Add "Display Density" Setting

[+niraD]

A frequent complaint in the release notes section is that the latest update has reduced the information available on a single page. Sometimes, the information is no longer there, but often the new layout simply adds a lot of whitespace, forcing users to scroll more.

 

The designers want the pretty layouts with lots of whitespace, but there is a compromise used by Gmail and other sites:

Offer users a Display Density setting.

 

That way, the default display density can be the designers' pretty layout with lots of whitespace, and those of us who prefer more information on the page can choose a "Compact" setting instead. There could also be a "Somewhat Compact" setting that would be a compromise between the two.

 

This doesn't have to apply to the main welcome page, but it would be great if it applied to all information pages: search results, the dashboard, bookmark lists, statistics pages, lists of hides/finds/logs, etc.

[+Bl4ckH4wkGER]

I can see where this request is coming from. That said, the chances of something like this being implemented right now or even in the future are very small.

 

There are multiple reasons for that:

• The various pages you mention live in various different ecosystems that have limited overlap. Hence, this would require building out the same thing multiple times vs a single time that is then applied across the site. That significantly increases the cost and significantly reduces the return on investment.
• To get to a place where this could be a once-across-the-site type project, further retirements are going to be necessary. Some next items on the list would be the old dashboard, the old logging flow, the old statistics page, but the list goes on.
• Padding & white space, while annoying for some players, are vital for other players, especially if the goal of the site is to be accessible to all. Accessibility is not a joke. I strongly recommend people educate themselves about these accessibility standards. You likely don't realize how fortunate you are and what challenges a super dense web site offers to many people. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ may be a good starting point. That said, even with multiple canned designs, individual preferences will still differ enough that even any one of the three may not be perfect for the individual.
• We are not Google. It is hard to compare the web development teams and resources of a billions-of-dollars tech giant with a small 80-people (total, web developers are only a small portion of that) bootstrap company.

 

All that said, there is certainly potential to look further into how we might make the new pages more effective for players by overhauling the offered functionality and design - either during the retirement efforts or as follow-up projects afterwards.

 

Thank you for reading and your understanding.

[+niraD]

30 minutes ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

I can see where this request is coming from.

Thank you for your understanding.

 

30 minutes ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

That said, the chances of something like this being implemented right now or even in the future are very small.

 

There are multiple reasons for that:

• The various pages you mention live in various different ecosystems that have limited overlap. Hence, this would require building out the same thing multiple times vs a single time that is then applied across the site. That significantly increases the cost and significantly reduces the return on investment.
• To get to a place where this could be a once-across-the-site type project, further retirements are going to be necessary. Some next items on the list would be the old dashboard, the old logging flow, the old statistics page, but the list goes on.

I know that geocaching.com started as a hobby site, and that Groundspeak has been working for many years to replace some of the more crufty parts of the code. But I have no insight into how much of it is left, or into how well the current code design supports changes.

 

Yes, it's easier to design accessibility and usability features into a system at the beginning, rather than retrofitting them later. But that's true for any significant features. And if you never bring up possible improvements because they might be difficult to implement, then you'll never bring up many possible improvements that would be meaningful.

 

30 minutes ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

• Padding & white space, while annoying for some players, are vital for other players, especially if the goal of the site is to be accessible to all. Accessibility is not a joke. I strongly recommend people educate themselves about these accessibility standards. You likely don't realize how fortunate you are and what challenges a super dense web site offers to many people. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ may be a good starting point. That said, even with multiple canned designs, individual preferences will still differ enough that even any one of the three may not be perfect for the individual.

Web accessibility is never an excuse to force everyone to access information the same way. If anything, web accessibility should inform us that different users will have different needs and different display environments, and that they will access our systems in different ways. Web systems should accommodate those different situations, not fight against them to force everyone to access the information the same way.

 

And no, you'll never be able to offer enough themes so that every user can choose his or her ideal theme. But the trio of expanded, compact, and intermediate seems to work well for a number of systems (although they may go by different names in different systems).

 

30 minutes ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

• We are not Google. It is hard to compare the web development teams and resources of a billions-of-dollars tech giant with a small 80-people (total, web developers are only a small portion of that) bootstrap company.

I used Gmail as an example that many people would be familiar with. You don't have to be a mega-corporation like Google/Alphabet to allow your web systems to accommodate different users in different situations. Small open source projects have done it too.

 

30 minutes ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

All that said, there is certainly potential to look further into how we might make the new pages more effective for players by overhauling the offered functionality and design - either during the retirement efforts or as follow-up projects afterwards.

 

Thank you for reading and your understanding.

Thank you for your consideration.

[+The A-Team]

(Never mind. I think my post was too off-topic)

Edited February 8, 2022 by The A-Team

[+thebruce0]

I'll echo what NiraD said, but I also want to address...

 

15 hours ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

Accessibility is not a joke. I strongly recommend people educate themselves about these accessibility standards. You likely don't realize how fortunate you are and what challenges a super dense web site offers to many people. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ may be a good starting point. That said, even with multiple canned designs, individual preferences will still differ enough that even any one of the three may not be perfect for the individual.

 

I hate to say it, but that too sounded very condescending.

 

An additional thought: Since there are free user scripts - which alter only the front end to provide desirable user interface functionality and tweaks, it's hard to accept the reasoning that it'll cost too much to implement some of the design ideas and suggestions provided here by other professional developers and laypeople.  Of course one could use that as a reason to simply shrug it off and recommend people use those scripts, and of course that's always an option - but we're providing feedback so that people don't get frustrated with the website enough that they feel that they need to use scripts to improve their user experience.

