New Website Design

Checked out the site for the first time on my phone last night. Now, admittedly, I don't have the greatest phone (a couple year old HTC something) but damn, is the site tough to use on it. Checking a busy thread (like an active thread in the NW forum), there's no way to easily see what the latest post is. You've gotta pull up the thread, go to the last page, then scroll through. Plus, those damn up down arrows are proportionately huge on my screen, and actually cover up some text, miking very hard to read certain posts. Would love to be able to disarm that. I mostly look at forums, and having them so far down, after all the ads and articles, makes it kind of a pain to get to. I could easily see my use of the site from my phone dropping dramatically going forward.

 

Sad the mobile app is gone.

 

The app search bar did utilize an instant results list that populated fine-tuned results the further you were in completing your search term. I then could select the beer and be at its page in one click. Now, I have to hit enter on my search, get results, and then click on the beer's link. It's a little thing, but big in terms of ease-of-use and quality of life.

Not trying to be overly critical, as I love BA far beyond any other beer site. I WANT to stay here. However, since I try to limit my drinking, I always research new beers before I buy to make sure I'm consuming well thought of brews. Ability to look up a beer in store is imperative for me and many others I'm sure. This search change kills it for me :-/. Hoping to see it change and become easier and quicker to navigate.

I appreciate all you do to make the site the premier destination of beer aficionados and also taking feedback to help improve it. Never resting on your laurels is what I think about when it comes to you all on the backend of this massive site. I don't want it to come across like I'm just bitching. I love Beer Advocate.

 

I don't get this decision at all. Can you imagine if Nintendo tried releasing pokemon go via website and had no app? I hate to say it but this is 2016 most everything in the mobile world is Application based.

I don't mean to complain but I use the app all the time to research Beers when I am out.

 

As an aspiring Front End web developer I appreciate the the move from a pixel perfect design to a responsive one. Im sure you had to change alot of those px's to em's and %'s in your CSS files to achieve this and I am sure it wasn't easy, But Im glad you did. Although it seems that your guys approached the responsive design from a "Mobile First" perspective don't forget about your desktop/laptop users! Great Job on the site.
Cheers!

PS: @Todd What editor do you use for your HTML, CSS, JS and PHP files?

 

I agree completely. When apps surged with the smartphone boom, I always thought why do I need an app for that website when I can just go to the website? Well, I was not prophetic and it turns out dedicated apps are far more functional, user-friendly, and intuitive. Hoping the roadmap is very much focused on a return to an app that is very robust, but with a sleek interface.

Further adding to my struggles looking up beers on the fly, I saved beer advocate as an "app" on my homepage, but it logs me out frequently... like before I leave the beer store :-/. Chrome browser stays logged in, but Safari bookmarks do not.

Love,
Frustrated in Flyover Country

 

I use photobucket app on my iPhone and it is super easy to upload and post images.

 

The only two things I note on the new site that are "bad" vs the many things I like about it (and it is a favorable upgrade overall in my opinion):

1. The jumping of the page to the "First Unread" or any other direct link to a post might work "too well." On my phone, it always used to jump around a bit as photos loaded and resized. I got so used to scrolling while this happened (and there still might be small jumps). Now the page seems to keep pushing me back to the linked to post (which is great if I stay patient, but generally I am not), which I may be far from in my manual scrolling.
   
2. The search seems to be more picky about my input. Was the upgrade entirely UI-based? If so, it would have to be my imagination, but the search engine used to better understand "what I meant" when I mistyped on my mobile phone (or my phone erroneously corrects me). Also, I subconsciously noted the type-ahead on the search was missing as @DRRxH metioned, and maybe it was seeing my mistakes were yielding nothing that made me better in the past.

So one "problem" that has always been there in some form that just seems a bit worse, and one that may be all in my head. Not too bad, all things considered.

 

Two changes which make using the site less efficient:

1. When I move the cursor over FORUMS or other links in the menu bar below beer advocate the menu drops down, however, if I move the cursor away the menu doesn't close back up. This inteferes with viewing the screen display. If I move the cursor without activating an item from the sub menu then the box should just disappear.


2. When looking at a beer style page the long box on the right has too much white space between the Avatar and the general information about food pairings, temperatures, Cellaring, etc. are both not visible, and require that I scroll to the bottom of the list and it moves into view. It should be some of it should be visible immediately below the avatar and the box should move upwards during scrolling rather than requiring me to scroll most of the way down the page to begin seeing the information. Several other types of pages behave the same way. Extended un needed scrolling reduces usability.

 

Actually - I was starting to notice this. I think it makes more sense on a phone (where you can't "roll over"), but it is mildly annoying on the laptop - especially on the main page where everywhere seems to be a link. Would seem to think this could be a fix they could work in fairly easily, maybe.

 

While it's challenging, the goal should be to have the design work equally well on multiple platforms since the diversity is so great, e.g., phones, pads and laptops and sometimes involves simultaneous use of more than one platform.

There's even a group that gives an award for good designs that work that way:

https://uxmag.com/articles/design-for-experience-cross-platform-experience

 

I may or may not have had an idea about how easy this one fix could be . But agreed, well done designs will work well on multiple, hopefully without too much extra maintenance for the site managers (coders). Can't ignore that mobile users are the main users, and they seem to be making an effort here to work with all.

 

If you're already using a restful api, then it wouldn't take a lot of effort to transpile this new site into native device code for iOS, Android, or even Blackberry or Windows Mobile using Apache's Cordova project.

 

Please do something about the new format of the forum. The posts are all gigantic, especially when photos are included. Threads like WBAYDN have become essentially unviewable as each posted photo is full screen size or bigger.

This comment is in regards to viewing the forum on a Mac laptop, not sure if its the same on other computers or phones.

 

I liked having the beer talk forum topics being the first thing you see when you get to the website. I'd like to see that come back at least somewhere on the homepage. It's easy enough to find though, and overall the new site has more of a slick feel to it, especially when I'm on my phone.

 

So did you guys fix it so that we can post pics over the phone? That's all I've ever wanted lol

 

So I am using my Mac laptop running OS 10.10 and most recent Safari.

I go to beer news to read and maybe leave a comment. Then I use the General Link to go back up to the general page. It nicely shows those four topics in that category but the black bar with general in it and the tops of Beer Talk and Beer news are concealed from view. All I see of both is the most recently active link requiring that I either scroll downwards to be able to reveal the Beer Talk link to the list of threads, or that I click on a thread topic I may not want to look at and then exit that thread and then scan the list for the Thread I want to see. This uses processing time both for your computer and for me.

 

A more general case description of what you are seeing (assuming I understand correctly). PC, Win7, Opera, so it is not Apple-specific.

If you are in a forum, and click on that forum's upper grouping (e.g. Beer News > General, Midwest > United States), the link takes you to the top of that grouping, but the gray bar that has your user name, messages icon & alerts icon covers the top so you have to scroll to see the top forums in the grouping.

 

I don't like how the forums have been relegated to a small corner of the homescreen. I feel like discussion is what keeps people coming back and is the highlight of the website, so to shove it to the side sends a different kind of message.

....otherwise the site looks much better!