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What's wrong with the new forum design.

Thought I'd kick off the list here.


1. O.P. can award a correct answer to themselves.


2. Status stays hidden unless checked, making it hard on both newbies and those trying to help them


3. No advanced search (that I can find) I've given up even trying to look, and users aren't even aware of it


4. Difficult to see what you have or haven't replied to


5. Can't see very far back in the threads


6. Huge waste of space on useless quote bubbles


7. Trying to edit your own settings takes you round in circles


8. Where is the forum how-to and guide?


9. Absurd to ask users to search without a suggested list to work from, the Pages iPad users are constantly landing in the wrong forum


10. I hate the default of sending email advisories and Safari messages of answers in the forum. My Mail Inbox is inundated and I am getting constant pop-ups interrupting my work on my Mac.


…many more but I'd like to let others add to the list


BTW I give 2 thumbs up to the improved post formatting options, but that was a long overdue catch up to other forums.

Aluminium iMac 24, Mac OS X (10.6.7), The closest you'll ever get to there, is here.

Posted on May 7, 2011 10:01 AM

Reply
31 replies

May 7, 2011 10:53 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

Don't have time to answer all of this, but here's a start...


1. O.P. can award a correct answer to themselves.


Useful when they've come up with the correct answer themselves. (OPs can't award themselves points, though.)


3. No advanced search (that I can find)


https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa (or click the blue Search button in the top right of any page without entering any text in the search field)


4. Difficult to see what you have or haven't replied to


The equivalent of My Posts is here:


User uploaded file



8. Where is the forum how-to and guide?


https://discussions.apple.com/static/apple/tutorial/index.html



10. I hate the default of sending email advisories and Safari messages of answers in the forum. My Mail Inbox is inundated and I am getting constant pop-ups interrupting my work on my Mac.


https://discussions.apple.com/static/apple/tutorial/email.html


Good luck!

May 7, 2011 5:55 PM in response to Tuttle

I totallly disagree with 1. and that comes under my response to all of the above:


Like much in OSX hidden, subtle, concealed, unobvious, counter intuitive, etc. features may as well not exist for 99% of users and used to be the biggest No-No under UI guidelines for bleedin' obvious reasons.


If you can't find it, you can't use it!


As I advise my design students, if you have to tell the punters what you meant, you did it wrong.


Oh, and "explanations" mostly are excuses not reasons.


Bring back DOS and have end to to all the pretence.


BTW Have the designers tried to use right click spellchecking in this new forum paradigm?

May 8, 2011 1:41 AM in response to baltwo

baltwo wrote:


Tuttle wrote:

3. No advanced search (that I can find)


https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa (or click the blue Search button in the top right of any page without entering any text in the search field)

Wrong. That generates this error message: Please enter at least one search term


Yes, but below that message is a long text entry box; under that box, over to the left, is a "more options" link. Click that and you do get more options - the ability to restrict the search to a specific community and/or restrict the search to a specific person.


Not as many choices as one could make in AD's advanced search, true, but more nonetheless.

May 8, 2011 2:59 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

BTW Have the designers tried to use right click spellchecking in this new forum paradigm?

The site now runs on a current version of Jive SBS software. It is largely driven by Javascript & a large number of open source technologies that are not platform specific. Increasingly, ASC is not just for Mac users; it is also for iOS users, & for Windows users using Apple's Windows oriented products & services.


One of the consequences of this is the software doesn't rely on or know that much about OS X-specific features like the system-wide contextual menu that includes spell checking, dictionary access, & so on. Thus, right clicks are interpreted by the software as requests for its popup insert/alignment menu instead of for the platform-specific OS X menu.


However, you can access the OS X menu by control clicking in places where the software would otherwise popup its menu. Nonintuitive as that may be to Mac users, it works.

May 8, 2011 3:02 AM in response to Don Archibald

'On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.'


'That's the display department.'


'With a torch.'


'Ah, well the lights had probably gone.'


'So had the stairs.'


'But look, you found the notice didn't you?'


'Yes,' said Arthur, 'yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.'

May 8, 2011 3:20 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

As I advise my design students, if you have to tell the punters what you meant, you did it wrong.

Do you also teach your students that in the real world they rarely will have the luxury of no constraints on their designs? The change to the new ASC format was dictated by the inability of the old, no longer supported Jive software that runs the site to handle the ever increasing traffic it now gets.


