Does new UI have problems on a slow connection?
Have you looked at how this new UI works on a non-broadband link?
I ran an unintentional experiment today. I was uploading 60 photos to my Smugmug account which tends to pretty much saturate my DSL connection and make it pretty darn slow for regular internet browsing. While that was going on in the background, I happened to be playing with my beta account. I thought it was completely busted and not loading new images that I selected at all and it was giving me absolutely no visual feedback. I would select a new thumb to view and "nothing" would happen.
As it turns out, something was probably happening. I think it was busy trying to pre-load a bunch of images and because a whole bunch of images were in flight already and the connection was slow, it was taking a long time to respond to a user action. In the old design, I'd get the typical browser busy signal (flying windows in IE, rotating circles in Firefox). In the new design, I see nothing. This made me wonder what happens for users on a slow connection. Does this new UI work for them at all?
At the very least, I think you would want to make some sort of progress indicator so the user can see that the app is responding to their input. You may also want to dial-back the amount of data that's inflight at once if the connection is slow (if you can figure that out) so that more bandwidth can be available to respond to the user's action.
Works fine on a normal DSL connection. Doesn't work well on a slow DSL connection which I presume means it doesn't work well on a dial-up connection.
Have you looked at how this new UI works on a non-broadband link?
I ran an unintentional experiment today. I was uploading 60 photos to my Smugmug account which tends to pretty much saturate my DSL connection and make it pretty darn slow for regular internet browsing. While that was going on in the background, I happened to be playing with my beta account. I thought it was completely busted and not loading new images that I selected at all and it was giving me absolutely no visual feedback. I would select a new thumb to view and "nothing" would happen.
As it turns out, something was probably happening. I think it was busy trying to pre-load a bunch of images and because a whole bunch of images were in flight already and the connection was slow, it was taking a long time to respond to a user action. In the old design, I'd get the typical browser busy signal (flying windows in IE, rotating circles in Firefox). In the new design, I see nothing. This made me wonder what happens for users on a slow connection. Does this new UI work for them at all?
At the very least, I think you would want to make some sort of progress indicator so the user can see that the app is responding to their input. You may also want to dial-back the amount of data that's inflight at once if the connection is slow (if you can figure that out) so that more bandwidth can be available to respond to the user's action.
Works fine on a normal DSL connection. Doesn't work well on a slow DSL connection which I presume means it doesn't work well on a dial-up connection.
We've done some testing, yes. We generally reserve "lanes" of communication for clicks to take precedence, so the browser isn't totally bogged down doing something else. Precaching isn't done in such a way as to monopolize the browser's resources.
I've certainly tested using a bottlenecked broadband connection due to uploads, and it seemed fine to me. Better than fine, really.
But we'll take a closer look and make sure we didn't overlook something.
Since the whole point of the speedup is to prevent full page loads when navigating and Statcounter triggers itself on a new page load, it's likely not trivial to make StatCounter work again. A StatCounter-specific hack would be to detect it's presence and call it's Javascript trigger function each time you pseudo-load a new image without reloading the page. Probably could do the same for Google-Analytics.
For someone who does this as a hobby on the side, you have an amazing eye for stuff that matters.
We're getting close enough I can smell it... Keep the feedback coming!
Don
At one point there had been talk about doing some mouseover goodness with the flyout - maybe underlining texty things and giving backlight to the icon things. For goodness sake don't delay the release if that's in the pipe, but I was wondering if it was in fact in the pipe.
thank god
The slowness was driving me crazy and now it is much more pleasurable.. now i can view a lot more photo's and see more work. I would get tired of waiting and leave the site in spurts. I also will read more comments because their there.One thing that you have not changed that is annoying is that in slide show,i have to keep checking off the fade and info boxes everytime i see a new slide show.it would be nice if it remembered.it gets repeditive.:D
p.s. I love your new update.. you will gain a lot more customers because of that. Good work.. and by the way mr. ceo... your pretty cute!
No you dont have to redo your whole site, this has nothing to do with your main site. Just create a new account through the blog link listed, its only for test any way. just upload a few images I uploaded only four and then just copy some of your customization from your site and just test to see if it works.
Thats all I did and it works just fine. The smugmug blog says its going to be deleted any way later on
No you dont have to redo your whole site, this has nothing to do with your main site. Just create a new account through the blog link listed, its only for test any way. just upload a few images I uploaded only four and then just copy some of your customization from your site and just test to see if it works.
Thats all I did and it works just fine. The smugmug blog says its going to be deleted any way later on
One thing I wish one could do is limit the image size to 1 specific size. I can turn off original and large, but I cant turn off small or medium. In the old site I could use a bit of javascript to force medium size on all images. Can I do something similar in the new style? The fly-out with the image sizes makes me think it isnt...