 

The browser scripts may provide additional features that may not be worth the time for HQ to implement officially, but they also provide very minor tweaks that improve some of the most common criticisms of the design mentality on the website. It may be prudent to consider not only the suggestions made, but those that are implemented by these script writers who provide these improvements for free. Without even having to make any backend changes.

 

This is just a plea to consider our suggestions just a little more than relegating them to "too costly to implement" (or coming from insufficiently educated people who don't realize how fortunate they are to have what they have).

 

The suggestion for this thread wasn't to remove all extra whitespace, it was demonstrating that there is usability value in less whitespace for some contexts, and having the option to compress the design to provide a better UX for that context would be a good thing. And since there are easy ways to accomplish this for free, the reasoning for HQ to not implement an adjustment doesn't seem to make sense to us.

 

All that said, I don't think anyone here envies the position of HQ developers. GCHQ definitely isn't Google. And dealing with criticism is never fun (any of us professional developers will certainly agree).  But these are more visual and UX design mentalities than highly functional modules and features that take massive dedication of resources and backend development.

 

(additionally: I have seen many complaints on Facebook friends' feeds about the loss of the old field notes page as well, having seen the disclaimer; so please do remember that there are many who will use things they're forced to use yet don't like, from whom you may never directly hear a criticism because the complaining is in an echo chamber of their own personal communities = P I'm sure there are some who, like me, often take a damage-control style response to try to ease some tensions in defense of GCHQ)

 

Edited February 8, 2022 by thebruce0

[+barefootjeff]

17 hours ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

Padding & white space, while annoying for some players, are vital for other players, especially if the goal of the site is to be accessible to all. Accessibility is not a joke. I strongly recommend people educate themselves about these accessibility standards. You likely don't realize how fortunate you are and what challenges a super dense web site offers to many people. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ may be a good starting point. That said, even with multiple canned designs, individual preferences will still differ enough that even any one of the three may not be perfect for the individual.

 

Sorry, but when I look at the new dashboard, for example, I'm not seeing much accessibility-related whitespace or padding, just lots of form-over-function and wasted space in the design.

 

 

A full half of the visible left panel is telling me who I am, information which is already conveyed in much less space on the right of the top banner. Then there's a whole lot of stuff about promotions, including Reach the Peak and Leaderboard which both link to the same thing, but to the get to the stuff I use most often, namely Logs, Hides and Pocket Queries, I have to scroll right down. Meanwhile on the right is an almost empty column with just the Events calendar in it.

 

The new logging page is more of the same:

 

 

The Geocache details -> Logging line at the top is immediately duplicated inside the box with the name of the cache that links to the same place as "Geocache details" and "Log this Geocache" saying the same thing as "Logging", all stacked vertically to maximise screen usage. The white logging panel is much narrower than the green banner across the top, with the grey space either side used for, well, nothing. Then there's the date field with a line above it saying it's a date (isn't that obvious?) which has the effect of taking up more vertical space than the log type bar and so forcing everything else below it further down. Finally there's that big trackables box which defaults to expanded even when empty. The most important thing on the whole page, namely the actual log, seems to be afforded almost the least amount of screen space.

 

Honestly, there are so many ways the new-style website pages could be optimised for usability without sacrificing any accessibility. Just removing duplications, putting the stuff that's used most often in day-to-day caching higher up and arranging some of the smaller fields horizontally instead of vertically would go a long way. Maybe it won't look quite as pretty, but I'd take functional over pretty any day.

Edited February 8, 2022 by barefootjeff

[+niraD]

6 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

An additional thought: Since there are free user scripts - which alter only the front end to provide desirable user interface functionality and tweaks, it's hard to accept the reasoning that it'll cost too much to implement some of the design ideas and suggestions provided here by other professional developers and laypeople.  Of course one could use that as a reason to simply shrug it off and recommend people use those scripts, and of course that's always an option - but we're providing feedback so that people don't get frustrated with the website enough that they feel that they need to use scripts to improve their user experience.

 

The browser scripts may provide additional features that may not be worth the time for HQ to implement officially, but they also provide very minor tweaks that improve some of the most common criticisms of the design mentality on the website. It may be prudent to consider not only the suggestions made, but those that are implemented by these script writers who provide these improvements for free. Without even having to make any backend changes.

 

Yeah, I've thought the same thing for a while. So now it is its own thread in this forum.

 

 

[+dprovan]

23 hours ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ may be a good starting point.

I'm sympathetic to GS's problem, especially the frustration at being compared to companies with orders of magnitude more resources for UI development, but this is frankly "baffle them with BS." As far as I can see, only one section of this huge document applies to this conversation, so let's actually introduce it here:

Quote

Success Criterion 1.4.12 Text Spacing

In content implemented using markup languages that support the following text style properties, no loss of content or functionality occurs by setting all of the following and by changing no other style property:

• Line height (line spacing) to at least 1.5 times the font size;
• Spacing following paragraphs to at least 2 times the font size;
• Letter spacing (tracking) to at least 0.12 times the font size;
• Word spacing to at least 0.16 times the font size.

Exception: Human languages and scripts that do not make use of one or more of these text style properties in written text can conform using only the properties that exist for that combination of language and script.

 

[+niraD]

Here are a few examples from Release Notes posted in the past year:

Release Notes (Website: Enhanced Search Results)
Release Notes (Website: Upcoming retirement of the old drafts pages) - February 1, 2022
Release Notes (Website: Upcoming retirement of old profile page)
Release Notes (Website: Links now point to new search results) - April 20, 2021
Release Notes (Website: Log upvotes) - March 15, 2021
 

There are more examples going back further. Searching for them is left as an exercise for the reader.