New Website Design and Navigation

Zaldan

dear god, someone trying to justify their job? change for the sake of change and not for the better. who ever made the cat-dev-recent and unanswered buttons must wear glasses to think they need to be that size lol

Rohamad_Ali

There is no adblocker for Apple iPad but thanks anyways . Really just need it optimized for all of us with different communication devices .

Mojmir

Is it safe from ddos attack? Lol

Tandor

The more I use the forums, the more I hate the way the screen hops around because of the banner, resulting in me invariably clicking on the wrong link because the page has moved. This is on my Windows 7 desktop PCs with Chrome browser.

I only have the General Discussion board main page bookmarked on my phone and that doesn't seem to have changed at all.

JasonSilverSpring

Is it just me or did they revert the mobile version of the forums back to what we had before?

Aurie

The screen jumping around every time you change the page is indeed extremely irritating.

Please @ZOS do something about it.

GreenSoup2HoT

Jeez this new header and footer is already getting on my nerves. You trying to turn your forums into an annoying pop-up add?

I liked the old version where everything was neat and beside the Account Options Tab. I could careless for the footer/watermarks.

Please give us the option to go back to the way it was.

Auldjohn

MissBizz wrote: »

Auldjohn wrote: »

News > Announcements is blank on Chrome Android Nougat.

@Auldjohn What phone/browser? Shows up on my S8 (Nougat) using either chrome or samsung browser.

LG Stylo 2+, Nougat, Chrome Android Beta

Grumble_and_Grunt

Was perfectly fine the way it was before. Absolutely hate the Banner at the top, the size of the tabs in the top left.
100% the banner needs to go. Makes zooming in, navigating up and down a literal headache.

If it ain't broke don't fix it
I suggest reverting it and spending your resources elsewhere

Animal_Mother

I love the new design.

Edit seems to move around... at least on iOS. Starting on the right and moving towards the left of the screen in landscape mode. In portrait mode, edit stays in place, but forum topic and discussion pages are funky. They don't preserve layout/zoom/resize that sort of thing. Pinching the screen fixes the issue. It seems that the web layout expects and prefers landscape displays.

Is there any way to bypass the age gate on the main site page? I usually avoid going to the main site for updates and such, because I need to verify my age for the umteenth time.

Animal_Mother

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

There is no adblocker for Apple iPad but thanks anyways . Really just need it optimized for all of us with different communication devices .

The later iPads (Air and up) and iPhones can support 3rd party blockers, under Settings -> Safari -> Content Blockers.

Loralai_907

I really don't like the banner at the top. It is far too big. It refreshes on every single bloody page, which is so not necessary and does not promote a user friendly experience. I dislike the jumpiness. I have clicked on the wrong forum category so many times already from clicking too fast. Its not a good fit for the forums. I'm not sure who did your design for this or who tested it out before deciding to run with it. Perhaps you need a variety team to test these things out as different people will notice different aspects that could be a problem. Part of my real life job is testing things out before we roll them out, myself and members of several other departments and/or other companies are all involved with testing phases so we can get most bases covered and catch any issues prior to a new thing going live. Like, this should have been caught. Unless your test environment is buggy and doesn't react the same way your live environment does, this should have been caught.

bottleofsyrup

The banner up top is way too big and clunky now. It also will load the forum pages without the banner for a second, then the banner will appear pushing everything down, so you have to wait until the banner pops up before clicking a thread or you click the wrong one.

Please revert this.

Saturn

I guess you HAVE to post website feedback here, since my thread was taken down, despite also working as feedback >.< It already has quite some feedback, so you might as well check it out here.

