Proposed navigation / menu change

Discussion about the Geocaching Australia web site
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caughtatwork
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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by caughtatwork » 31 July 15 12:36 pm

I don't know exactly where you are located, but based on your hitlist, there's about 5 within 5km, another within 7km, a few more within 10km. Not exactly a plethora of them, but not exactly none either. http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/ziggiau/hitlist
Hides also garner points, so you could always hide and try to entice more people near you to play.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by ziggiau » 01 August 15 7:34 pm

True, it is more than none, but it feels like none once I've got the trigs. And hides, yes I do have plans for GA hides but if I apply the rule of "why are you bringing cachers here, is it worth it?", my area isn't abundant with those sort of locations.

But back to the topic at hand, cleaning up the navigation is fine, but don't bury things too deeply that novices don't understand what's going on. I've visited several caching related sites in the past 10 months that assume the visitor knows what the site is about. As I didn't, I tried to establish what was going on but on each occasion I had to dig - not new visitor friendly. But then who is the primary audience - newbies or existing users? There's a whole bunch of user experience basics that could be applied but on the other hand, you may never get the redesign off the drawing board.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by caughtatwork » 01 August 15 10:35 pm

So based on what has been presented is it ok or too complex? Your feedback is appreciated but as I'm experienced I don't know whether it is clear or not. If you have specifics to comment on then please do so. We're way beyond concepts now and I need you to say exactly what bit works, what bit doesn't work and what I need to do to address it.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by ziggiau » 03 August 15 1:42 pm

caughtatwork wrote:So based on what has been presented is it ok or too complex? Your feedback is appreciated but as I'm experienced I don't know whether it is clear or not. If you have specifics to comment on then please do so. We're way beyond concepts now and I need you to say exactly what bit works, what bit doesn't work and what I need to do to address it.
Understood, just haven't had time to devote to a comprehensive answer (I still don't but you seem like you're so close to launching that I'll bash something out). But based on your FB post this morning, I will create your colour palette if you give me any other specs that need to be taken into account.

Brief review: More spacing required all over. Not sure how much opportunity you have to tweak spacing, but on the front page example the three images on the left (logo, flag, dragonzone) really need some breathing space. They're cramped in both horizontal and vertical spacing and make each one of them difficult to read. This will add to the real estate you use across the top of the page, but it could also allow you to utilise this space in some other creative way.

You're missing pictures! Pictures sell your product. This may be why people are finding it difficult to engage with the page beyond the functional service it provides. Is there an opportunity for header images? Even the simple randomised images on http://www.geocachingnsw.asn.au/ help to give a solid anchor point. You have to offer the same information in different ways to both the visual and the text based learner otherwise you loose them quickly. A happy balance between colour/images and data.

Will this be a fixed width design? The content part of the page seems to look like it's fixed and if so, why not have the menu fit this width too. The full width box for the "what is geocaching" drop down seems out of place, not related to anything else and therefore not an intuitive clicking option. I know you're going for the clean menu look, but maybe don't hide everything in the main menu - there's probably some studies that tell you that you should have key words dominant at the top of your page/menu. Or maybe you could have some graphical buttons or house ads within the page to take people to other parts of the site. Will there be space for your own internal house ads (whether that's selling items in the shop or highlighting whats new)? Probably too late in the process, but a two column approach? And don't shoot me, but will it be mobile compatible?

And from a SEO angle, you need more static text for the Googles to be able to find.

Hope that's a little more useful and less vague. It's not all the answers but if you go with breathing space and kick arse photos you'll change the feel of the design enourmously. :)

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by caughtatwork » 03 August 15 2:47 pm

I'll add some spacing to the 3 elements on the front page. That's simple and thanks for the suggestion.

I'm happy to include pictures but ... how ... what ... where ? I appreciate your feedback. I can't incorporate a concept. I need something definite. The Geocaching NSW page looks very nice, but what is the message on the images? It's fixed width. How does that play out on a mobile device? Give me a dozen images and what you would like and how this can be achieved in a variable width, I'll be happy to incorporate. Details. Specifics. THIS goes THERE. Use THAT over THERE. HERE you should DO THAT. I like what Geocaching NSW does, but I'll also admit unless the imagery is germain to the points it's bling and pointless to me. However I have asked for feedback and I'll look to incorporate, but I need help with the what and where.

