Space Utilization of a DK5 Diary
Rather than add further narrative to the chorus of dismay regarding the usability of the redesigned diary pages, I thought it would be useful to break down my unhappiness numerically. Yes, I am only one user, but I suspect that I am not entirely unrepresentative.
When I’m only reading DKos, I use all three ‘major’ display types: sometimes my phone, sometimes my Surface tablet, sometimes my desktop. I am a web developer for scientists, and when I am working I use a laptop hooked up to a big monitor, because I find that setup optimally productive if I’m creating and manipulating code, images, and content.
The same goes for participating in the DKos community. When I want to contribute, usually in comments, I typically do so from my big screen setup.
In the last couple of years, I have watched web-based applications and heavily interactive sites go through major redesigns, typically packaged as efforts to incorporate a ‘responsive design’ that is friendlier to users of mobile devices and tablets. And every time, the same choices are made to allegedly accomplish this holy grail which seriously degrade the usability of sites for users on desktops / laptops / large monitors. TITLES GET FREAKING ENORMOUS. Useful UI layouts and presentational cues are discarded because they don’t scale well to phones. And for the users on larger displays, white space (that is to say, wasted space) explodes, as designers focus all their attention on making large complex sites work on tiny damned phone displays.
The most common bottom line result across sites that ‘go responsive’ is scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, to get to even the start of the content that you came to the site for in the first place.
And that brings us to the graphic above.
Among other constraints, authors cannot resize embedded images at the point of insertion in a diary. So in the case of the diary depicted above, the image that Kos placed in his diary is so big that in the first screen full of content for the diary does not display any diary text content AT ALL. So on an enormous monitor, I can’t read any of this diary’s content without scrolling. This is completely nuts.
Allocation of pixels between content, site overhead, and white space in a DK5 diary
The screen capture above is 1400 x 930 pixels, which is the biggest ‘bite’ of DK5 content I can display on my monitor. (I could make the display wider, but but DK5’s content space doesn’t get any wider than 1150px). Of that 1,302,000 pixels, the allocation of space breaks down like this.
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38% actual content, of which 70% is the embedded image, and of which 0% is diary text. (!!!) This includes a generous description of what counts as content, including the title, diary rating information, and author identification information block. The title clocks in at a cuh-razy 7.6% of the total display space.
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25.6% site overhead — navigation, tools, facebook share buttons, etc. I actually find the site overhead on diary pages to be completely unobjectionable. It’s pretty compact and more or less makes sense to me.
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32.5% of the display space on this diary page is white space.
I just can’t think of any scenario where the distribution of DK5 content (and lack thereof) on my screen can be thought of as usable or desirable. I use a big monitor because scrolling is annoying and because I like to see as much of the content I’m working with in a single view as possible.
The changes in DK5 and other ‘updates’ are made, in my opinion, because designers on these responsive design missions spend all their time focused on how things look and work on small screens, to the total detriment and neglect of the user experience on large displays. Since anything but phone calls and texting require constant scrolling on a phone, there’s no incentive to try to minimize scrolling as a general usability goal. And since on phones you can only see a tiny bit of content at a time, visual relationships among elements on a page are equally irrelevant. And of course, there is also the looming generational divide, where the youngsters are purported to ‘do everything’ on their phones, and they are the longed for demographic, the hell with older users. I’m sure your tech team will at this point sententiously reference data about how everyone is doing everything on their phones now, and observe that I’m a dinosaur/ outlier/relic of the pleistocene. Whether this is true or not, I don’t accept the assertion that in order to give mobile device users a better experience, you have to give desktop users a TERRIBLE one. Because that is what the diary page is, for users of large screens. It’s a hot mess of too much scrolling, unclear visual cues about the relationships between elements, and oceans of white space taking up the monitor that I bought because I want to READ THINGS ON IT.
Constructive Suggestions / Pleas:
Is there any way that titles can be smaller, relative to body text? The title text is 32 pixels tall, and long titles eat the screen at that size. If they were 24 px. tall, many titles would be 30% less space devouring.
Is there any reason not to let users adjust the size of uploaded images? While some folks have access to image editing tools and can adjust things before they upload, many do not and cannot, and we end up with ridiculousness like my example. Why not, for desktop users, show smaller images and let users pop up a big version if they want it?
If you made much of the element padding about 65% of its current size, the page would still ‘breathe’ but reading would be less laborious.
Bottom line: People come here to read stuff. If reading stuff becomes a miserable experience (and it’s getting there!), they will go elsewhere to read this kind of content.
