There's an awful lot of repetition in the lists that it opens up, with the same forums showing (I know it will be different for everyone) in favorites/recently updtaed/popular etc.
More useful for mobile users, I would suggest, is something that simply mirrors the existing category/sub-forum structure and lets us go to any forum rather than just the ones that get to populate these lists.
I'll go ahead and remove the repetition right now, and the result should be a long list prioritized by where you're likely going to want to go. I think that would be the biggest benefit to both mobile as well as desktop visitors.
I think this is great! Nice Job Dani, as usual. It would be cool if this was an app instead of accessing it with my phone's browser. Other than that, ++1
OK, repetition removed from forums. Give it a go and see if it's useful. It might not be the final solution for mobile, but either way, the current page is more useful (theoretically?) for any use it does get, desktop or otherwise.
I'm not a mobile developer. However, we do have an API and anyone is encouraged to create a native app.
That's much cleaner and less fussy on mobile now, and consequently more useful. Thanks Dani :)
IMHO it's better than any other type of forum menu because, on a small mobile device, a top down view of what I'm most likely most interested in is appealing.
Navigating iamthwee's mobile friendly hierarchy-based menu system would be more cumbersome than this me thinks considering how many forums/subforums/sub-subforums we have.
It's nice, but the top level forums are scattered throughout that list.
Top level forums can have articles too. The top level forums aren't taking their children into consideration when populating the list. So if it's telling you something in software Dev was just updated, it's talking about an article in there and not a child.
I know. My point is that I only browse the top-level forums on my phone, and in the current list I have to search where they are. Can you add them somewhere, I don't care about all the others.
I'll have to think about how to go about this, if at all. I have an idea that might work, but we'll see.
Playing around with some stuff. Can I get a show of hands for how many people still need top level forum links, finding the current forums page insufficient?
Currently, to get to a too level category, you need to click on Forums in the bottom toolbar, go into a forum, and then click the breadcrumb link to go up a level. Alternatively you can get there from the breadcrumb of any forum thread.
Alternatively, it should be noted that the Articles link in the footer gives you your list of recommended articles, which IMHO is a cleaner more streamlined way of finding what might interest you, on a mobile device.
Also I'm typing this on my iPhone. :)
For my needs, and I can only speak for myself, the current forums link system is working well enough right now.
Being one out of a 1M+ members, i can only tell you how i was accessing your site.... i would say that i used my mobile device about half the time. I didnt mind accessing your site in "desktop" mode. I actually liked it that way. For me, i dont care for sites that limit my view in their mobile version.
I have found it difficult to use the site using my mobile device now because one of the things i like to do while standing in line, on break, is to log on with my mobile and read over new and updated articles in 3 or 4 top level forum categories. From my mobile, i cant tell anymore what is new, what I have posted in, what's been updated so in the past two or three days, i havent been using my mobile device any longer.
I can deal with the mobile look of the site, but for me, i like to quikcly click on the top forum categories and find those types of articles i described above.
I assume that i'm in the minority based on what i've read on this thread, but just wanted to let you know since you asked.
An another note, the only thing i wanted to do from my mobile which i wasnt able to before was to vote.
I'm in the process of creating a quasi-desktop version for mobile that can be manually enabled. This should hopefully suit the needs of both pritaeas and JorgeM. It will have a full desktop design in terms of the content that was removed simply because it couldn't fit, but it will be missing functionality that is broken on mobile or simply not designed for on-the-go devices, such as the fancy editor, social media share buttons, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm in the early stages of figuring out how this might work. Upon being coded, it might not pan out, but don't shoot me for at least trying.
:)
awesome. I'm good with what ever changes you come up with now and later. I would say focus your efforts on the things that will address major pain points for the majority of your users/interaction with the site.
you cant make everyone happy.
Will do. Depending upon how today pans out, I should have a better idea of something by the end of the day.
OK, there's now a toggle link at the bottom of the page when you're in mobile mode that lets you toggle between mobile and quasi-desktop mode.