This is not a fixed with design. It adapts to the size of your screen. This is why we're dumping the navigation tabs right now. They do not scale. From memory there is no single element that will constrain the size, but the smaller you get the more the presentation looks wonky. For the majority of the site across the most common screen sizes, I think we're OK.

As far as the What is Geocaching goes, how do you propose we provide this information to folks who are new? I have one idea which is the accordion. This doesn't work for you, so what is your proposal to make it more intuitive to provide assistance to newcomers? Remember they do not know what you know. You will need to assume you know nothing before trying to navigate the site.

There are indeed probably some studies that tell me how to build a website, but I haven't read them. In the absence of reading them and you suggesting that there should be key words at the top of the page / menu, what are you suggesting? My thinking is that if I have a MENU and the "other" menu options I am confusing the user. If some of the menu options are in the menu and other menu options are not in the menu, then how do I know where to go to get to a menu item? The menu or the not menu? If you know of a site that would help demonstrate your point, please provide it, then we can both see what you are trying to explain. At the moment I'm not getting how a menu can be a menu if it's not the menu.

We don't do ads. If we need / decide to do a promotion, what is currently the dragonZone icon at the top is the promotion area. We use this area quite frequently.

The site looks OK on a mobile device. As there are approximately 1,000 devices with buggy browsers, non standard implementations, O/S constraints, etc, what we have works reasonable well. I do not have a device suite to test on. I have a tablet, a phone and a computer. In the absence of someone throwing a lot of money at me, this is all I can test against. Even between the iPhone versions, you get differing results so I can't test and address everything. I don't even know what's wrong as I will never see it. This is a website which may run on a phone. If it works, that's terrific. I have tried to make things work well as I can on most screen sizes, but until we go live and have the community do some testing, that's a little unclear as to how much success will be achieved.

Two column? Haven't given it a thought for the front page. I am assuming you're talking about the front page rather than the menu / navigation. Two column is magnificent on a wide screen / landscape mode. Go small screen and portrait and you'll wish there wasn't two columns. As we're already opted out of device detection (for the most part) I think this would make the final outcome nice on one device and almost unusable on another. Hence for the front page, a single column was adopted. If you have a site that uses a multi column screen that adapts well to a phone, please show me. I'd like to see what you're thinking of but I just can't picture it at the moment.

https://www.google.com.au/#safe=off&q=geocaching that puts us a number 3 behind our current Google+ post. > 50% of our searches come in with the word geocaching and a state or locality. What do you propose in terms of SEO data for our site? I'm looking for specifics as to what to include and where. I know we should do better SEO, but someone needs to step up and give me the what and where. I'm a programmer. I'm not a designer or SEO specialist. I need help, but specific help.

A colour palette would be nice. HEX would be preferred. Identify which elements get what colours, please. Also please consider folks with colour blindness. Folks who may need contrast (i.e. not grey on white). Then expect around 100 people to challenge your colour selection and prepare to make accommodating changes.

Your help is appreciated and anything you can provide in terms of specific what, where, when, how, will be review.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by ziggiau » 03 August 15 10:29 pm

