Shall we change the site design?

Dim ond draig arall! :dragon:

If you want an honest answer, rather than simply warm reassurance, then I have to ask, does the pop-out window idea (for the challenges) really add anything?

Was there a technical reason for doing it that way? Does it help people on mobile devices for example? (I only ever use this site on a PC, i.e. using keyboard and mouse, so I wouldnā€™t know what it looks & feels like on say a mobile phone or a tablet or a touch-screen laptop or whatever).

Maybe it has advantages for some people, but from my perspective, it has some disadvantages, which I could go into if anyone is interested.

Although Iā€™ve done a bit of webbery in my time, Iā€™m not au fait with current thinking, so maybe it is the thing of the moment or the future, but in some ways, the pop-out idea feels a bit retro (and may be associated in some peopleā€™s minds with pop-up adverts, which I know this isnā€™t, but may carry that subliminal connotation.

Having said that, I only use that part of the site to download lessons and occasionally check for new ones, so as long as it functions at least as well as the old design, I donā€™t really mind what it looks like, but Iā€™m genuinely curious as to the choice of the ā€œpop-outā€ design.

I have had zero involvement in the site redesign, but I can see a couple of good reasons for using one

  • Thereā€™s no need to spend time worrying how displaying a list of courses and lessons will affect other elements on the page, because the pop up is a completely separate thing floating above the page
  • By using a pop up rather than navigating to a course/lesson selection page means you donā€™t have to worry about providing a navigation option back to the previous page. People can browse other courses and lessons whilst still playing a lesson, for instance.

Iā€™m interestedā€¦

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Yes, Iā€™d definitely like to hear about them :sunny:

I think mostly it was a design-driven thing - @Kinetic or @jonthomas may be able to comment further - Iā€™m happy with it, unless I find out itā€™s causing any significant drawbacks for anyoneā€¦

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For the phone matter ā€¦ as far as concerns Android ā€¦ thatā€™s why apps are here. It substitutes the site itself all the way so I donā€™t even know how exactly the site looks like on the phone, but as ā€œtech explorerā€ I can check out later on. All of a sudden Iā€™ve became curious too. :slight_smile:

Yummy, one more tech thing to be put on test and exploring. :slight_smile:

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Yes, there is that, I suppose.

Well, up to a point. I wouldnā€™t normally play the lessons directly from the site, but I can see that if you did, then the ā€œfloating pop-upā€ does allow you to browse to see what other courses and lessons there are (although if you select another lesson, then your playback would stop.

But if say, I select this lesson:

https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course2/lesson8

and either play it, or download it, I can already see (without the pop-out) all the lessons and vocabs in that particular course, and in what I think is quite a nice and attractive layout (so thatā€™s a plus point for the new design ā€¦ itā€™s only the pop-out that Iā€™m having difficulty seeing the point of)

What I would not be able to see at that point are the other courses available, and for that Iā€™d have to bring up the pop-up again. An alternative would be for them to be on a side bar or similar.

On the old design, we could see all the courses at the top, and once a course was selected, we could see all the lessons at the side, and (to me) it felt pretty easy to navigate between all of them.

You could possibly adapt the new design to be similar, except the lessons would be displayed horizontally (as they are in that page I linked to), but with all the courses listed down the side

I can sort of see that for totally new users, you donā€™t want to overwhelm them with seeing too many courses at once, or rather, you might not want to distract them with information about other courses while they are playing one particular one.

However, for more experienced users might prefer to have an overall view, without needing to bring up a ā€œpop-upā€. However, I only use the site on the relatively large screen of a computer, so there is plenty of screen ā€œreal estateā€ to spare. I can see it might be different for people using it on small hand-held devices. (So is that the reason for this ā€œpop-upā€? (and I realise that might not be the technical term in todayā€™s technology, but I canā€™t think of another name to call it).

Yeah, I liked that too!

One for @Kinetic or @jonthomas. But if I visit the site on my phone thereā€™s no mobile specific version being used i.e. the same site is having to scale to your desktop and my phone. Ideally thereā€™d be different designs for each, but Iā€™ve seen the size of @kineticā€™s todo list!

@aran - Have just noticed an issue with the pop up dialog (it whatever itā€™s called) - if I switch to South using the link underneath the list of lessons the pop up doesnā€™t take into account lessons available for South. Selecting Level 2 New - Challenge 7 takes you to a page where no lesson is available.

Perhaps the lesson page could use a default message for when there isnā€™t a lesson available (rather than making the pop up dynamic based on region)

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First of all, itā€™s not really causing any significant drawback for me personally. Itā€™s just that it seems to me not to have any real advantage when there seem to be other ways of achieving a similar result. I suppose it depends how much information you wish to present to the user (especially the new user) at one time.

As I say, Iā€™m not au fait with the latest web techniques or design concepts, and even calling it a ā€œpop-outā€ may be technically incorrect, but Iā€™m not sure what else to call it.

To be fair, one disadvantage that I thought it had was not actually the case: I thought you could only use the mouse to navigate down the pop up (if youā€™d clicked on a course to see how many lessons it had, e.g. Course 1 with its 25/6 lessons + 10 vocab). I thought it would not let you use ā€œpage down/upā€ or the arrow keys, but in fact it does when I tried it again today, so I withdraw that objection.

A couple of other worries remain (and I repeat that I can only speak as the user on a moderately large screen)

  • Itā€™s a bit disconcerting when a large part of the screen suddenly goes ā€œdarkā€ - I can see this is to make the ā€œpop upā€ more visible, but even soā€¦

  • Itā€™s not displaying as much of the coursecontent as it could. You can see this in my screen capture with the pop-up open on Course1:

I can only ā€œseeā€ 10 of the 26+10 items in the pop up, but as you can just see in the now dark background, all of those were visible on the underlying screen. I am then forced to either mouse down or page down or arrow key down to see the rest of the lessons/vocab.

  • And this pop-up can not be moved, or stretched.

Having said all that, I donā€™t feel that strongly about the ā€œpop-upā€ and if most people are happy with it, fair enough. It just seems an odd design choice to me.

And I will repeat, I do like the underlying design of the new layout, i.e. the page(s) ā€œunderneathā€ the pop-up. :slight_smile:

So ā€œpaid a phoeniā€¦ā€ :smile:

Donā€™t ask me about design - Iā€™m about as artistic as a housebrick. Iā€™m just the guy who tries to implement what heā€™s asked to implement :wink:

Your pallet of colours, when playing the piano, is pretty good artā€¦

OK then, I have about as much visual artistic ability as a housebrick, howā€™s that? :laughing:

Na! You can read the notesā€¦

ā€œCoding guyā€ then ā€¦ firmly sitting and coding whatā€™s asked from you ā€¦

Naaa ā€¦ I bet you have

Every single thing can be as artistic as one can imagine it to be no matter what and no matter in which area of life. And, the website design is rather modern, simple and not too colorful. :slight_smile: Love it.

Yeahā€¦ the nice modern design was done by @jonthomas, who certainly knows how to art! :stuck_out_tongue:

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@Kinetic you might be interested to see this: Welsh - a new design. I found an issue you might already know or not. :slight_smile:

tagging @kinetic on this! :sunny: