replies. In the new design, the original post is essentially isolated, with a huge gap to the replies. And if any replies were promoted, only those replies appear on the first page. This isolation may encourage "shoot from the hip" replies, based only on the first post, ignoring subsequent discussion which may resolve or significantly alter the original question. For example, this thread Problem with new Apple TV.  Siri is always on, not just when speaking into the device.  It reads everything on the screen.  And remote finger touch does not work properly. Further, isolation of the promoted posts may discourage a searcher from reviewing the other replies, even if they may help resolve her particular issue. This is especially significant in multi-year threads, which tend to morph over time.

BTW, the default editor now comes up as a small box containing HTML paragraph brackets, viewed by iOS Chrome.

Hi Bob,

Sorry, this site is no too difficult to navigate to read the entire thread, so I'm probably repeating other members' discussions.

New design is terrible!! This is meant to be a support forum where the dominate means of communication is via text. However, the new design goes out of its way to display as little text on a page as possible. So the result is constant scrolling, loading pages, etc, etc making it probably one of the most unfriendly sites I have ever used.

The ultra thin fonts are atrocious to read on any display that is not a retina display. We are not all 20 years old with the eyes of an eagle. Change the font to something readable!!

Isn't  making something like 70% of it's money from the iDevices these days, selling about 50M units per quarter verses about 4M Macs in the post PC world. Based on this ratio, the vast majority of users want help are probably loading these pages from an iDevice. With this in mind, how come the site is completely unusable on an iPhone. It's not mobile optimised in any way.

Here is a couple of examples.

This is the link from the first page telling us how good the pages now look, taken from my MBP.

This is the same from my iPhone 6+ in portrait mode.

And in Landscape it's even worse.

In Portrait, if I double tap to view the entire column, I get this. But now it's too small to read.

So using the site from one of  flagship devices is a constant struggle of zoom in and out to read and navigate.

All of this is of course already been know to the developer(s) of the site as they would have tested the site on all types of browsers and displays and would also be known to the manager of the developer(s) as it has been signed of as 'Good To Go'.

Sorry, but this site is embarrassing.

I'd like to add a couple of observations regarding the page control buttons.

First, I see that the forward and back arrows now go to the top of the page, by the rather odd device of loading the page, then scrolling to the top.

Second, when you change pages, there is no "loading" indicator to let you know that the page is not yet refreshed. The network "busy" wheel (iOS) is not turning, nor is the browser page loading indicator (Chrome). I have seen a loading wheel on the page itself, i.e raised by the script, but cannot place the exact scenario that produces it. Certainly, performance is not uniform across different scenarios. And just as I say this, the thread forward/back buttons have sprouted a busy wheel, At least for those at the top of the page.

Trying to design the forums so users can find answers is assuming that users will even try to find an answer first. I've seen on the Microsoft forums a user ask the same question that showed up answered just a few moments earlier with the answer in the recent posts page. They didn't even bother looking at the post. There are a few questions I know I answered hundreds of times over the years because no one ever bothered to search for the answer. Yes, you can call me pessimistic, but it's also a reality.

Designing the forums to make it easier for the contributors to answer should be a high priority. Most of us have other jobs and want to use our time wisely when volunteering our time on forums to help users. If it takes me two to three times as long to answer a question then my time is not well spent. There are other forums that make it easy for me to help and I end up going there.

Users that ask questions need the volunteers to answer their questions. It's not a one way street.

Biggest complaint is font size and spacing along with the light colored font. I'm seeing this light color on many other sites as well. Designers should get a clue. It's not readable.

Do you know something we don't Bob, or is that more in hope than expectation.

I use opera and changed all the fonts sizes and types to use Arial - and some parts of this seem to be easier to read.

Apple is a one size fits all organization - so they have not tested this on various monitors they have sold in the past (I have a studio display)  

I think it's absolutely horrible. Too much whitespace. Thin, faint, unreadable font. And the option to edit is gone? Please revert to a previous version. The recent change has made the forum useless. Did you intend to chase away all the adults? Maybe the forum looks better on a tablet but it's a disaster on a real computer such as an iMac with a 21" or 27" screen.

So I see we can still edit. Good!

My impression is that this forum has gotten worse with every revision over the last several (5? 10?) years. I used to consider it an example of a well-designed forum, worthy of emulation of every other forum. Now I consider it a prime example of how NOT to design a forum.

Jobs wouldn't let this **** happened

I have no idea how it looks on retina Macs, but here, on my old iMac it looks GIANT

Can't stand it.

I've noticed another oddity, which may have always been present. When replying to an initial post, the text of the post appears above the editor window, which seems natural. When replying to a follow-up post, as I am now, the post appears below the editor window, which I find unnatural and inconvenient, since I need to scroll across the blank editor window to see the prior post. If it were above, I could just pull down (on iPad) to see it. Having the Reply button below that prior post is awkward also, since one expects it to be right below the editor.

And it is growing more and more annoying to need to scroll to the bottom of the first page, click "See all replies", click "last", and scroll to the bottom of the last page to reach the new entries. C'mon! The delay while preparing data for a page, with no data transferring (I can see the modem internet light no flashing), and no busy indicator on the screen is still distracting.

I notice that we've lost the somewhat confusing "Branched to a new discussion", indicating that naughty words have been removed. This has the anomalous effect of promoting a thread last updated "4 months ago" to the first list page of Using Apple TV. Wonder what that was... Since the last update date can be set back to the last retained post, maybe the internal update time that determines the list order should be reset also.

Diana.McCall wrote:

 

I notice that we've lost the somewhat confusing "Branched to a new discussion", indicating that naughty words have been removed.

I saw this behavior this morning myself. I had a couple of my own posts removed by the hosts and didn't see the "Branched to a new discussion" which always appeared when a discussion had been edited by the moderators.