As usual, out of the blue something is thrown right in your face without intention of harm. However, though as much I’d like to be happy for PPS, Aizuddin, and others who’ve worked hard in making it better..I am honestly not very happy.
There isn’t any harm throwing a huge surprise to the audience. But when it concerns the user interface which in return will reflect heavily on the usability of a website, I can’t rest at ease to see something I looked highly upon has somehow lost its touch.
Yes, I’m dead serious in what I’m speaking about. I think PPS might’ve taken this project too quickly and assumed people wouldn’t mind such a leap in change.
I’m sure there’ll still be fans of PPS shouting w00t! and cheering on the new move but I’m still not convinced that this bold move was smart or done out of haste.
If you’ve followed PPS recent development, you would have noticed that they’ve brought us the PPS Blog, the PPS RSS, the PPS Wiki and now the PPS Directory along with its new homepage.
It looks like PPS still wanted to stick to its plain looking interface from before but I think they took it a step further by losing all elements of usable interface. Right now, there are no borders that used to act as simplified graphics, there are no tab designs and in on my own words, the homepage doesn’t look like it knows where it is going.
Sigh, it pains me to not be able to appreciate PPS as much anymore and I can understand that what I say here might be personal preferences. However, I do understand usability to a certain extent and if we’re really a blogtal who cares about bloggers, shouldn’t we be catering to the new bloggers too?
If I were a new blogger, what am I suppose to do? where am I suppose to go? how am I suppose to do this? is this what I’m suppose to do? These are just few of the questions on the top of my head that I could visualize a new blogger to PPS asking themselves.
PPS blogtal is regarded as ‘the’ place to learn about blogging and expand their blog-fu from there. So I hope this won’t be taken away from them. There’s much to the art of blogging that everyone wishes to learn so we should be encouraging and not frightening them away.
Therefore, if any of the PPS members of the team happen to read this. Please..oh..please do something about the interface. At least just announce that something is in the works of finding a solution so people would still have the old faith in PPS.
Well, I’m certainly hoping for a revamp later.
And I apologize to anyone who feels that I shouldn’t be that harsh towards the PPS team since they’ve been working hard behind the curtains. So kudos to the team for accomplishing so much in so little time.
I prefer the old layout actually.The new one looks so weird.
And the ping portal URL is also different.Now,you cant see all pings in the main page anymore.
I agree to some of the points conceeded by you, the main thing that bothers me as well is the interface, when I first saw it I was a bit shocked especially even after using PPS for a year I was momentarily lost. I can only imagine what newbies must be going through. It’s quite hard to navigate the site now to ping and the feel is just not there. Maybe it’s like you said that it’s personal preferences by Az, but the blue link look is a notch down from the neater black type from before. But I think the idea for a directory is a good one and offers some nice services for the blog community. Yet maybe it’s just the initial phase and over time with comments and suggestions Az would tweak it to make it better.
As usual, words of wisdom from Danny! Thanks, i really appeciate it the honesty.
(1) Perhaps too much was done too quickly, thus it can bewildering and confusing what i was trying to accomplish. And yes, (2) point taken that a new user might have difficulty understanding what to do and where to go.
Ok, on point (1):
With the new services coming into PPS, it seriously required some restructuring. Yes, the PPS Pings will still be the focus of many, but i wanted to ensure that the other services receive equal representation in PPS. Especially the PPS Directory — to me that’s every bit as valuable as the Pings because it provides structure where the Pings provide chaos. Very yin and yang.
With this in mind, i had two options: do a make very minor changes (which i very carefully considered — i think most PPSers know how conservative i tend to be about these things), or make some very major changes. I actually did make the minor changes in BETA, and honestly, the more i looked i it, the more it just didn’t feel right. I’m a Jakob Nielsen loyalist too, and KISS is almost a mantra for me, but if my objective was equal representation for all PPS services, then minor changes weren’t going to do it. Thus it led to a drawing up of a new blueprint, thus resulting in what you see now.
The thinking behind the new structure was, quite simply, Google. I thought about how they designed they main page and how the services were hidden at the back. I will be the first to stand up and say that i think this tends to suck sometimes from a usability point of view because it makes URLs hard to remember, and it flies against Jakob-sen principles by hiding your crown jewels behind a front door. But it works — all major Google services are navigatable from the main page, and the main page becomes a first stop for all things Google. New users especially will benefit from this for two reasons: (a) they have yet to be conditioned with expectations and (b) their focus not distracted by a mass of content such as the old PPS main page was.
And, plus it saves on bandwidth too (!!), especially if what people are interested in are the other services and would rather bypass the Pings. With the old design, unless you bookmarked the other services, there was no way to bypass the Pings. This (a) was distracting and (b) sucked bandwidth like crazy. A lot of thought supported by log file analysis went into this design — the general usage pattern of PPS was studied (especially after i introduced the new services slowly over the past months), that modifications to the UI cater to these trends.
On point (2) — yup, agreed. A newbie would be lost. Where to start? What to do? What can be done? Too many questions, and the current main page has no answers. A “START HERE” page explaining usage is required, and i’ll get that up right away on the WIKI. Great suggestion.
