At least we'll always have Frank

[rahaeli]

I've seen a lot of people wondering about recent changes or proposed changes to LiveJournal's navigation and user interface, and asking why they're necessary. We've talked about our individual goals for some of the changes in the lj_design community, but we haven't talked about why we're working on the project overall, and I wanted to take a minute and

Comments

[trishtrash]

As a rule of thumb, I think people prefer changes to be opt-in rather than opt-out to start with. For instance, a visually impaired friend on LJ was irritated by having to figure out how to remove the bar using the tiny text... had you *offered* the change, he would have been aware of it's existence without the inconvenience. Personally, I don't even notice the thing - I have peculiar focus/attention issues that allow me to tune out much of what's not expected. One day it'll get me run over, but in the meantime, what navigation bar? ;)

[ems]

I forgot about the nav bar. Man, that thing's ugly. If it were more customisable, it might be better. The basic concept is good, but I personally want it on the side, the same colour scheme as my journal and with whatever links I want to have on it. Until then, I'll just use my sidebar. ;)

[christine]

Try this? http://legomymalfoy.livejournal.com/448587.html

It's not exactly point-and-click, but you can make the colors pretty to match at least your journal :)

[ems]

Ooh, that does look much better, thank you!

[otana]

I agree wholeheartedly.

[kyrielle]

I can see why they did, tho', if there are some people who only ever view their friends page.

Of course, I hate the thing. It's not useful to me, and it's also uuuuugly. But. I can kinda see the reasoning, with this post.

Even if I don't entirely want to. ;)

[jamesd]

The nav bar is a nice example of how not to do things:

1. It was set up for all immediately. It could have been set up to be on initially only for those who apparently had the nav problems it was trying to address, leaving the experts interface alone.

2. It was set up to override the preferences of the user doing the navigating, so the non-experts overrode the experts. The overriding gave the experts no choice about their own UI.

Both were bad systems design choices.

Now, the nav bar isn't inherently a bad idea - the horrendous variation in navigation back and forward in journals because every style dumps them in different places on often-illegible text provides ample opportunity to be a major improvement. But it doesn't include those critical context-driven design elements that could make it of significant value in the experts interface...

[pinkpolarity]

Yes! If you've got enough sense to have custom CSS on your account, you shouldn't have had to fight with that accursed thing.

[bridgetester]

Which critical context-driven design elements are of significant value to you? I think the problem is that everyone wants different links on there...

[jamesd]

Previous 20 journal entries when viewing a different journal overview page. Previous day with an entry you can see. These are sort of exposed in journal styles but the wide variation gives you no consistent place to hover your mouse over to navigate easily and color schemes regularly make the links hard to read.