caughtatwork wrote:I'm happy to include pictures but ... how ... what ... where ? I appreciate your feedback. I can't incorporate a concept. I need something definite.
I have half a brain that's techie and half a brain that's creative/design focused and I forget that my vague explanations, that seem clear in my mind, don't magically materialise in others heads via the written word.
caughtatwork wrote:The Geocaching NSW page looks very nice, but what is the message on the images?
The message I take from their images is that the organisation has something to do with the outdoors and having an adventure. I think they hit the spot :)
caughtatwork wrote:Give me a dozen images and what you would like and how this can be achieved in a variable width, I'll be happy to incorporate.
Could the images be sourced from log entries? Could we ask folks to submit their own images that meet the brief (whatever you choose that brief to be)?
caughtatwork wrote:Details. Specifics. THIS goes THERE. Use THAT over THERE. HERE you should DO THAT. I like what Geocaching NSW does, but I'll also admit unless the imagery is germain to the points it's bling and pointless to me. However I have asked for feedback and I'll look to incorporate, but I need help with the what and where.
Again, it's about your audience - who are you making this website for and will adding images meet their needs? At the least it will give them some warm and fuzzies. I haven't gone into details because I don't have your design to tinker with and see where best to incorporate imagery. You may need to play with a few locations to see what works within your scope.
caughtatwork wrote:As far as the What is Geocaching goes, how do you propose we provide this information to folks who are new? I have one idea which is the accordion. This doesn't work for you, so what is your proposal to make it more intuitive to provide assistance to newcomers? Remember they do not know what you know. You will need to assume you know nothing before trying to navigate the site.
Hey, I still barely know what's going on with some aspects of geocaching, I'm not sure when I'll feel like I can take off my L (or am I up to P's) plates. I am a newbie webpage visitor many times a day and the sites that give me what I want without me having to work for it are the ones I stick with. I just feel that if you don't have the words "what is geocaching?" in your face somewhere people switch off.

Random selection, and I'm not suggesting that this is a good design and certainly not for this project, but if you've never heard of Zentangling before and you arrive at https://www.zentangle.com/ you immediately have two ways to find out what it is, one visual and one text. Another totally random selection, go and find out what disc golf is and you could end up at http://www.australiandiscgolf.com/ where they have a simple top menu with extensive drop downs. Their "about the sport" is a little harder to find than the first example but the feeling of movement in the images and bright colours have hooked me in long enough to make my mouse move over the menu. Again, I'm not suggesting anything firm and concrete here because it's something you'll need to play with within the constraints of your design. (BTW, did you know you can play disc golf AND cache at the same time at Sydney Olympic Park?)
caughtatwork wrote:The menu or the not menu? If you know of a site that would help demonstrate your point, please provide it, then we can both see what you are trying to explain. At the moment I'm not getting how a menu can be a menu if it's not the menu.
Stick with the big key words across the top, drop downs for the details. Current site has too many options and I don't know what they mean (as identified in your review). Pick 5 key words, make them big, give them space, and everything else goes under them. What are they going to be? Well again, it's how best to meet the needs of your primary audience. Menu design is a subset skill in its own right and we're just muddling our way through. And I'm not suggesting that you have to look like the GC site, but if a player has come from there they have an expectation of what every other caching site they come across should behave like. If GCA's point of difference is it's freedom from rules and hoop jumping, then VISUALLY you need to show that. I know I know, how to do that? I've never worked in the development environment you've got so I can't give specifics I'm afraid.
caughtatwork wrote:We don't do ads. If we need / decide to do a promotion, what is currently the dragonZone icon at the top is the promotion area. We use this area quite frequently.
Maybe my intention was misunderstood. I was suggesting self promotion not paid placements (I understand the business model) but maybe more so I was thinking of another place to add visual impact.
caughtatwork wrote:I'm a programmer. I'm not a designer or SEO specialist. I need help, but specific help.
And I'm no SEO specialist but I know that if I saw "The home of Aussie Geocaching, with cache listings, forums, newsletters and leaderboard." which is what currently comes up on the Googles, it's not inspiring. Feed the machine with something more like "Official home of Australian Geocaching. Learn how to play this game of high-tech hide and seek without the rules!" or "Geocaching Australia, home of rule free geocaching. Find, hide and enjoy the adventure all across Australia", or "Come geocaching with Geocaching Australia. There are hides just waiting to be found by you - start today!". Something factual and something engaging.
caughtatwork wrote:A colour palette would be nice. HEX would be preferred. Identify which elements get what colours, please. Also please consider folks with colour blindness. Folks who may need contrast (i.e. not grey on white). Then expect around 100 people to challenge your colour selection and prepare to make accommodating changes.
I'll work on some options over the next few days. Could you send me some of your screen samples so I can tinker?

I hope this essay helps and doesn't confound further. Sorry about not offering specifics in many areas but without getting touchy feely with unknown environments, I don't know what is and is not possible. :D

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by caughtatwork » 05 August 15 10:45 am

All discussion is good. I hate writing it down though because so much gets missed in the conversation.