To sum it all up:

• The website changes all around are very counter to the whole idea of "If it isn't broken don't fix it", but that also goes for a lot of changes ingame and seems to just be a trend with ZOS' decision-making on everything.
• The banner up top is too large and intrusive, plus it wastes a large amount of the available screenspace for some mobile devices, and it doesn't need to follow you as you scroll down, since it eliminates at least 10% of the available screenspace on desktop for something which could easily just be fixed in the top of the screen like it was in the past.
  • The banner also makes it impossible to quickly navigate certain areas of the website, especially the forum, as it jumps the screen up and down by not appearing immediately and then resizing when you scroll down.
• The minimization of the "Forum" hyperlink and relocation to the top-right of the screen makes it extremely hard to find, along with the Support and Account tab. The "Game" link basically just sends you back to the main page, which clicking the enourmous "The Elder Scrolls Online" title in the middle of the enourmous banner also achieves. This same redundancy is also seen in the "Store" link in the top-right, as there are a total of three store related links on the main page as soon as you enter the website proper.
  • A further worry with the relocation of the "Forum" link is that new visitors will no longer have an easy way to find the forum with its (mostly) unfiltered opinions about everything concerning the game, which can be seen as ZOS' attempt to quell negative opinions that could potentially rob them of future customers. This along with many other changes and the increasingly larger focus on the Crown Store really gives off a very money-hungry vibe, which granted is the point of a business, but if that's the case, then touting "We are transparent!" is extremely counter to this and very misleading.
  • The forum is the only place where players can consistently communicate their opinions and ideas to the developers, and making it hard to navigate to that part of the website is quite frankly a step in the wrong direction, as it could potentially lead to a lack of communication, which would turn ESO into the type of MMO that is only spoken about when trying to prove how much better something else is (how a lot of us currently use SWTOR, Wildstar, and many other failures, to prove ESO is better), although it is also fair to say that a lot of poor changes in that direction have already been made recently with the Morrowind update (which had an incredibly frustrating ignorance to its testers, who consistently told devs that the sustain changes were poorly designed), as well as with other changes in the past year or so.
• Personally I think some of the pages look better than before and part of it could potentially be good reference material for newer players, such as the guides that span most of the game's content, although I have yet to check it all out so I'm not 100% sure if they are in fact well-made. The idea is at least a step in the right direction as the game proper lacks proper tutorials on how to do a lot of things, considering the introduction barely covers combat and is easily forgettable after a few hours. Obviously this is a larger problem with the game itself, and a topic for a different discussion for sure, but at the very least it seems the website guides aim to remedy the lack of proper guiding within the game.
• The final note I want to leave with is that what strikes me about the website as it is now, is that it seems like a lot of work went into the changes, but very little effort was spent testing it all, as it was approved despite the above mentioned things (especially the great obnoxious banner). Once more this is a common theme in ESO as well, a lot of effort spent making assets, animating, voice-over, etc. and then having it be usurped and overshadowed by simple, yet disruptive, bugs and glitches that would have been easily discovered if more time had been spent testing. Even outsourcing testing to the playerbase (and depending on us for intelligent feedback on these website changes) only works if you actually apply the feedback.

I realise that a lot of what I've written encroaches on ESO proper, as well as other topics, but I find it hard not to critique one aspect without including the rest for comparison.

TheValkyn

It's not good. (Like at all) Hire a web developer with some UX chops.

• You aren't showing your brand logo or header.
• There's a lot of room for consolidation on the header and footer. Headers and footers are not the reason we visit the website. They are tools and nothing more but they are maybe 20% of the screen real estate right now. You wouldn't use your entire yard as a driveway, right? The driveway is there for one reason and it's not the main attraction to your home.
• There's no filtering of news articles anymore through the header bar. I'm not sure why you'd want to remove that feature. It's nonsensical.

Slick_007

the large black banner at the top of the forums page is very annoying, even when shrunk down to partially annoying.

zZzleepyhead

I strongly oppose the new change. Even more so than I opposed the previous change to the UI on the forums a while back. Stop trying to make all UI look like console UI! It looks too awkward on PC.

idk

The new design is fine. However, when scrolled down and the banner is smaller it has a case of the jitters as we scrolled through a thread or list of threads. It should not be moving like that. It is a distraction.