Superb posting as always, danny. You remain one of the first persons i turn to for unbiased feedback on PPS.
I don’t exactly have great wisdom. I started out with Jakob Nielsen then in RMIT my web lecturer told me to try reading another usability author’s book titled; Dont’ Make Me Think by Steve Krugg. The moment I read the book, I couldn’t put it down at all.
The reason for it is because it really made me think why was I so dumb, usability isn’t that technical, it’s really about fulfilling the needs of a users common sense. :)
Actually when you mentioned Google, it just made my suspicions correct on the interface adaptation. When I was in RMIT, we needed to construct a matrix to solve a need. I was stuck so the lecturer suggested doing on ‘Help’. I struggled to understand what was needed but when I did, it truly opened my eyes bigger.
I categorized help into categories like informative, convenience, quick and barred. Google was an informative type of help but contained a convenience type of help as well. They chose to look at themselves as a primary help website to many Internet surfers while having small links that helped people.
Usability practice is essential but as my lecturer said, “..you need to know where to draw the line.” If usability was totally Jakob style, some would just need to use a single graphic all around the website. :)
I think the PPS homepage can be improved easily. A vision actually came to me on how it can be done. I just need time to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of it. Also, because now the additonal goal is to balance the priorities of all services, I need to see how I can help re-organize.
I’ll try and get a new PPS skeleton up later. :)
Aiz:
I agree with Dany that on first look, the change was really “daunting”! And I share some of his concerns. Maybe I’ll get there. But Aiz, still, your team’s efforts are appreciated.
I tried my first Ping, no problem. Then I sighted the successful Ping, but it appears along with about five (?) others within a short time frame (5 minutes?) and then disappears from the radar screen.
Do we still have the “old” main page display of all the Pings over the period of several hours? I need to be directed…
desire: All that was there before in terms of services is still there. The problem i have come to realize is that its not immediately noticeable, hence the confusion. I’ve added a link to the Pings so that its clearer.
Generally speaking, the restructuring exercise was a success, in my book i.e. nothing broke when i made the switch. Not a total bomb, and certainly lots of room for improvement.
I’ll be eagerly waiting for Danny’s further input, i’m sure he will email me details when he’s ready.
Thanks, danny.
Aiz: I understand what you meant when you said the new design was modelled on Google. But Google’s main service is the search engine and its homepage leads you right to that. PPS’s main service is the ping list and its homepage doesn’t lead you right to that. The ping list is what makes people go back to PPS every day, several times a day. The PPS blog also draws visitors but I would think much less than the ping list does.
Thanks for adding a link to the pings, and for your hard work in revamping the whole PPS site. I’m wondering if we can get back the old look & feel on the ping page… at least having the links back to their old colour :)
I was telling KCYap that it’s weird seeing not many people speaking about the new look PPS has. Seriously, if really that many people visited it, why aren’t they complaining or at least giving any feedback if it was well done. Are Malaysians that scared to be heard? *sniff*
Anyway, due to the concerns I’m hearing here, I think I’d better work double time on the skeleton and try to help everyone out.
I’ll try and make the homepage a place of comfort with attention drawn still to PPS pings without ignoring the priorities of the other services. :)
It’s going to be difficult but someone’s got to do it. And hopefully, everyone will get to comment on it. Because as I’ve learned from Peter Flaschner and one of his clients, the brand or website shouldn’t only please the designer nor the client but also the audience.
Well, wish me luck.
I like the copy-cat-off-google style better. It seems a little more efficient. I prefer to throw people into the deep end… I think if done en mass, it’ll raise the literacy level faster.
Hmm, jerng might be getting at something there because PPS main target audience are bloggers. Being bloggers, it’s safe to assume they’re within the age of 13-30+ years old. I’d give it 35 years max. And if we did a survey, I think a huge accumulation of these people actually know how to use the Internet.
However, no matter how smart the audience, PPS still needs an interface irregardless if a learning curve was there to use it. Every website you go to actually has a learning curve, just that we might not notice it sometimes because we’ve self-taught ourselves already.
When i first took a look.. the first thing that came to my mind was “A google rip gone bad”. Simplicity is a good thing, but so is neatness/tidyness.
If you look at google’s main page, you will notice how neat everything is. This coupled with simplicity makes it a good interface. The PPS page IMO is really messy, it probably has something to do with how the text is displayed or maybe the lack of visual enhancements.
Secondly, the page spans 100% of the screen size. While this isn’t really a problem on smaller screens, the bigger your screen gets you will have to shift your eyes from the left to the right to see all the services. I find my eyes doing that at 1024×768.. imagine a higher res :P
I’m not a follower of PPS, but from what i see on the main page i think a 2 column design might work. List the links to blogs and stuff on the left and the services on the right. Also do not span the page to fill one end to the other. This way all the information is focused to the center of page where the user is normally viewing.
On a second note, why isn’t the page done in xhtml1.1/CSS ? Considering the KISS mantra for the design, it shouldn’t be difficult to achieve.
Say hello to my partner in crime everybody. :)
I work with Hawk on projects that require more programming power and he’s one of the finer people I’d find to discuss with regarding website revamps.