Just posting this through my phone and it seems to be working quite alright. I find the mobile interface nice and clean but it can be a bit difficult to navigate.
Using chrome on Android phone.
Thank you for the feedback :) Because of the small space to work with, I had to come up with a different navigation scheme for mobile because the full forum listing would be just too clunky. The Forums tab in the footer toolbar should do the trick. Be sure to hold your phone vertically this time, Mike.
Plus there's now a way to toggle to pseudo-desktop mode.
I'm assuming you've taken away the responsiveness -when you resize the browser and you're just using media queries to target devices. Any reason why?
Because some of the buttons / functionality are missing on smaller screens. I am someone who lives with two massive 30" monitors, including one of those new 4K monitors, and I am always multitasking, with at least a handful of browser windows open simultaneously. All of my browser windows are arbitrary sizes, scattered across the desktop, as I work.
I think it creates a confusing and inconsistant user experience for desktop users when some functionality suddenly goes missing and they don't understand why, only for it to be that their browser window is just a few pixels too small.
That has happened to me many, many times in the past, including on the old Facebook design (thank goodness they finally smartned up and removed most of the responsiveness from their desktop CSS), and it created a very frustrating experience for me.
Our desktop view accommodates as low as 1024x768 resolution, which I think is appropriate.
I'm assuming you've taken away the responsiveness -when you resize the browser
Actually I haven't taken away anything. It's always worked like this. We are still responsive with some things that are appropriate for a desktop, such as fitting either 5 or 10 related links in the sidebar depending upon the height of your screen resolution, and that type of thing.
Plus there's now a way to toggle to pseudo-desktop mode.
I like it, although somehow the page is not being displayed full width, although my phone is 1920px wide (landscape mode). I have to scroll horizontally. Not sure why that is (yet).
1920 pixels wide on a mobile HD display is not the same as 1920 CSS pixels. It just means that it's HD so they are able to cram more physical pixels into the width of a single CSS pixel.
But, just maybe that lack of growth and the lack of usability on mobile devices in the past are linked.
Percentage of users accessing DaniWeb from mobile and tablet devices decreased this week compared to last week.
I think that using just a week's worth of data may be a bit soon to make correlations / comparisions. Perhaps the percentage won't change too much to begin with, but the ease at which those users already using mobs/tabs can communicate / browse will certainly improve, possibly leading to more active engagement, even if it's to turn to a PC to type up some code having browsed a forum. I always found browsing DW via full-ish site on my mobile extremely frustrating, but now I can look something up in half the time, if not less.
I think that using just a week's worth of data may be a bit soon to make correlations / comparisions.
No, because we get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day across many mediums and demographics, it's proven itself in the past that it is definitely a large enough sample size.
I always found browsing DW via full-ish site on my mobile extremely frustrating, but now I can look something up in half the time, if not less.
Funny how you love the mobile version and JorgeM loves the full version from his phone. See what a hard job I have trying to please everyone? :)
No, because we get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day across many mediums and demographics, it's proven itself in the past that it is definitely a large enough sample size.
So you're saying that people have stopped using mobs/tabs because of the mob/tab redesign? Even though a large proportion of them have never been to DW before? Have users who show 'healthy' historical mob/tab usage stopped using them too? Sorry Dani, I'm not disputing your statement, just curious.
So you're saying that people have stopped using mobs/tabs because of the mob/tab redesign?
No, I'm saying that we've always gotten no more than about 5% mobile usage, even though most other sites in our industry are at least 25% mobile and climbing over the years.
We only went down a few tenths of a percentage last week versus this week, which means that it's still fluctuating as normal for us, but there was no dramatic increase since launching a mobile design.
As previously mentioned, even just a day or so of traffic is a large enough sample size for us to make sweeping statements with regards to usability. So, it's not as if a quarter of a million people visited DaniWeb from a mobile device last week, and suddenly left instantaneously after just one pageview because the site was so horrendous to navigate, and now suddenly they're browsing an average of three pages per visit because the usability is so vastly improved.
Essentially I'm not really seeing any such differences in terms of pages per session, duration of session, etc. from before versus now.
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