@Feeds 🚽

@Feeds you are epic, keep being the way you are ;) Even if you have a lot of bugs.

Also, twitter.com/aaronshekey/status/1394361271408017413?s=20 < related to the new fonts that everyone hates so much.

i mean, when you make an arbitrary change for an arbitrary reason, you're only going to piss off half the community, then come out the other end no better off than you were

I dunno if it's just me, but the first iteration of the font changes (pre-update 2 in the post) felt really bad. After that update, the changes seem completely fine and readable. If that's necessary to move onward and upward, then godspeed.

I don't even know what specifically they changed in the second iteration. It just looked better, randomly, when I opened it up the next day.

depends on your os

Why do you call it arbitrary? Nothing about Aaron's post makes it feel "arbitrary".

Nothing about how he's responded to people who've explained the struggles it's caused feels that way. He's honestly putting a ton of thought into it and trying to balance a bunch of really complicated factors.

Lots of people really disliked it when we changed the fonts the last time. One of the biggest asks was to use something else but the issues were the same then as they are now - we like our pages to load quickly and using fonts people don't have slows down page loads.

I can't even begin to understand all of the various factors but, what I can understand, is that it's hard but there's a reason for it. Dismissing it as "arbitrary" is rude and unfair.

Maybe i misread?

> Mark Otto put it really well on his personal blog, documenting GitHub’s rationale for switching. Like GitHub, our original font stack used Arial across macOS, iOS, and Windows. Arial was first created in 1982, and has served the web well for decades. But technology moves on. Modern system typefaces look better on both new high DPI screens, and old screens alike.

some people think it looks better?

I understand that it's not arbitrary, and that there is a goal behind changing the font. But what is that goal? I feel if that goal is shared with everyone we'd be on the same page and there'd be a significant less amount of complaining.

And taking feedback from only the users on meta is not a very good idea. The vast majority of users on Stack Exchange don't even know what meta is. Taking feedback from meta is good, but the feedback is also contradictory. Votes on meta don't really represent how the majority of users feel about the change.

I suspect that most people don't understand how complex that part actually is. I found the font change understandable, but I also didn't expect it to work without issues from the start. Fonts are really, really difficult.

the font as a whole i don't think looks bad. The numbers infuriate me for some reason

but my eyes hurt after reading anything on SO for more than a few minutes

> I'm always reticent to share exactly what I'm on the way to because there are often so many steps that I'm not even sure are going to work out. I wasn't confident dark mode would ever ship until I shipped it, you know?

twitter.com/aaronshekey/status/1394394734840500231

People should stop complaining. Just explain that you're now being blocked doing X because of the change. You'll either learn that you're not supposed to do X anymore or you have shown a use case that wasn't taken into consideration yet.

Someone's already done that, they haven't received a response.

It hasn't been 6 to 8 weeks yet.

Lots of people have voiced the issues and aaron's responded to many of them. Handpicking a single one ignores the vast amount he's done to address the things people have brought up.

?

The part about each change only being part of a bigger vision is something I understand, but also something I don't trust entirely. The sidebar and the somewhat inconsistent top bar are both a consequence of a failed vision for the design of SE sites. The top bar was designed for SO only, and inevitably ran into troubles once it was extended to other sites. And the left side bar was never filled with the stuff that was promised there.

@10Rep We're sorta screwed either way? If we don't talk to Meta about things, we're accused of designing the site without feedback from meta. We do use user research sessions for a lot of stuff - such as the review queues work... and we use surveys along with meta for things like the outdated answers stuff... but Aaron currently doesn't have a team to help him with stuff. He's pretty much on his own.

That's supposed to change eventually (soon, even?).

Also for something like the fonts...there are so many configurations out there that it's only possible to get so much testing coverage before shipping

At least with fonts there's no way to shoehorn teams into it

So...test what you can, ship it, and then quickly iterate in response to feedback...which he's done here.

@MadScientist I don't specifically remember any promises about what would be added to the left nav. I heard a lot of people talking about what they wanted there but ... that's just people talking and I disagreed with a lot of it (e.g. moving the site switcher to the left nav) but liked some of it (e.g. give me a frigging link to the child meta in the left nav, please!!!).

The most difficult part for me is to distinguish actually bad design decisions from stuff that is just different, and which I'll get used to. I went too far into ignoring my gut feeling on the first Skeptics design, but there were plenty of other changes where my first reaction was very different from how I saw the changes once I got used to them.

I'm honestly just glad the Teams stuff is in the left nav now because finding/seeing when stuff happens on Teams is impossible for people who don't use SO regularly.

@MadScientist And yeah, +100 to this...getting cross-platform text rendering to work consistently is a nightmare.

@Catija My point is more that the side bar isn't earning the space it consumes right now. SE never found enough stuff that had a place there, so it's mostly empty and takes up more space than the content justifies

tbh, it's consuming space that otherwise would have been blank

so...

Depends on your screen width

and iguess what setting you use

i consider sticky navs to be a plague

@RyanM I'm not sure how many shops/project outside of SE use the Stacks design system. I mean, it is not like Bootstrap. I used Stacks on a play project but I'm not a designer so at best I have an opinion on developer friendlyness. That doesn't help in finding weird glitches in specific setups.

Yeah, plus SE itself is always going to be the first user...like how Facebook is the first user of new React features.

i would have probabely been fine with the nav

if it weren't for teams

teams just pissed me off so much that anything related to it i hate by default

I dream of a more responsive Stack Exchange design...I'm a little sad that the great work the team has done on making it responsive to smaller screens hasn't also extended to making it responsive to larger screens.

(with the proviso that I am well aware that this is hard to retrofit onto a site that was designed for fixed width in the first place)

@RyanM There's really only one thing I can think of that would work there, and that is a side-by-side preview. Most other stuff can't be expanded much without creating lines of text that are just too wide

@MadScientist Yeah that's...a good point, actually. It'd also be useful for reviewing edits, which is currently borderline impossible for code changes.

But most of the UI wouldn't really benefit from it, you're right.

And I'm sitting on a 32" 4K display right now, so I have a screen that is bigger than most. But I almost never maximize a browser, there's just no point

I forgot about long lines of text actually being an impediment to readability.

I guess I really just want side-by-side preview and diffs :-p

(yes I know why this is difficult to do for just those things)

@MadScientist that's fair, sure. There's the site setting to hide it (and free up the space) but that also hides the useful links that used to be in the banner.

@KevinB I mean... you can definitely be angry about Teams... but it's making a lot of stuff possible because it's a major source of income. We have to make money and it's actually related to Q&A, which our other products are not.

@Catija I only need the questions link, but that is the most often used one. So hiding the side bar is not an option at all.

g q

SE designed themselves into a corner with the SO-centric Top bar redesign, and so far they haven't managed to design themselves out of it again

I never use "questions", just the logo/home. There's a chance to make the logo in the top bar link to home the way it does on SO but we'd have to create logos for 170+ sites to fit there.

My most common action is to view new questions, and that is the questions link. The homepage is too sensitive to random changes for my taste

I'm not quite sure why those ~20 px of real estate on SO were so valuable to reclaim.

it put the teams link closer to the left

Try a 16:9 notebook and you'll see how valuable vertical space can be ;-). But while I think the redesign worked somewhat for SO, the consequences for all other sites were ignored entirely

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

a lot of the changes both during the team dag nav redesign and the one that came after were driven by analytics to drive clicks to paid products, i guess assuming people who actually wanted the other links wouldn't really care where they were as long as they could find them

it's gross frankly

We must accept that the only thing that doesn't change, is change itself.