Testing Testing - Ok so now here's our new look (but you don't have to have it, do you hear?)

[JustinExcelsisMumsnet]

This is a sneak preview of our redesign - it's planned across the whole site but we thought we'd give you a preview of Talk so you could give us your thoughts. ETA is early in the new year (God willing).

Two things we should make clear:

First Customise talk and Mn Classic WILL STILL BE AVAILABLE so don't panic if you really hate it!

Second it's not finished yet so not everything works perfectly - it's a test site.

You might wonder why we are bothering with a redesign by the way. We have had quite a lot of feedback that newcomers find the site a little hard to find their way round at first so we are trying to simplify it. We haven't changed much overall in nine years but we've added quite a few bits and bobs on, and to newbies it can be quite daunting we think.

And one more thing - we've found in the past (and we know ourselves) that change can be disorienting but do give it a go for a wee while before you trash it completely, please? .

There's no link to it yet - YetMoreTech will post it in a minute - he wants to add more caveats before he posts it up!

Hope you like it (or at least don't loathe it) - let us know your thoughts.

(Please address all complaints to [email protected])

It's the page the link goes to....

OK, I have pushed the long thread title down, but there are still no posting details on the right until you get below the ads - think it might be because thread titles from old threads aren't wrapping on active convos like the new ones do(though they do on Threads I'm on/watching/started)

Rustybear, you won't convince me. The word 'stubborn' has often been applied to me for some reason.......

It just looks like other sites now.

Thank God for MN Classic!

It looks a bit like other sites now and harder to view. Don't like the way it doesn't fill the screen (lapdog too).

Thank God for MN Classic!

Confused.

Don't like it,sorry. Love it just the way it is.

I love it (or at least I love the way I assume it will be when all the bumps are ironed out)

Does it come in other colours?

That confused the hell out of me as I didn't look at the dates and thought 'whaaaat' hughjarssss is back, under the same name and having normal conversations. I'm silly.

I don't like it, classic all the way for me.

don't like it much... sorry

I think its got too much on one page

Active convo's needs to be more prominent

Nope, sorry, not keen I'm afraid.
It looks like all the other parenting forums out there - which I can't work out, thankfully!
I really like the way Mumsnet is set out, it;s different and much much more classy. I'll be sticking with the classic style

The interesting (but difficult for us!) thing about the feedback received so far is that the negative comments seem to vary between "it's too cluttered, there is too much information" to "you're not filling the page enough and there is too much white space".

Some of the space in the column on the right will be filled with useful content.

The messages themselves should expand horizontally to fill whatever width you have available in your browser.

And for those that haven't read this entire thread if you have a lot of space between the title and the body of the thread and you use Internet Explorer then that's a mistake and it will be fixed.

The big ad that lots of people have commented about is no taller than the existing ad that you see on a thread like this one. It is wider, but then the whole page is designed to be wider given that people have higher resolution screens these days.

The thing about the topic list is that for a new user the existing list is pretty overwhelming. So the idea is that they see a friendlier list of the most active topics, but the others are never more than one click away, thus keeping the regulars happy too. We could be wrong and we'll reconsider it if enough people don't like that, but do try to see it from a new users perspective if possible, or at least give a nod to the fact that we'd like to!

Quite how anyone can say it looks like NetMums is confusing to me!!! Messages aren't fixed width, no images, no tickers, no pink, no "my baby's last poo was 4 hours ago and weighed 2.5 lbs".

im getting the ad problem in firefox, plus the messages arent expanding to fit the width of the screen

ignore em I like it, what else matters? [huuuuuuuuuuuuge ego emoticon]

People hate change. The way it's always been is a good enough reason for most people to keep it the way it is. I think that is very limiting! Change is good, is progress, is fun! What's wrong with making it better even if it wasn't broken before! Or change something just cos you feel like it! What the hell? I change my living room round just cos I'm bored with it - I wouldn't keep my sofa in the same place on the grounds that it has been there up to that point! It's good to shufty!

And the current new format - erm, iyswim - is pretty shite and I bet it's put loads of people off! whereas the new new format, erm, iyswim is far better.

of course, the original format was lovely too, you could always go back to that?

I like it. And i normally don't like things.

My initial impression is that I actually do like it - being someone who doesn't like change, that is quite unusual. I use FireFox and didn't notice any technical issues. Will have to try it in my mobile mode (using Opera Mini, to see if it works - with luck it will, I like posting from my mobile

~~ Signature ~~
"my baby's last poo was 4 hours ago and weighed 2.5 lbs"
~~ ~~ ~~~ ~~ ~~

Sorry, couldn't resist

Thanks to everyone who's tested it so far and fed back. Some of your suggestions we are planning to incorporate already before we release the new format and we promise to have a look at all your comments/ suggestions and to see if there are some general themes/ ways to improve the design.

Do keep your thoughts coming .

It's different. I fear change.
I think I'll be OK with it but would like the ads to be a bit less obtrusive.

Ads - They are not clickable (I'm using FireFox). I expect that is a Test Site issue and will not happen when the site is live, but just thought I'd mention it should those ads should actually be clickable while in Test mode.

When viewing list of message titles within a topic page, I like the 4 column layout - message title, num replies, latest reply date/time, latest user to post. The width of the username column appears to be of fixed length, which will therefore cut off some usernames... but I don't see that being a bad thing - may encourage some users to pick shorter names!

Within .post css class, could there be a little more bottom padding? Currently seems to be 5px, could it be increased to 10px to give a bit more of whitespace at the bottom of a post. Or am I just being picky

I really like that.

I think that part of it for me is the new blue (for the darker bars) seems very dominant. I'm also not very keen on the little purple arrows, although that's a very minor issue.

I think my most significant concern is about not showing most of the talk topics on the Talk page, because they aren't grouped in a very intuitive way, so for example I post in Living Overseas, which is for some reason under Homes and Gardens. In the new design you have to click "more" under homes and gardens to know that the topic exists, and why would you? So I would worry about lots of topics getting lost, and that means, I think that they will die over time, as the next generation of users takes over. Likewise Chat under fun and games, or Dadsnet under In the Club.

I'm not getting a very muddled looking discussions page, with lots of overlap - assume this is something being fixed as I type, because it wasn't like that earlier. One thing I did think in passing, looking at this page is that the bit at the bottom letting people know how to start a new thread etc is much more infomrative than the one t the top - would it be too crowded to use the same approach for the top and bottom, because on the busier topics the bottom is a long way down.

Is there any reason why last 15 mins and last hour have been excised as options? I always like to know how busy the board is, and whether I'm likely to get any responses when I post, and I like the lay out of the last 15 mins page, because you get a glimpse of the sort of conversations that are going on, and whether you are likely to want to join them (oh and whether anyone has responded to your witty post)

I think the crowded/white border issues come to the fore in the threads themselves. Compared to classic the text looks very squished, which seems to be both lack of space between the posts (esp where there are lots of short posts) so that the blue line is too dominant, and also within the posts, where classic seems to have a wider line spacing. For some reason the couple of centimeters of white space on either side of the screen accentuate this, because it makes it look as if the text is squished into the middle of the page.

Ah, I see nannynick has said the same thing as me, but in tech talk I may be married to a techie, but I don't do the talk!

I don't like that, but then I still prefer mn classic.
I am another one who doesn't really do change.