9rules 2.0: What Can Be Done Better?
UPDATE: Mike puts me to shame with his more thorough entry. Scope it.
You may or may not have noticed that we launched with a new site on Tuesday. You can read a little bit about it over at the 9rules blog. I know one of the bigger issues that will come up is the color selection. Mike will be writing an entry at Business Logs shortly to discuss his design choices, but I wanted to ask the Whitespace readers what you see with the site that could be done better? It’s definitely not in its finished form, but from a functionality perspective we think it is better than the previous version and so we have launched it.
Hope everyone enjoys their weekend.
Related reading:
It looks like sh* and doesn’t function correctly in IE. I type that NOT to be hypercritical, but rather because v1 looked fine in IE.
Otherwise I think the colors are…interesting and you’ve got some cool, innovative features — now if you can get them to work cross-platform.
By Mark on November 4, 2005 2:08 pm
I like the new features and improved IA that’s been added. As for the design itself, I like the previous design much more then the new one. The new design almost seems kiddy, but that may be because of the color combination. Also I’m sure my point of view is scewed since I like the previous design.
Excellent work as always, even though I’m not totally sold on it.
By Carlos Porto on November 4, 2005 2:21 pm
I think the colors are great and it seems to work fine on IE for me. The site does seems to load the page slowly, even through a broadband connection.
By Jeff Adams on November 4, 2005 2:22 pm
Mark I’m not sure if I understood what you said. Does it not function correctly in IE6, or not look right, or both? We’re well aware that there are some design kinks in IE6 and we have to fix that, but if some things aren’t functioning cross-browser please let us know what they are.
Thanks for the almost constructive criticism though, “it looks like shit” helps me tremendously.
Hugs and kisses :)
By Mike Rundle on November 4, 2005 2:25 pm
Hey Jeff-
One of the reasons it might be loading a bit slow is because with our new infrastructure, the more people access the page, the more our RSS caches are refreshed, and the quicker it should load. Not many people have accessed the new version yet, so that might be it. Hopefully haha.
By Mike Rundle on November 4, 2005 2:26 pm
If I might chime in for a moment.
Our site “should” function in IE 5+. So if you are using IE 4, not only do I feel sorry for you, I won’t support you. :) That was harsh, yes, but so was the sh* comment.
The slowness is hit or miss. We have 1 member right now that decided to rip away our feed and not let us know. They are being strung up, and hopefully we’ll have that issue addressed soon.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 4, 2005 2:36 pm
Oh, and as for the colors. I LOVE CANDY.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 4, 2005 2:39 pm
Mark has a case of the Mondays…and that sucks on a Friday.
By Scrivs on November 4, 2005 2:40 pm
I checked it out last night and was initially pleased by the freshness. I was unsure about how the blue fit in but appreciated the move toward a lighter. more open feeling. While I liked the old design, in comparison it now seems too dark.
I did notice a lag in the whole page loading. I only checked it on FF Mac and Win. It took me a little time tracking down one of the member sites through the keyword drop-down, but that is only because I was trying to see where it was located.
Yes, I always appreciate comments like the one you pointed out, Mike. They are so helpful and you can tell the person put a lot of thought into writing it.
Save some hugs and kisses for me.
By Britt on November 4, 2005 2:40 pm
Britt: Just today we were able to release a “site name search”. Makes it much easier to find specific sites by their name.
Thanks for the feedback.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 4, 2005 2:43 pm
Ok, Mike / Colin you’re right. My comments did leave you a bit short there. Here’s more detail -
For me and my IE6, functionality wise the biggest issue is the English / Spanish dropdown doesn’t work at all - meaning I don’t get a switch over when I choose spanish.
Design wise -
Under the random tab, there is what appears to be a missing spacer gif (I know it’s not a space gif, but that’s how it appears) under the by line for each site
There is a huge gap (maybe 3″?) between the Campaign Monitor ad and the top of the orange section
The subscribe and add fave chicklets in the orange section repeat vertically
On the right hand border of the orange section, there is a about a 4 pixel wide orange vertical bar on the outside of the curved border
This orange bar is also making the footer appear misaligned.
By Mark on November 4, 2005 2:47 pm
Thanks Mark, as I said previously, we know all about the IE6 design issues (everything you mentioned, and more!!!) so we’re working on them.
