Changes needed for Live Journal

[adlackey]

Title
Changes needed for Live Journal

Short, concise description of the ideaI am a writing teacher for international university students. I sign up a new class of students every two months to use your site. Today trying to explain how to use your site to a lower level group was really frustrating. To be frank, your site is not very user friendly

Comments

[boredinsomniac]

Thanks for the feedback. Just so you know, "friends" and "friends page" lead to the same page. If it appears blank again, you may want to open a support reques to find out why:
http://www.livejournal.com/support/

[scolaro]

The site is indeed difficult to get into and even more difficult to explain to people. I have many friends who signed up because they liked the concept, then never really used it because they found it to be too cluttered and complicated.

Most said having the XColibur menu helped, because this menu was not jumping at them with too many options at once, but eventually they went to sites with an easier-to-use interface.

LiveJournal offers a wide variety of options, certainly more than other sites, but there seems to be no easy-access area with simple instructions, it's all or nothing. Frankly, I believe this overwhelms new users. Some accept the challenge, others - less computer-savy folks - don't.

[proxyanon]

Re: 3)

All of that is addressed in the navigation strip. Which is the default setting for all new users, unless they've chosen to use old styles or funky journals (which would be akin to a five-year-old attempting calculus).

[commentr]

Just discovered that is it possible to upload pictures, but at the home page, there is no reference to this feature! It seems that the url is pics.livejournal.com/username. Why hide this feature? Then there is scrapbook, but again, no link is visible from the home page. Strange!

[siderea]

Yeah, *sigh* LJ's UI and nav is a hot mess. I do wish LJ would hire somebody with UX expertise to sit down and figure out how to rationalize it without adding or removing features.