The header can be done, but I will need to look at some aspects of how we do it. We currently have themed banners in the header for Xmas, Easter, Halloween, New Years Day, Anzac Day, etc. Sio we might end up going live with what we have now and an update to the header in the next release. Will need to gather images to use for the banner, so I'll trawl the gallery and see what I can spot and adjust them for the appropriate size.

Our audience comes in two parts. Newbies who have no idea what geocaching is, what a lat or lon is, what a geocache is, how to find one, etc, etc. It's much more of a challenge to get comfortable with geocaching with the sizes, containers, difficulties, terrains, types, etc than a relatively simple game like disc golf. So trying to explain what you need to know before you try for a geocache is hard. You don't want people trying a 5/5 for their first cache, nor a cunning micro / nano. They need enough information to understand a traditional, 1/1 or 2/2 hould be their first target. That's a lot of information to explain to someone who has no idea what's going on. I was hoping the "What is Geocaching" accordion would do that.

A little piece of history for the redesign is that the wide navigation structures do not work well on a mobile device. Mobile devices do not hover. On a PC hover shuts down the menu system when you hover outside the target area. Extremely wide navigations are difficult because there are too many things to look for if it all folds out at once. Deadly seriously, there were complaints that the menu offered too many options. Make is simpler to start with, then allow the user to drill down. That was some of the original brief. Newer players will not want to complexity of a full menu. They want simplicity until they have gained some knowledge then they can get into the details behind the main navigation functions.

Directing the navigation by concept seems to have been the desired direction. Whereas we currently have concepts of "cache" and "cacher" and "swaggies" and "logs", this did not sit well with people over time. People did not understand that you needed to choose a concept then the action. i.e. CACHE then FIND. So we're reversing the concept. It will now be FIND then CACHE or FIND then CACHER or HIDE then CACHE or MY then "INSERT FUINCTION" maybe even LOG then CACHE (this one is not yet part of the structure).

Navigating by icon unless they're well defined / designed icons are mystery meat. Click a thing and see where it takes you. I don't want to have to interpret what the designer thinks a FIND icon looks like. I want to FIND a geocache and it's probably easier by words. We're also not having a landing page because we want people to get into finding from step 1. New players are interested (from my limited polling) in
WHAT (is geocaching)
HOW (do I play the game)
WHERE (can I find a local geocache)
HOW (do I log it)
3 of those concepts (with LOG to be added) are on the front page. This hopefully means they can land on the front page and with a few clicks can be out the door to find their first geocache. Granted a dedicated iOS app will help as they then don't need to get a GPX file, etc, etc. More on this when the senate settles down.

Slide navigation is bad because it hides things.
Hover navigation is bad because your can't hover on a mobile.
Click navigation is better but wow, you end up clicking a lot.
Wide navigation is too complex.
Limited navigation hides too many functions.

Most apps (that I can see) have a MENU function similar to what is being developed. It seems to be a common icon which, by the absence of anything else up in the header, indicates some action when you see it and the word MENU underneath it certainly should tell you what it is. However, that hides information that you may want to get at quickly. So really, it seems that the discussion is around a couple of things, one of which is ALL THE NAVIGATION AT ONCE vs. DON'T MAKE IT COMPLEX. The others are iconography and colour which I'll leave til later.

In a look at providing both worlds, what about the MENU stays as it is now. Slide out, click to do what you want, top of the screen. As well as this a full wide screen navigation list (essentially a site map) in the footer. Closed to start with, you click to open and everything, is laid out for you to click in column form. No more mystery as to where things are.
i.e.
My
-> Settings
-> -> Genealogy
-> -> Profile
-> -> Alerts
-> Account
-> Cacher Page

Then it's up to you to decide how to navigate. Hierarchically or everything at one.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by ziggiau » 01 September 15 7:08 pm