Thanks though.
By Mike Rundle on November 4, 2005 2:52 pm
…and just for the record guys, since historically my comments are misconstrued here, I’m just calling it as I see it. I approach things like this from a business perspective. If you were to turn this in to me as a business project and asked what I think so far, I would’ve answered just like I did - with the expectation that you, as the designer, were aware of the faults and should’ve had them fixed before you showed them to me.
I’m not going to pull any punches in my comments, especially since ya’ll tend not to pull any in your posts.
Has nothing to do with a Friday case of the Mondays.
By Mark on November 4, 2005 3:18 pm
Yeah the original title of the Flock entry was…
These guys stand no fucking chance in hell of making a motherfucking dime in this bitchass world. Silly bitches.
So I feel ya Mark.
By Scrivs on November 4, 2005 3:48 pm
I have the best business partners.
By Matthew Oliphant on November 4, 2005 3:59 pm
Funny, that’s how I was about to phrase my comment as well, until I decided to tone it down a bit.
I hope you hit your chest with your fist a couple of times while saying you feel me. That’s the only way to do that.
By Mark on November 4, 2005 4:00 pm
Was AJAX really needed at the “9rules Network Members” (orange section, at the bottom)? Why don’t just load them all from the beggining and hide/show them with old and plain JS?
By Federico on November 4, 2005 4:03 pm
Well I would’ve, but I use both hands for typing so it was more like a slow head nod type of thing.
By Scrivs on November 4, 2005 4:03 pm
Federico: We really wanted to build a better infrastructure for what we will be doing forward. Technically I could preload almost 40 DIVs with the sites found within, but our solution allows us to build other things onto it that are much more dynamic. Such as our site name search and our upcoming Network wide content search, etc.
Really, what you see currently is only the foundation of what will be a much more complete solution.
Oh, and I guess I should say: Ajax is the coolness? Something like that.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 4, 2005 4:08 pm
It is just to wide. Annoyingly so. I browse with an 800px wide browser (I only have a 12 inch iBook) and I cant see all the design at once.
The orange box at the bottom needs to scale. I know it is on the todo list and if you click once of the tags there only seem to be 10 in any category. However, try searching for ‘e’ and it messes up.
Other than that it looks sweet. The colours are fresh and give it a nice vibe.
By Eddie Sowden on November 4, 2005 4:22 pm
Is it National Teenage Angst Day? I guess people get fierce when it’s so close to the end of the work week.
My thoughts: I like the color scheme. It’s cheerful, it’s bright — I like that. There is a lot going on so I think the multiple colors are necessary. I would note, and I believe Mike made a comment addressing this, that the randomize function does seem slow. Additionally, I’ll add that I have felt the need more than once this week to use the Ctrl/+ key combo.
By Nicole on November 4, 2005 4:52 pm
Hi,
Opera user and long time reader here.
On my browser (O8.50), there is no way to refresh “Recent” tab - while “Random” is loading every time, recent posts stays the same since the begining.
Nevertheless I like the use of “cool” Ajax, and bright theme is nice, but personally I hate excess of rounded corners.
pi
By PragmaInline on November 4, 2005 5:02 pm
Eddie Sowden: I’m on a 12-inch ibook too, full time. Click the green button and Safari will adjust to the correct size. Which I think you will find will only be very slightly larger than whatever you are set to now, and it will actually make viewing other sites much more enjoyable - especially 3 columned ones.
I licked the 1 letter searching problem. Searching for ‘e’ is pretty useless though, so I don’t expect too many others to do it - but if you search for 1 letter it should just result in those that end with that letter or have that single letter singled out. As I said, doesn’t matter too many anyway since most searches will be fairly close to the names since that is the entire purpose of that search (for people who already know the name of the site they are looking for)
Nicole: We’ve fixed our 1 member feed that had made our site a bit slow. Everything else should be quick as a snap now, unless our server is giving us issues due to the load we’re seeing right now with a Network wide announcement of our launch.
Thanks for all the great feedback thus far.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 4, 2005 5:04 pm
PragmaInline: Recent doesn’t currently refresh. We’re still working out this methodology a bit more. But we’re close. That being said, that tab will never refresh on demand.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 4, 2005 5:31 pm
I love the color scheme. It is very “anti-Web 2.0″ in a good way. Many color schemes have become the default for many of the Web 2.0 blogs and websites. It’s refreshing to have something truly different. I enjoy the new look.
