Obsidian Portal ... Ruined!

[Crowley72]

Hey guys,

I have just been to the "new" Obsidian Portal today, after all of the new updates made and paid for through donations via Kickstarter. I don't like the look and feel of it at all. At best I say it looks horrible, and worst I feel it's totally unintuitive (the color scheme does not help).

I cancelled my subscription to them.

Does anyone else use OP? Sound off, what do you think of it now?

C

[primarch]

Hey guys,

I have just been to the "new" Obsidian Portal today, after all of the new updates made and paid for through donations via Kickstarter. I don't like the look and feel of it at all. At best I say it looks horrible, and worst I feel it's totally unintuitive (the color scheme does not help).

I cancelled my subscription to them.

Does anyone else use OP? Sound off, what do you think of it now?

C

Hi!

I've used it for 4 years and never liked the old interface. I like the new one in every single way. Very intuitive, simple to use and the most used features are readily available.

Once natural editing appears it will be the bees knees.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Primarch

[Mgrancey]

Well to be fair, they have stated they need to fix the CSS connections and such.
There is also the Dashboard which looks much different from the more normal views.
I think a little adjustment is needed but overall it works and might be easier to use (navigate, manage, and add entries)
I'm planning to wait and test it out before weighing one way or another.

[dr_venture]

Well I'm glad someone likes it - I hate what's there out of the gate, but am hopeful that they'll make some basic changes to make it more usable. Things like using colored rectangles for buttons and editable and non-editable text fields drives me nuts - it's not obvious what many things do unless you kinda figure each thing out... as opposed to the basic HTML form controls which are not flashy, but are instantly recognizable as buttons or fields, etc. Then some brilliant genius decided to make the page code editing be white text on a light grey field (fixable by adding a CSS rule, and hopefully it will be fixed site-wide)... and the wiki links are now the same color whether or not the target page exists, so you have no way of knowing whether a page needs to be created or not. Finally, the screen space is used *horribly* - I have almost the entire top half of the scree taken up by a giant version of my campaign's banner pic (which they have enlarged) and their dragon logo. Resizing to a bigger or smaller monitor doesn't help, as the pages resize very thoroughly... which is probably *great* on a smaller screen like smart phones or an iPad or something, but on a by 2-page monitor like I have, the larger screen is totally wasted, as I wind up with giant geriatric versions of all the graphics that soak up tons of space simply because it can. With a 2-page monitor I still have to scroll to see anything that isn't in about the first 10 lines of text.

Basically, it's riddled with a *ton* of just stupid errors - just really poor design choices. The problems I just listed make all of the new features pointless as it stands: editing pages is a pain, I can't tell what pages need to be created by looking at the links, and I have to scroll to my content way more than before. Hopefully many of these issues will be addressed (you'd *think,* right?) but since the OP folks haven't made any kind of statement and are leaving the users to sort it out with a crew of semi-informed "power users" I don't really know what they think of their roll out.

All of that said, *if* they fix some of these painfully lame shortcomings, I suspect that there are some really nifty features underneath it all... at this point they've just whiffed the rollout pretty badly. I'm hopeful that is the extent of it. But if things *don't* get fixed, I'll be moving my campaigns somewhere else... pretty aggravating after supporting their Kickstarter.

[Magnatude]

I just went Ascended last month.
I spent hours upon hours to get my CSS just right on my campaign site, I am SO FURIOUS!
I just emailed them, I want my money back.

Exactly, what the hell am I paying for now.

[RosenMcStern]

Apparently, they have just chosen the same approach to UI adopted by Windows 8 (and Roll20). They have adopted a look and feel that works really, really well on small portable devices and touch-enabled screens.

And if you are not operating from such a device... well, they do not give a damn. Yo ain't "trendy" if you are not working from your smartphone or iPad. That operations like editing a wiki are much faster and easier using a real keybord on a PC is of no interest to modern UI designers. Get modern, folks :)

[Valarian]

That operations like editing a wiki are much faster and easier using a real keybord on a PC is of no interest to modern UI designers. Get modern, folks :)
I know it is meant light-heartedly, but a good UI designer considers the approaches to the interface and the efficiencies of each. They provide a different, tailored, UI experience of the same data for different approaches (touchscreen/keyboard/mouse/screen reader/visual impairment) to make each approach efficient in attaining the goals of the screen.

[RosenMcStern]

I know it is meant light-heartedly, but a good UI designer considers the approaches to the interface and the efficiencies of each. They provide a different, tailored, UI experience of the same data for different approaches (touchscreen/keyboard/mouse/screen reader/visual impairment) to make each approach efficient in attaining the goals of the screen.

Oh no, it was not meant light-heartedly. As you hinted at, a good UI designer should consider the peculiarity of all user/device combinations he can expect; and also know which operations can reasonably be done on a touchscreen and which require a mouse or even a graphic tablet to work well. While Autocad can absolutely function on a good tablet, there is no way you can make the fine adjustments it requires with your fingers. A good UI designer should also differentiate among the players who wish to read the latest news about their game (probably on their iPhone while they commute, with little need of typing anything but login/password) and the GM who must input and format a godzillion lines of text about his game - a job he is hardly gonna do while commuting. A good UI designer makes TWO interfaces in this case, instead of having people swear like mad because they get the WRONG ui for what they want to do with the application.

You know, Microsoft made the exact same mistake with Windows 8: in order to standardize the "user experience" (a word coined by marketing guys, not by people who actually deliver stuff to customers) they forced everyone to use the tablet-like interface on their laptops, providing unnecessarily big icons on the main screen and forcing users to scroll the main view all the time, without a prior check for the presence of a damn touchscreen. After receiving an adequate amount of "***K you morons gimme back the desktop" messages, they realized how badly they had botched it and brought back the ability to use the laptop-friendly interface as the default. From the superficial look I had, OP is stuck with a tablet-friendly approach with little or no hope of optimizing the thing for PC use.

Apparently, people are unable to learn from MS mistakes.

[Acroyear]

Win8.1 resolved many of those issues and still faster that the Start Menu anyday.

[RosenMcStern]

Yep, that was exactly my point. The fact that they had to make a Win 8.1 to solve those problems is evidence that the problems existed in the first place :)

[Acroyear]

Obviously for some people. Change is hard for them I guess.. I had no issues.

[Magnatude]

My pain is, I've put hours upon hours into getting my CSS just right, they assume that my time is "free" and want me to fix what they have broken.
I'm just going to go back to my own paid site once again.
I have no problem paying for a site like I've always had, but at least with my own, I'll have the control over it so I don't have to worry about someone else breaking the code.