One thing that seems odd is I have the game and Morrowind. Why do I see a Buy Now in the upper right hand corner?

EDIT: this is on a PC browser.

Ok mobile the forums appear mostly the same.

BlueViolet

I'm sorry, but I don't find any of the redesign an improvement. It's annoying, clunky, overly large, and even when shrunk down, is still dreadfully irritating.
I probably wouldn't mind it so much if the whole thing just stopped bouncing around every time I scrolled my mouse to the top. Why can't it be static?

I miss the older style boards. They were fairly unobtrusive and still functional. This one is awful
Edit -

Draqone wrote: »

Life Tip for those who think the header is too big:

Install Adblock (if you haven't already).
Rightclick the logo and block it.

This way the huge logo that covers 25% of the screen will not be visible even if you are scrolled all the way up.It also stops the header from jumping.

Blocking was the first thing I did when I saw this new monstrosity. Honestly ZOS, just get of that logo and we are all happy.

THANK YOU.
God. That thing was horrible.

Feanor

After raging a bit about the botched mobile theme on iPhones (thank you for reverting that so fast) I must compliment you. First look on my iPad now is really nice. I like it so far.

Morgha_Kul

I'll chip in my 2 cents, I also really dislike the header that STARTS huge, then suddenly shrinks when you scroll, then RESETS to huge when you click on anything, they shrinks again...

It's nauseating.

I think it was better the old way (though the need to enter my birthdate every single time I visit the page is still REALLY irritating).

SantieClaws

Another issue with the moving enormous header monster is that when it keeps moving this one she keeps clicking on things she did not wish to click on yes.

You are most lucky this is not posted in the thread about the crown store things.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Hippie4927

Aurelle1 wrote: »

The screen jumping around every time you change the page is indeed extremely irritating.

Please @ZOS do something about it.

So much THIS ^^^^

kwisatz

Language flag at the bottom: it's not practical having to scroll page down when I want to permute between languages.

LadyHeloise

Hippie4927 wrote: »

Aurelle1 wrote: »

The screen jumping around every time you change the page is indeed extremely irritating.

Please @ZOS do something about it.

So much THIS ^^^^

Totally this ^^. The screen 'jumping' every time you change page is driving me up the wall. The design of the banner in itself is fine, but the way it resizes each on each page is annoying and headache-inducing.

xSkullfox

solved it

FLambda

The header is so bad and huuuuuuge that I used uBlock Origin to block it. That's right, completely DELETING the header was an IMPROVEMENT in functionality. Cause now I can actually read the page.

Edit: Just saw I wasn't the only one

Docmandu wrote: »

universal-nav div display none; .... and life is good again.

This basically sums up the main problem with the header, size-wize:

MissBizz wrote: »

MissBizz's Novel of Feedback for New Website
Forums on desktop
Imagine when you use one of the event popups on the bottom of the page? We'll have like 1/10 of the page to actually see content.

Biro123

LadyHeloise wrote: »

Hippie4927 wrote: »

Aurelle1 wrote: »

The screen jumping around every time you change the page is indeed extremely irritating.

Please @ZOS do something about it.

So much THIS ^^^^

Totally this ^^. The screen 'jumping' every time you change page is driving me up the wall. The design of the banner in itself is fine, but the way it resizes each on each page is annoying and headache-inducing.

Double, triple this ^^^^

Almost every time I 'm navigating, I click on the wrong section - because just as I've had enough time for the page to load and for me to see where I'm going next and move the mouse and start to put a bit of pressure on the click button - that bloody header loads, everything scrolls down about an inch and I end up clicking instead on something an inch higher than I wanted. SO you go back - and do the same bloody thing again!!!

For the love of all forum trolls - PUT IT BACK!!!

xSkullfox

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/363759/chrome-plugin-extended-eso-forum

FLambda

xSkullfox wrote: »

solved it
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/363759/chrome-plugin-extended-eso-forum

Heh, someone already re-designed the redesign, and it's perfect!

ZOS devs... implement these design changes!