By David Babylon on November 4, 2005 6:40 pm
Why the search for site names function? Seems to me it would be preferable to have visitors find what’s available, and motivating them to go exploring, by having them click on a category or keyword, rather then have them discover potentially what’s not available via a specific site name search and leave.
Know what I mean?
By Mark on November 4, 2005 6:56 pm
Mark, for the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 we have three sets of individuals visiting the site.
Set 1: People that find 9rules via a link on one of our members Weblogs or various other locations. This person generally has no idea why he is there, and will be looking at the about sections and our member sites to “poke” around.
Set 2: People that are interesting in subscribing to a specific topic. Lets take Web Design, since that is our most popular “tag” right now. So they can sort our sites by a specific tag, Web design, and subscribe and or mark as favorite all of the sites within that category.
Set 3: Are, or have been, fans of 9rules for awhile already and want to subscribe to, or set as favorite, their sites of choice. So, they are looking to find Whitespace and instead of routing around through the various keywords on our site “hunting” for Whitespace - or clicking the Random tab till Paul’s site comes up - they can search for it.
We built the site name search for the people that fall into Set 3.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 4, 2005 7:13 pm
Ok. But if I’m a long term Whitespace user - and I am - I really shouldn’t need to route through the keywords, should I? I mean, highlight “design” and bing bang biff, I should see Whitespace listed under that category — right?
Although, now that I play around a bit, I’m seeing your keyword list is randomized as well. That’s not real intuitive. If it’s got to be that way, it might help to put some type of instructional text in that area, or re-word the text you got up there already to more clearly state that not only are a few of the categories being randomly displayed, but only a few of the sites in an entire keyword search are being randomly displayed, as well.
By Mark on November 4, 2005 7:25 pm
Overall, good job. A few IA comments:
At the top, “Language” would be a better label than “Choose”.
The two sets of tabs look the same, but behave differently. When I clicked “About” I expected the same behavior — content loading inline via AJAX — as I experienced when I clicked “Recent”. You might want to consider modifying “Home-Blog-About” so they don’t look like tabs.
My Favorites: very nice feature!
The following comments are all about the Network Members section. I really like the look of this section, but the implementation just ain’t right…
Displaying ten random keywords is a good idea and encourages exploration.
However, when I select a keyword I’m rewarded with a randomly selected list of sites displayed in a random order, with no indication as to which ones I have already visited. This is very, very bad. I might want to check out every site in the network for which the “CSS” keyword applies, but I certainly can’t figure out how I would go about doing that.
When I select the “CSS” keyword I should see all sites for which that keyword applies, and they should be in some sort of logical order. Either alphabetical order or in order of the most recent update would be good choices. Also, an option to display all sites in the network would be nice.
The search functionality is broken. Search for “return of design” (one result), then just “return of” (zero results), then just “return” (one result, but a different one) to see what I mean.
How could search be better? It would be really cool if when I searched for a word I was presented with a list of sites in the network for which any of the following apply:
1. The word is part of the site’s name.
2. The word is one of the keywords that applies to the site.
3. The word appears in the site’s most recent RSS feed.
Advantages of this method:
1. Usefulness: search by content / topic in addition to name.
2. Timeliness: RSS feeds generally contain only relatively recent posts.
3. Cost / Benefit: relatively easy implementation, big help to users.
I hope you find at least some of this helpful.
By Scott on November 4, 2005 7:27 pm
The search function, from a branding point-of-view:
9rules is all about finding quality content. Even if I’m familiar with all of the sites in the network, I should be able to do a search for “web 2.0″ (which I know most of your network sites have done at one time or another) I should get a listing of all the posts with that term, not just a listing of the sites.
By Mark on November 4, 2005 7:35 pm
I like the colors and I like them together but they seem very very bright… possibly because the right side is so white. It could be that I just need to get used to it but the first glance was beautifully painful.. sort of like looking into the sun :D
I don’t like the favicon/add button to the left of the random articles. In 1.0 that part of the site stood out and it seemed to showcase the sites in the network and their entries more. Even knowing what that section is it’s not as magnetic. Between the large clickable buttony thing on the left and the cool clickable arrow-y things on the right there’s no pull to the actual headline and site buried in between. Even with such compelling headlines as “The Girlspoke DrunkCastâ„¢, Take Three” which seems tragically unfortunate. The additional functionality is nice but for me one of the joys of the 9rules page was the random browsing of what the members are writing. It feels like it’s lost that or at least made it much less important which may have been the goal.
