Where do I begin? for Questionland Seattle

Reputation: 1039

Where do I begin?

Ok, that sounds rude, but I wanted to make it a question and I have what seems like a million little suggestions for you.

I'd normally just email you, but since you made this category I thought I'd post here so others can comment.

I should say first that I like where this is going. The character of the brand is really coming together in all of the little icons and avatars (love the star guy). The top, the balloon, the clouds, how it changed from day to night a bit ago, the sun, the moon, the stars, the aurora, the rest/play links--all very cute (in a good way).

You've done some good things with usability, too. The three boxes at the top are great. Moving the vote buttons means you no longer have to scroll to the bottom to vote on something, which is awesome. The brief lists of questions / answers on the home page are also more compact and have less needless white space. Switching between Latest / Greatest / etc no longer does a page load (it used to, right?).

How about the question/answer box, though? Can it be wider? Can it grow vertically as you type a long post?

On to design suggestions...

Typography. I thought it was pretty great how it was, if not perfect. Now there are some definite problems. I have a hunch you designed this on Mac OS, though, which is notorious for rendering typography differently than Windows. So.

The most important thing that simply must be changed is the margin between paragraphs. You have it set at '5 px' and it really should be something more like '1 em'. Look at a long post with many paragraphs. Luckily you're already looking at one :). It's difficult to scan to the beginning of the next paragraph, and even more difficult to tell the difference between a paragraph break and a single carriage return. The paragraphs all seem to just run together and readability is suffering (are you reading this Rev. Smith?).

Now, about that Times New Roman. It's really kind of atrocious on a web site :). I don't actually mind it where it's italicized ("in other categories", etc) but as a regular old header I think it's a no-no. I used Firebug to axe it from the "h1, h2, h3, h4" and ".ysi_post_header" selectors, and the front page is looking a lot cleaner.

The colors. The palette seems a bit schizophrenic in terms of the sheer number of hues on the page. The day theme does work better than the night theme. You might consider making the categories background and the blue page border (and the logo?) a bit darker at night, to match that hue better. The light blue links "2 answers by..." and the up/down vote buttons clash a bit in both themes. The cyan around the question box is completely out of place in both themes and seems to be left over on accident from the old design.

I would pick 3 or 4 hues--blue, green, brown, and grey--and stick to them, then play with brightness and saturation for contrast. When your hue of blue changes between night and day, make sure the other page elements based on that hue also change.

(Ahem. You know that old cliche interview answer? "What is your biggest weakness?" "I guess it would be that I'm such a perfectionist...")

Finally, I'm not feeling the green tree background. There's a few reasons why.

1) The pointy tops. With all the rounded corners on the site, maybe round the tops slightly. The angles are kind of busy for a page background.

2) The colors (goes back to having too many hues). They clash with each other.

3) Scrolling with a clicky mouse wheel is kind of nauseating. It's doing this weird strobe effect, and sometimes it looks like the trees are scrolling up while the text is scrolling down.

4) They don't make a lot of sense at the bottom, where the clouds are actually in front and they don't meet the horizon.

Ultimately, I think it would work a lot better to have the blue sky be the main page background. The sky could have sparse tiled clouds for day theme, and tiled stars for night theme. Then you could keep one to two layers of trees, only at the bottom, coming out of the hills. The amount of trees in bkg_sky_night.png is basically what you'd have at the bottom.

The big clouds could stay or go (they overshadow the little cloud guys in the day theme, which I like better). Either way, they probably wouldn't be there in the night theme, and they would be behind the trees.

Rather than just having two layers of "tiled" trees, they could also be more caricatured and sparse. Right now with the clashy hues and the pointy tops, a full screen of trees with no context is looking kind of like a bad rug. They don't really match the character of the site you've created with all of the little avatars and icons.

I hope all of that helps or at least gives you some more ideas. I'm more of a backend guy by trade, so take all of this with a grain of salt. Thanks for the awesome site!

Jon asked in Questionland Redesign about 1 year ago | Report

New answers are not being accepted at this time.

Latest Greatest

5 Answers

Reputation: 3723

Follow 1

0 1

(are you reading this Rev. Smith?).

Yes. Yes, I am.

uhm, why?

Rev.Enant answered in Questionland Redesign about 1 year ago | Report

1 comment by Rev.Enant…

Share this answer with a friend:

Reputation: 1711

Follow 2

4 1

I agree with Jon on the typography. Type on the web looks so much better on a Mac. When viewed on a Windows machine, serif typefaces tend to be hard to read... Unless you're using IE8 (with TrueType), which you shouldn't be using because it's total crap, other than the type thing.

I disagree about the colors, though. I like the palette as is. I also like the pointy trees. And I'm a designer.

e.strange answered in Questionland Redesign about 1 year ago | Report

1 comment by Luckier…

Share this answer with a friend:

Reputation: 1254

Expert: 2 topics

Moderator

Follow 5

1 0

Hey Jon,

Thanks for all that thoughtful feedback. I'm going to defer all your suggestions on typography, colors and graphical treatments to our designer but I did take care of the paragraph spacing. Very good point and so much better now.

Marty Unger answered in Questionland Redesign about 1 year ago | Report

Comment on this answer

Share this answer with a friend:

Reputation: 628

Follow 3

1 0

I like the trees. I haven't seen the daytime one though. And I think the pointy tops give them that 1960's vibe.

Kristin Bell answered in Questionland Redesign about 1 year ago | Report

Comment on this answer

Share this answer with a friend:

Reputation: 2266

Follow 2

1 0

I also get a weird loading pattern - a blue box hovers over everything until the page fully loads. It is rather annoying, since it takes quite awhile (in internet time) to go away.

Basil answered in Questionland Redesign about 1 year ago | Report

2 comments by Marty Unger and Basil…