8 ms·

What parts of it strike you as sloppy? How would you improve the design? We'd love to hear specific feedback. We're admittedly programmers and not designers. O

by rgrove 15y ago

What parts of it strike you as sloppy? How would you improve the design? We'd love to hear specific feedback. We're admittedly programmers and not designers. Our main focus for the redesign was to improve usability, remove clutter, and decrease the overhead involved in finding relevant content. The new user guides and API docs in particular got the most attention in this regard, and I'm pretty happy with the result. It's not super sexy, but it sure is usable.

kellysutton 15y ago
I'll chime in here, just in terms of the design of yuilibrary.com * Use a fixed-width site. Most people go for something like 960px. * Establish horizontal and vertical eyelines or columns. * If you're on Github, might as well use gists. Offer example projects as open projects on Github
- catch23 15y ago
  +1 on the fixed width. I'm a developer, so I have a big monitor -- it's hard for my eye to follow sections of the document without lined up elements.
  - rgrove 15y ago
    Great feedback, everyone. I've pushed a few quick changes to address the low-hanging fruit: - We're now using Maven Pro for headings (no more Trebuchet). - Replaced Lucida Grande with Helvetica in the nav bar (sorry Windows users, you get Arial). - The site now has a max width of 1200px instead of expanding infinitely. This seems like a reasonable compromise, since any purely fixed-width design draws the ire of people who hate fixed-width designs. Keep the feedback coming!
    - hobonumber1 15y ago
      Wow, that was fast.
      - rgrove 15y ago
        One other nice thing about our new site is that it's super easy for us to push changes. :)
catch23 15y ago
It just looks ugly, hard to put into words. It feels like there's too many shades of colors & font sizes. You don't need gradients to make a site look good. Maybe you guys just need to hire a designer. I feel like you have over 20 different shades of blue if you count all the backgrounds & borders on elements -- which is annoying since blue is usually the color for links. Facebook is known for their blue color, yet they only use 4 shades of blue total.
scorxn 15y ago
Trebuchet feels dated, especially when bolded and part of blue + orange scheme. That look was very trendy a few years ago. Also, too many faces. Two faces usually work fine. Maybe replace all the Trebuchet with Maven Pro, and all the Lucida with Helvetica. And lose any weight variation you can (eg: since a link is already a different color, it doesn't really need to be bold too).
wisty 15y ago
It's not very useful to me. When I'm learning anything visual (GUI, plotting libraries) I really like a gallery of live examples. YUI's site seems to assume that you already know what you are looking for. The new site puts 4 examples (todo, calendar, charts, and search) on the home page, which is 4 more than I found the last time I looked. For contrast, jQuery UI has dozens of examples (under http://jqueryui.com/demos http://jqueryui.com/demos). You have the pages - http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/examples/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/examples/, but it's not really promoted. I bet you don't get many clicks to that page (due to the design of your site pushing people to other sections), but I bet the people who go there find it useful. Everyone else lands here: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/. Unless they think to go back, everywhere they click will look like a man page, complete with big "caveat" boxes. Functional, if you are debugging YUI, but otherwise it's just ugly. IMO, you should promote the live examples more, rather than the API docs. If I want to do some complex stuff, I'll look for a section labeled "API". If I'm just trying to assess whether a toolkit is useful, if I don't stumble onto live examples I'll wonder why you aren't even using the tookit on its own homepage. You could also go one better, and put some screenshots (or inlined examples) on the example index docs/examples/. People don't complain about "design" because they think it's ugly. They complain because they can't find what they are looking for (even if they don't know what they want).

by rgrove 15y ago

kellysutton 15y ago

I'll chime in here, just in terms of the design of yuilibrary.com * Use a fixed-width site. Most people go for something like 960px. * Establish horizontal and vertical eyelines or columns. * If you're on Github, might as well use gists. Offer example projects as open projects on Github

catch23 15y ago
+1 on the fixed width. I'm a developer, so I have a big monitor -- it's hard for my eye to follow sections of the document without lined up elements.
- rgrove 15y ago
  Great feedback, everyone. I've pushed a few quick changes to address the low-hanging fruit: - We're now using Maven Pro for headings (no more Trebuchet). - Replaced Lucida Grande with Helvetica in the nav bar (sorry Windows users, you get Arial). - The site now has a max width of 1200px instead of expanding infinitely. This seems like a reasonable compromise, since any purely fixed-width design draws the ire of people who hate fixed-width designs. Keep the feedback coming!
  - hobonumber1 15y ago
    Wow, that was fast.
    - rgrove 15y ago
      One other nice thing about our new site is that it's super easy for us to push changes. :)

catch23 15y ago

It just looks ugly, hard to put into words. It feels like there's too many shades of colors & font sizes. You don't need gradients to make a site look good. Maybe you guys just need to hire a designer. I feel like you have over 20 different shades of blue if you count all the backgrounds & borders on elements -- which is annoying since blue is usually the color for links. Facebook is known for their blue color, yet they only use 4 shades of blue total.

scorxn 15y ago

Trebuchet feels dated, especially when bolded and part of blue + orange scheme. That look was very trendy a few years ago. Also, too many faces. Two faces usually work fine. Maybe replace all the Trebuchet with Maven Pro, and all the Lucida with Helvetica. And lose any weight variation you can (eg: since a link is already a different color, it doesn't really need to be bold too).

wisty 15y ago

It's not very useful to me. When I'm learning anything visual (GUI, plotting libraries) I really like a gallery of live examples. YUI's site seems to assume that you already know what you are looking for. The new site puts 4 examples (todo, calendar, charts, and search) on the home page, which is 4 more than I found the last time I looked. For contrast, jQuery UI has dozens of examples (under http://jqueryui.com/demos http://jqueryui.com/demos). You have the pages - http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/examples/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/examples/, but it's not really promoted. I bet you don't get many clicks to that page (due to the design of your site pushing people to other sections), but I bet the people who go there find it useful. Everyone else lands here: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/. Unless they think to go back, everywhere they click will look like a man page, complete with big "caveat" boxes. Functional, if you are debugging YUI, but otherwise it's just ugly. IMO, you should promote the live examples more, rather than the API docs. If I want to do some complex stuff, I'll look for a section labeled "API". If I'm just trying to assess whether a toolkit is useful, if I don't stumble onto live examples I'll wonder why you aren't even using the tookit on its own homepage. You could also go one better, and put some screenshots (or inlined examples) on the example index docs/examples/. People don't complain about "design" because they think it's ugly. They complain because they can't find what they are looking for (even if they don't know what they want).