Are you finding DU4 easier or harder to use than DU3?

[highplainsdem]

84. I know you're working hard to tweak DU4's design and try to fix bugs, EarlG, and I appreciate that,

but I think there are serious design problems, a downgrade from DU3 for most people, that may not be fixable that way.

And since you brought up the admins throwing out the entire moderating system with the switch from DU2 to DU3 - that probably was traumatic for some (I don't remember; caregiving had to be my top priority then), but there isn't anything like that causing problems with the transition now. Although I have noticed from posts in Community Help that apparently the jury system isn't working nearly as well with DU4 as it was with DU3, which is a problem.

DU3 simply gave users much easier navigation and a much better display of what this site has to offer than DU4 does. It was easy to find out where different forums were, and they were reachable in one click via the sidebar, or two clicks via the Forums & Groups tab at the top of every page.

A button labeled Navigate, opening to an array of buttons/links with the new category labels for all of what were once called groups, not only makes more clicks necessary, but is unnecessarily confusing.

I was trying to find the Atheists and Religion forums the other day, before responding to someone who was grieving. I believe in an afterlife, but I don't want to offend someone who posts a lot in those groups by mentioning that (I'm including Religion as well as Atheists because the Religion group is completely dominated by atheists). It was no problem to reach both those groups on DU3, either by the sidebar or the Forums & Groups page. They were both under Religion & Spirituality, where they belonged.

On DU4, Religion is under Issue Forums, and the Atheists & Agnostics group is under Alliance Forums.

And to look for them easily after clicking on the buttons for those forum categories, I had to click Forum Names to change the order of the list to alphabetical (again - I've already mentioned this in Community Help - that needs to be explained on the page so people know they can do that; most people and especially new users WON'T know that).

Compared to DU3, it's a nuisance, at best. A new design shouldn't make extra clicks and guessing games necessary.

Right now, there is NO page on DU4 that conveys as much about everything this site and community can offer as the old DU3 left sidebar and the old Forums & Groups page both did.

With DU4's navigation design, it's as if you took a vast community and chopped it up so at most only a portion at a time is visible.

Anyone new to DU using DU3 could get a much better immediate sense of what was here. Now they have to click on each of the categories for what used to be called groups and are now forums, and scroll down a long list that's jumbled by time of last post, and try to remember where on DU a particular forum/group that interests them is.

It should not have to be that hard, for anyone. It especially shouldn't have to be that hard for newcomers. What would have taken them seconds to skim over, with DU3, requires a lot more clicking and hunting now.

I applaud your wanting DU to work better for people using phones.

But with the switch, you've created a lot of obstacles elsewhere.

I really had no idea how this poll would turn out when I posted it.

It actually does skew in favor of DU4, simply because some people unhappy with DU4 are already taking breaks from it (as I've heard in email and as seems obvious from the lessened activity on the board). We all love this site. We all appreciate what you've done to keep it going. And, as I mentioned in the OP, a lot of DUers will tend to blame themselves first for any problems they're having with the site, and unfortunately some of the DUers who like DU4 have been happy to snipe at people who are having problems with it, discouraging them from speaking up.

Include those factors, and you should probably add at least a few points to those finding DU4 harder to use.

I don't know how you get from the current design for DU4 to anything as convenient - and as beautifully clear about everything DU has to offer - as DU3 was.

I have wondered if going back to DU3 and adding a Mobile Navigation tab mobile users cannot miss, linking to the Forum & Groups page, would do wonders for people accessing DU via their phones, since they didn't have that super-convenient sidebar (which was there from the start with DU3, as far as I can tell from the Wayback Machine).