My general comments about DK 5 are first, I really do appreciate all the hard work and time our tech team and Markos have spent creating DK 5. Thank you each for working to make things better for everyone. There are a lot of great new features. But beta site is about asking us to tell you what we don't like.
DK users, newcomers and existing users, generally have similar needs with navigating websites. In the past five years, our excellent blogathon team brought to DK hundreds of special guests, who were former WH officials, lawmakers, political activists, environmental and civil rights activists, and political leaders that had a minimum of time to spend and expected an elegant, user-friendly experience. One of my admin tasks was to introduce the guest bloggers to navigation and use of DK. It didn't take long to walk them thru because DK 4 is so intuitive. But the features that made it easy to walk thru DK4 are now changed or gone.
I grouped my concerns thus far into:
1. Navigation and use of tools are not intuitive.
2. Restricting our choices and individuality.
3. Eliminate tools we use as individual bloggers and as community organizers.
4. Clutter and confusion.
Navigation and use of tools no longer intuitive.
DK 5 is not as user friendly as it could be because there are many tools and navigation that are not intuitive.
If you read the diaries by belinda ridgewood and nomandates and the comment threads, you can see many people have questions about how to accomplish basic blogging features and need explicit instruction from others. People are asking for instructions in how to do the most basic tasks, like posting pictures or finding parent comments.
DK 5 reduces our choices and voices.
DK is top progressive site and used to nurture and promote our many different voices. Now, little things that allowed us our individual voices are being removed by DK 5, like no more sig lines, no more individual tip jars and no more creative templates for promos and community organizing.
DK 5 has editing tools for comments that I really like, an easy way to do a headline, bold, indent, blockquote etc. But now we are apparently (some questions remain on this issue) supposed to use this same editing box for drafting our diaries and insert manually anything we want to use, like links, images, text styles.
This is not how many of us draft diaries. I draft my diaries in word document, and do my coding for pictures, blockquotes etc. in the word doc. Then I copy and paste my draft into DK publisher to preview its look and to edit. It is one thing to use this editing box for a brief comment, but quite another to use for an entire diary. It creates extra, unnecessary work and will demand more time. These editing tools should be an option, not a requirement for posting diaries.
Another way we express our views is by pictures and videos. I think more information might be needed here, but my understanding from comments thus far is that there are now restrictions in terms of how we use them, whether we can size pictures, and whether we can use tools like TubeChop and hovers.
Hotlisting diaries gone. I used hotlisting to make it easier for me to find diaries that I often reference, like how to diaries!
I liked the choice of minimizing Most Shared list on the FP but now it appears that choice is gone.
Eliminate tools we use as individual bloggers and as community organizers.
There are many tools that our community used that are no longer available with DK5. Tip jars not only expressed individuality of bloggers, but were also used as a community tool for presenting announcements in a recognized location. Many community organizers use original templates as promos and features of organizing activities at DK, whether our past blogathons or fundraisers, etc. Original templates now gone.
The "Welcome Back" box for each blogger on our FP now is gone! Not a big deal alone, but now I must use several clicks instead of one click to find groups when doing admin work for groups.
Clutter and confusion
The top of the FP, the right column and the comment threads look cluttered. The lack of subject lines for comments creates a visual issue with making the separation of comments more difficult. There is no sufficient demarcation that makes it easy to see one comment from the other.
There is no easy physical distinction between the community right-hand column between spotlight, rec list, most shared and recent list. Without the separation, the sections bleed into each other visually.
The comment threads are confusing without the parent tool. Parent was a useful tool and self-explanatory. The replacement "parent" I think is this arrow and we click on the blogger's name to the right of the arrow:
Mopshell had to explain what is the new parent tool!
Before I saw her comment, it took me a little time to figure out by clicking onto Crapper's name to see if it worked as a parent tool. But, why make users have to fiddle with trying to figure out where is the parent tool?
And that's one of the issues with DK 5 is that there are a lot of little tools like this that we need someone to explain.
