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marksisson
Post subject: Forum Usability Improvements  PostPosted: Oct 20, 2007 - 09:11 PM
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Joined: Oct 18, 2007
Posts: 8

Forum Recommendations:
I've been using your forum for a few days and I have to first compliment you for it's content and general layout. It's well organized, thorough, it they seemed to be well moderated.

That's 99% of what's important so kudos for a great forum site!

But, there's the other 1% that I thought you'd appreciate feedback on so I thought I'd spend the time to jot it down.

1. On the search parameter screem (http://www.myeclipseide.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=search) you have two options to search (1) within title & text and (2) just text. Was there a reason why you didn't include a third option to just search titles? That's the one option I think I'd use the most. With almost every query I run I seem to get a lot of noise in the results so I'd like to try and narrow my result set by just searching the titles first.
2. The css styling on the search forum is ridiculously hard to read. I have to highlight everything with my mouse so that I can see text against a white background. I understand that you want to keep your color scheme going but it really is at the expense of legibility. The white text against a blue background shows up "ok" as long as the font is big enough. But, in a lot of place the font gets too small and that really only works well with black on a white background. To exacerbate the problem there are a lot of places where you use green or black ( or even BLUE!) text against a blue background (for the blue on blue see the bottom credits of your search screen). I would strongly recommend you change the background to white in all the search areas. At the very least, if you're stubornly committed to the blue background then the only fonts your should ever use should be white or maybe yellow. With a white background though you could still preseve your color scheme by having areas that don't contain text have your blue (like you did on your support page at http://www.myeclipseide.com/module-htmlpages-display-pid-8.html).
3. After performing a search and I'm looking at the results, there not a way to return to the search parameter screen. If I click on the "Search" link at the top I'm taken back to the search screen but all my previous params are gone. Same things happens if I use the back button from the search results screen.
4. After I click on an item from the search results, the issue screen provides no option to return to my search results. And if I hit the back button, the browser says the page is out of date, so I have to hit refresh and answer a dialog box that asks if I want to retry posting the page. This is very annoying if I'm trolling through a lot of articles trying to find one that pertains to what I'm looking for.
5. On the search results the left hand column has several different icons, some are even animated. I'm sure after time I might figure out what all those stand for but if you added a legend at the top of any page then it wouldn't be a mystery to me and I would immediately benefit from seeing the icons. This is one of those cases where it's probably cool to the developer who knows what it stands for but the user is initially baffled. It's always a good practice on any page that used icons to represent information that explanations for those icons are readily available the user. Maybe just add a link at the top of the page to popup a legend (and don't forget to do this for ever symbolic icon being used on the page!!)

So, I know these are nitpicky things but I can tell a lot of effort was put into the forum design. Fixing these things could put the icing on the usability. I don't know if anyone ever spends the time to give you feedback so I thought I'd spend the time :>
 
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support-nipun
Post subject: RE: Forum Usability Improvements  PostPosted: Oct 23, 2007 - 01:25 PM
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Joined: Apr 18, 2007
Posts: 8012

Hi Mark,
We appreciate you taking time out and giving us such a detailed feedback about the forums. I'll take a note of your requests and take it to the management.

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Nipun
MyEclipse Support
 
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