Oh, and "explanations" mostly are excuses not reasons.

As excuses go, changing the design to prevent the site from becoming totally non-functional isn't a bad one. 😉

May 8, 2011 3:48 AM in response to R C-R

Exactly what I tell my students. Don't shoehorn your final design into what you think the box is, and then explain the results away with excuses.


The core principle which you seem to miss, is not to waste the precious capacity on increasingly coping with the flood of trash buried under the mountain of more trash. ie The Engineers solution.


The solution is to examine how do you sort out and retain the useful parts of the flood and make it accessible to those who don't want to have to dig through the rubbish to find the gems, any more than the supporters do. ie The Designers solution.


There is no point to hundreds if not thousands of bad responses to the exact same query. One accurate, complete and well written response is all that is needed. The only purpose of the queries is to sort out what the users are not getting. If they are repeatedly not getting it, there is something seriously wrong with the software/hardware design and instructions.


Apple has gone over to the dark side in that they seem to have relegated the original great minds that created the Mac to history, and now just have fashion designers to put nice frocks on their hardware. That the public loves frocks on dross is no excuse for abandoning what used to be the amazingly farsighted clarity of thinking we once expected from Apple.


btw Do we have any geniuses in the room who maybe can spot the need for clear, comprehensive and complete User Manuals actually delivered with all software or hardware? The time and effort put into those is repaid many times over in time saved in support, lost productivity and distress of the user.

May 8, 2011 4:20 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

There is no point to hundreds if not thousands of bad responses to the exact same query.

You do realize that this is a real-world user-to-user support site, right?


We routinely get queries about even the most seemingly obvious & well documented stuff. Many queries are just from nervous users that want confirmation that they aren't misinterpreting anything. Some are from folks whose knowledge of how computers work is close to nonexistent, or based on totally wrong ideas. Many don't want comprehensive, technically accurate "one size fits all" answers; they come here because they want personalized answers from fellow users.


If you are hoping for some design that eliminates the need for person-to-person exchanges, including all the messy 'trash' that people bring with them, I think you are hoping for the impossible.

May 8, 2011 5:04 AM in response to R C-R

You are not listening because you are dealing with something you do not understand.


That is good, clear communication and design.


The point is not to stop the hand holding, the point is to eliminate the necessity of it in the first place.


I was a VAR for Macs in the 1980s. I could not make a living out of it. Why? Because once you sold a system to studios they asked a few questions the first week.Then they were happily on their own. In a well designed system, hardly anything remains hidden or obscure and solutions and documentation fit into a pattern that makes sense.


The new OSX model has achieved much greater business sense because there is a lot more money to be made in support. If I was a VAR today I probably could make a go of it because like the PC there is plenty of confusion, inconsistencies and hidden minefields, that can only be negotiated with the aid of a paid guide who has stood on most and already lost their legs so can point out where they were buried.


Posting maps to the mines, or better even removing them, is obviously not on the agenda here.


Ambulances, post trauma support and the on-going massive care is. A whole industry in fact that out of self interest won't remove the problem that sustains it.


My role is the volunteer St John's Ambulance man, here to pick up the body parts, hold hands, offer tea, sympathy and stick band aids on the less fatal wounds and despatch the rest to the trauma unit.

May 8, 2011 6:48 AM in response to R C-R

R C-R wrote:


PeterBreis0807 wrote:

As I advise my design students, if you have to tell the punters what you meant, you did it wrong.

Do you also teach your students that in the real world they rarely will have the luxury of no constraints on their designs? The change to the new ASC format was dictated by the inability of the old, no longer supported Jive software that runs the site to handle the ever increasing traffic it now gets.


Oh, and "explanations" mostly are excuses not reasons.

As excuses go, changing the design to prevent the site from becoming totally non-functional isn't a bad one. 😉

I keep hearing Apple had no option but to use this Jive abmonination. But hard to believe that Apple, with all its heft, couldn't have forced Jive to come up with something better or ordered up something custom made from another developer or even from its own people. That they had to accept having this shoved down their throats is hard to believe. If native Apple apps were designed like this -- God forbid this doesn't come to pass -- no one would be using them and Apple would be on its way quickly down the drain.


Makes one think they wanted this.

What's wrong with the new forum design.

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