I miss the 9rules blog preview on the home page. (I know it hasn’t been there for at a few versions but still) The featured article is cool but it would be nice to have a reflection of other updates to the blog on the home page again. Especially when the “read more” is not read more of the featured article but read more of what our blog says about the featured article so it’s a bit disconcerting.
The bold text for the first sentences of each section seems pixelated and hard to read
and last but not least I adore the long awaited categories and the beauty of the bottom section.
By sunshine on November 4, 2005 10:30 pm
I really like this design. Then, come to think of it, I really liked the design right before it. I am baby shit green with envy.
By patrick Jackson on November 5, 2005 12:19 am
The blog list overflows its box when I hit the “random” tab in Safari, but you probably are already working on that.
It’s a minor point, but your error messages need to be localized. On the Spanish page, I see “Feed or site is currently unavailable.” when a blog is unavailable.
By Paul D on November 5, 2005 4:56 am
Well, well, well, the redesign is an step backwards as alistapart! Nothing better than the previous version!
By GaBuBu on November 5, 2005 6:16 am
Mark: Network wide search, as you probably know, isn’t as easy as we wish it could be. But we’re working on it. Its on the short list for sure.
Paul D: Our Spanish brothers are working on localization across the board. We know we missed a few things, and they have a list.
Everyone else: All good catches, and we’re working on them. I’ll let Mike answer the to design aspects but I think his B-logs article wraps all that up nicely.
By Colin D. Devroe on November 5, 2005 1:45 pm
Colin - Yeh, I know. My comment #30 was more about the hell a branding promise can put on an organization. Comment #28 also referenced by Scott in #29 is by far the more important issue concerning your current state of search.
By Mark on November 5, 2005 3:06 pm
I, for one, love the colors. They make my eyes bleed… with happiness!
By Michael McCorry on November 7, 2005 1:17 am
Functionaly I think the site works very well. The addition of specific section for different topics is a very handy feature.
Visually I think the site has an over designed look. Maybe this is a personal thing, but it look quote busy, especially with all the differnet colour schemes for each section - seems to clash a bit.
That said it does not detract from the quality content of the site, so it means I’ll keep coming back. :)
By Rob Mason on November 7, 2005 9:52 am
I really like the way you’ve got the members organized, and how I can choose to see random headlines. I’m not so sure how I feel about the white with all those colors, but hey to each his own.
By Beth on November 7, 2005 11:00 am
I would change the sky blue background for the page. Change it to black, get it back to the initial identity, black and oranges colors.
:)
By mini-d on November 8, 2005 3:11 am
I think it is much better - having pretty much avoided the 9rules site since an early visit which put me off - you now have clearer focus and easier access to syndicated content/sites.
You’re still missing a few things I’d like to see that would make it easier/quicker to find new blogs to read… the current pick a topic where you’re presented with a list of sites is lame… google does that!
e.g. Pick a topic and list the sites with their ‘best of posts’ immediately underneath as a linked title and extract, now that’s usability!
By Steve Williams on November 9, 2005 8:48 pm
I prefered the old design. The upper half of new one looks like a refugee from Microsoft(tm)’s default Fischer Price(tm) interface for Windows XP. It doesn’t display properly in IE here either.
By WD Milner on November 10, 2005 5:22 pm
I really do love the new design and it’s nifty features but the entire 9rules site is missing one major component. Nude girls. If Rupert Murdoch has taught us anything is that you need a balanced mix of great content, great design and a Page 3 cover girl. How on earth are you people going to make it in the media biz without getting these fundamentals sorted?
By Jess on November 12, 2005 9:21 pm
The pages of 9rules are not consistent. They should all have the same style.
By Christian Montoya on November 18, 2005 2:28 am
I wanted you to know that i really loved the design of your new site sorry to get off personals subject but had to tell you the site looks nice.
By personals on February 4, 2006 3:33 am