Notes from Discord thread. The goal here is to reduce the cognitive load of using the site, so when I say “declutter” it can mean remove things, but it can also mean to make things more apparent and thus doesn’t feel like distracting clutter.
Remove the time from the published time stamp on the front page.
Remove the “Brandnew and desperate to be rated!” icon.
Remove the “New since your last visit!” icon and introduce a last visit marker.
Make the story header less busy.
Normalize all the title words “By”, “Published”, “Category” etc. by them all having colon, all capitalized, none italic.
Make publish date the same size as everything else. It’s arguably the least important information.
Removed “Published on”. It’s not useful information here.
If it is in a series, write out “Chapter” instead of “Ch.”
“Chapter” is shortened to “Ch.” because of space restrictions on mobiles. Of course, I could make that responsive, but I was too lazy at this spot (there’s already SO much responsiveness on the site, and as you say, it all has to be QA all the time…)
For me “published on” has the purpose (I actually even need this for approval). Maybe the icons can be tugged away somewhere and the text “Published on” can be dropped.
It’s actually quite helpful, especially on Kinky, to see if that’s a Spiral, Cupid, or Collar story and what additional site it fits on, as well.
Actually, the story display was never so much an issue, I always thought that the story/series list is more of an issue of too many UI elements…
I’ve made some changes to the general layout in an attempt to declutter the UI as you suggested.
Most of your suggestions are implemented, some of them slightly differently, like the “new story” indicator. Please let me know, if you like the new approach with the slight greenish background. It’s a delicate balance between being not too intrusive but still visible enough.
Your suggestion with a marker doesn’t work, because I’ve got to accommodate to all sizes and that wouldn’t work on a narrow display.
I got rid of the “new” and “unrated” icons. I wasn’t too fond of them myself, but now you cannot discern between stories too new or with not enough rating and those who simply haven’t been rewarded any badges. Oh well. Still better that way, I guess.
And some of your suggestions have been used to slightly clean up the story display, as well. I didn’t want to get rid of the site indicators, as they DO carry a useful information: Whether a story is on Cupid or Collar does tell you something, too!
I’ve been turning over the twin problems of “Can’t tell if story has sufficient ratings to display icons and is just new, or if people have rated it low” and “Authors don’t get rated/get enough feedback”.
If folks think this is a good idea, I can make it a feature request, but why not display the total number of times a story has been rated in one or more categories by an individual inside the story page? What I mean is, something like “This story has been rated by X number of users” or similar, regardless of how many categories were rated by one person.
I don’t know if this could help encourage people to rate or not, but figured I’d mention it.