Now that I've been using the new design for a few weeks, I want to point out a couple of design things that are bugging me on each visit. And I know exactly why they bug me - it's because I've been trained to expect things to be a certain way by the GC site. I only mention these things because if I'm feeling it, I wonder if others who use the GC site often might also feel the same way and be put off.
  1. The area beside the menu that says "Logged in as ziggiau - Logout" - I've logged myself out of the site so many times because the equivalent area on the GC site takes me to my profile page. I find that my profile page is my default spot at GC but it takes three clicks to get to the same place on GCA (Menu dropdown|My Profile|My Cacher Page). Any chance we could do something similar on GCA?
  2. Everything fully left justified - I'm finding it difficult to read with everything jammed up against the sides of the pages. Even printed books have padding on either side of the text to give your eye a place to rest between lines. Could you add padding on either side (sitewide) as a test to see if it feels better?
  3. There's lots of real estate in the bar across the top doing nothing. That's some valuable space and I think the words Geocaching Australia need to stand out like dogs balls up there so you know where you are ALL THE TIME.
Take a look at this doctored page I've fiddled with to see a very rough idea of what these changes might look like - https://www.dropbox.com/s/vkuaosonrlhvt ... a.jpg?dl=0

Changes include:
  • ~140px padding added to both sides
  • Blue bar is deeper
  • GCA Logo bigger and Geocaching Australia text added
  • Cacher name delinked from logout and would now link to profile/stats
  • Find count underneath name (or any other quick stat you like)
  • Dragonzone and state flag added beside cacher name but smaller than current site
  • Logout/Login beneath the cacher name stuff
  • Menu image size increased and not hiding in the corner
A little breathing space all round. Possible? :-k

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by oldfella » 01 September 15 8:07 pm

Everyone has their own thoughts on the changes. I for one have been playing around with the new format over many days and hours and I do not have a problem with any of the layout. As I was a member of GCA before I joined GC i use GCA as my benchmark for the other one and I find I am doing the opposite to some others. Not comparing the other one to this one but the other way around and i like this site. There are those out there with more computer and code savy then me but I go with the flow and at the moment it all works for me, also acknowledging that with anything new there are allways teething problems and perceived areas that may be improved aupon but are not what the developers were trying to achieve with simplicity and eas of use. Keep up the good work craigrat and C@W

Edit. This is just my opinion and not a criticism of any other comments made before my post. When something is new there nearly always is an avenue for comments to assist in further improving the re development.
Last edited by oldfella on 01 September 15 10:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by ziggiau » 01 September 15 9:40 pm

My comments aren't meant as a criticism oldfella, I'm trying to add to the dialogue with regards to design which c@w has requested help with. I applaud the devs for going for it, this is just refining what they've done further.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by caughtatwork » 02 September 15 9:25 am

Noted.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by Lazarus_68 » 03 September 15 1:20 pm

I'm appreciating the new menu, layout and functionality; even if not yet quite 'perfect'.

Two suggested improvements:

1) The "Find a Geocache Zone" page has "Warning Zone Checker" where you put in GPS co-ordinates and click 'Check'. Awesome! Simple request: can you add this "Warning Zone Checker" onto the page used to create new cache, please?

2) It is easy to see listing of all caches within a particular dragon zone; however missing is the reverse: a list of all caches NOT in a zone, i.e. where Zone = "Unknown dragonZone"

Thanks,
Laz :)

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by caughtatwork » 03 September 15 2:03 pm

I will update the wiki http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Geoc ... pment_List for your first request.

There are some 20,000 caches that would "not" be in a zone at any point in time. That's way too much strain on the DB. Why do you want to see that? There might be an alternative means.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by ziggiau » 04 September 15 10:52 am

Oooh, look at that text in the header! And being text it can be found by search engines.

But when viewing in Firefox (my main browser) the body of the site is aligned underneath the G of the new text and pushes everything out (which I think why people can't find the RHS sidebar). Testing in Chrome and IE have the site looking schmick and correctly aligned. I'm running Windows 7.

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Re: Proposed navigation / menu change

Post by caughtatwork » 04 September 15 11:24 am

That's because Firefox sucks. Seriously there is no valid reason for a 5px border on the BOTTOM of the logo should push the page out to the RIGHT. It's been hacked to fix for now.

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