New Friendslist Site Scheme

[twissie]

I want to update you all on the state of the beta testing of the new friendslist. I've now been actively using and testing all the features of the new style for a couple of days, and while it's not completely useless, it's not perfect either.



Here is my list of pros and cons of the new style, I've tried to keep this list as objective as possible.

Pros

• Old outdated source code will get a much needed update
From the perspective of the people who run LJ, this will free up resources and make the service easier to manage.


• Notifications on new entries


You won't have to manually refresh your friendslist in order to see entries that are posted while you still have your flist open. The number in parenthesis will change to reflect the number of new entries available to you.


• Notes are displayed next to the user's username on entries
No more having to awkwardly hover over usernames to see the notes you'd made about the people on your flist!


• LJ-cuts open and close directly in the feed
You no longer have to open LJ cuts in a new tab or go to a new page to read what's behind. The text will open on your feed, and there are also links to collapse the cut back together


(this makes the feature different to the spoiler cut, spoiler cuts can not be collapsed back up again once opened (other than by manually refreshing the page)).


• Unified look for metadata
This is just my opinion, but I like the entry footers with the all the metadata. It's a simple, minimalistic look which makes it easier to process the information given in these fields.

Cons

• Javascript and AJAX
Doesn't play well with mobile devices and screen readers, can lead to various issues in various browsers.


• Readability
The default font is difficult to read, and I know a lot of people have issues reading black text on a completely white background.
I have been made aware of the fact that the main background colour will be a light grey. The main background colour is displayed as white in my browser for whatever reason, this is a bug. The background colour of individual entries are still set to white, though.
This is what the scheme is supposed to look like:


(Click for big)
Here you also see the scheme with the proper navigation bar at the top.
It's also my opinion that the entry boxes are way too wide. Having text stretch across the entire width of the screen is straining on the eyes and difficult to process.


• Scalabilty
The entry boxes do not scale to fit your browser window.
Fullscreen:


Small browser window adjusted so that I can do other things on my desktop:


Look at that horizontal scrollbar! Wow. Keep in mind that this is a BETA TEST, so this might actually be a bug that'll be worked out. It might also be specific to my browser (Safari) or viewing style (the outdated Dystopia). Issues like these are reported through the proper channels and will be looked at.


• No links for "Previous" and "Next"
Infinite scrolling with the option to use the Archive tab to the right to filter the view by date (i.e. only displaying entries posted on Sunday 28th of October). You can also filter your flist by your personal filters, journals only, and communities only - however the Archive tab feature seems to ignore the filter settings. There really should be an option to display filtered entries by date as well.
The personal filters under the Filters tab are sorted alphabetically.


• No mood icons
Not sure if this is set in stone, but there are no mood icons displayed in my feed at the moment. The mood icons are of course still visible when I go to each user's individual journal/comment page.


• Commenting takes you to each person's personal journal/commenting page
This adds variety to your user experience, but it's odd that comments don't show up in ?style=mine. This, again, might be a bug. I have a feeling we'll see in-feed commenting in the future, meaning we never have to leave the feed in order to post or read comments. This is a welcome change for me personally, provided the feed is made easier to read.

Neither here nor there

• New friendslock icons!

- Friends only

- Filtered to a group of friends

- A repost
Public entries have no security icons like this.

While I think it's wrong to force everyone into a specific site scheme for their feeds, I definitely understand the reasoning for it, and I can see what they are aiming for with this. It needs a bit of work to be usable, but I am vaguely positive.

If you want to join the beta test and test the new flist for yourself, you'll find instructions over at ruljautonews, or in my previous entry about the proposed changes.

ETA: Public beta has now been announced. Official announcement.