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

[blktauna]

You say you've done testing, but I find it hard to imagine who you've tested... There are a multitude of ages on LJ who seem not to have any problem navigating over the last several years. The suggestions asked for in all the venues available have never included, "please make our userinfo more generic, please force a navbar on everyone, please hide useful pages under several layers of FAQ, or please treat us all like idiot endusers who have no clue." Forgive me if I don't take your test group results as gospel

[fweebles]

That's because birthday notifications have been disabled due to site-load issues for years. I don't think anybody should (or would) expect to receive birthday notifications any time since about 2002.

In fact, now that I look at it, the option isn't even on the main journal info page any more.

[crimmson]

But it does give you birthdays under the MYLJ tab...which works just as well...another improvement that once I learned how to use I decided I pretty much like...

[kenboy]

I don't think logging into LJ and clicking the My Lj tab works nearly as well as getting an e-mail to remind me it's someone's birthday.

Sorry.

[uozaki]

Right. The point of reminders is that I don't have to go and look and remember them myself. Also I still feel that the changes to the Portal are still All Evil, so if I can avoid MyLJ at all, I will.

[burr86]

http://www.livejournal.com/birthdays.bml

[blktauna]

All well and good, but not gettable to by any means on the navbar in Xcolibur. It also still is not a notification.

Much like the hassle of getting to "recent comments" which is one of the only truely useful things on this site.

[kellzilla]

You can get to recent comments by viewing your journal with the navbar on. Also, recent comments is linked nearly-top-level (Journal > Manage Comments (which IMO should be Recent Comments, not Manage)) in the betanav scheme.

However, both of those are almost universally-agreed to be ass-ugly. And if the dark navbar didn't mesh with my journal style, I would agree - though I do agree with the general assessment of "ass-ugly" for betanav.

[blktauna]

ahh see there is another problem manage=/=recent in my version of english

The betanav doesn't have enough contrast for me to read with any ease so I stopped using it. The navbar is waaay too small for me to see and ugly.

I am now informend that journal/comments is in place, although i wager that was an extremely recent doing. Again stealthy change for no reason.

But this one, at least, is very welcome.

[kellzilla]

Manage doesn't mean recent in ANY version of English. :) Even the page that Manage Comments links to is called Recent Comments (since it's the same page that, in X-Colibur, is called Recent Comments.) So having Journal > Manage Comments be the link to Recent Comments is a misnomer and ambiguous/incorrect navigation

[blktauna]

I have a difficult time telling where the navigation strip across the top ends and the actual content of the page begins, since everything is a sort of universal block of blah.

My second real complaint about the thing, yes.

however if they made the text bigger, the navbar would get clunky in size,

I already think it's clunky in size. And useless, which is why I have it turned off.

Journal > Comments in X-Colibur happened approximately the same time as the "release" of the betanav scheme.
later because I was paying attention to both navs at that point. I like how one of the only useful changes they've made has gone completely unheralded.

I'd been complaining about that lack of real link for ages ... Yay one for them. ;)

[burr86]

Recent comments is under Journal > Comments in xcolibur... am I missing something?

[blktauna]

Ha that's new. I've had it as a bookmark for ages because it wasn't anywhere reachable. Much like the adminconsole.

Keep it a secret why don't you? I'd have made this known as soon as it was put up. Now I don't have to ever look at myLJ again. Thanks.

[ankhayra]

The birthdays list in MyLJ should get a "librarian-fix": and also show the last one that has passed. Sometimes you miss one, and then it's gone.

Librarians, when using a filing cabinet with cards (like in the old days), have the habit of -when they found the card they were looking for- looking at the previous card. "Just to be sure". Modern library software has this built in!