Will it be possible to use the old style photo rank popup? Im personally not to keen on all that moving around stuff
Caption Problems Follow Up
I just uploaded a copy of one of the problem images. I added additional caption information. This is the caption i put in the IPTC using IrfanView.
2006 Los Angeles County Peace Officer’s Memorial.
Held at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Training Center in Whittier California. May 3, 2006.
This is a copy. Uploaded Jan. 12 at 1207hrs.
RichW it wants my Credit Card info. I don't think I should put my credit card information in the beta because I'm getting an invalid certificate error.
RichW it wants my Credit Card info. I don't think I should put my credit card information in the beta because I'm getting an invalid certificate error.
I'm getting this. Your credit card on file has expired. Please update it in your Billing settings and try again.
Maybe it don't like us midwesterners,
Al
Various UI feedback on the latest release
Various UI thoughts:
Need loading feedback. Smugmug viewing style: In cases where the L version of the image is not pre-cached yet and you click on it's thumb, you really need some sort of feedback that it's being loaded. Becuase it's JS loading it, the normal browser "loading" UI is not active. If it takes more than a second (which it can do if you're on a slow connection, you're on a busy connection or Smugmug is just not responding quickly), then you think that nothing is happening. In all the other places of the design you doing a "Loading..." animation to show the user that something is being loaded. Here, in the main UI, there is no feedback. IMO, there should be something.
Flexible number of thumbnails based on screen size. I'm hoping you are planning this for a follow-on release, but a huge benefit that I want out of the new JS-controlled UI is that you can put more thumbs on a big screen and simplify navigation/viewing a lot.
Fix info palette. The photo info palette just doesn't work for me. Because of the way you lay out the window (you center the smugmug style in the browser window), it's next to impossible for me to find a place to park the floating palette that doesn't overlap something. In fact, because of the centering, I need double the extra space on the sides to find room for it. So, the modeless benefits of it are completely lost. I'd rather have it in a separate window (like it was before) or weaved into the actual layout of the page below the photo. Per my comments on the earlier beta, a few simple graphic presentation improvements (divider lines between sections of info, combine a few pieces of info onto the same line) like this
would make the info palette massively easier to scan and find info on.
Pop-up toolbar not discoverable. I still believe you should offer an icon somewhere near the large photo that invites a user to click on it which will pop up the toolbar. When a first time user sees a Smugmug screen, they will have NO idea how to change sizes, download originals or see EXIF info. They will assume that stuff can't be done. They will have to accidentally discover it. That's not generally a good UI design principle to rely on accidental discovery.
Vertical shots lay out funny. I still think that vertical shots lay out really funny in the Smugmug style. You center them left/right, but you left align the caption and keywords. These shouldn't be opposite. Pick the same for both. I'd rather see left aligned for both since I don't like the main image being moved away from the thumbs because of it's centering. But, just being consistent either way is better than the way it is now.
Page navigation glyph looks funny. The page navigation glyph (down arrow in a gray circle) just looks funny to me. I'd rather see you put it after the second number than in between the two numbers. Here you are following the discoverability recommendation of putting an icon near something that brings up a pop-up (like I recommend for the main pop-up menu over the main image). But, I just don't like it's location. Wouldn't it look a lot better visually to put it after the second number: Page 3 of 4 icon here. Also, I'd make the entire "Page x of y" space be active for the navigation popup. Why limit it to just the first number.
Need more visible keyboard focus in the thumbs. Now that you support keyboard navigation, I think you need a more visible indicator of which photo thumb has the keyboard focus. Right now it appears to be a one pixel border that changes from white to green. It's really hard to discern. If you're trying to figure out which arrow key to go to next, you often want to know where you are in the page and can't find it. The keyboard focus indication also looks the same as the state when the mouse is hovering over it so you can have two thumbs that look identical, but only one is the actual keyboard state.
Share button should do a popup window. It seems odd and kind of like an incomplete design that so many parts of the UI now bring up a sub-window that floats over the original page, but the share button takes you to a whole different page and requires you to press back to get back to where you were. I like that the themes button just pops up a little menu and you either pick the theme you want or you close that palette. I'd like the share button to do the same thing. After all the share button isn't really taking you somewhere else, it's just trying to show you info related to your current page, so it would be great to put it in a pop up window. Then, you could use Javascript to let the user click on the link they want and just copy that to the clipboard for them rather that requiring them to do Copy Link Location from their browser. Cleaner presentation, easier and quicker to use. One of your competitors has a very nice implementation of this feature similar to what I'm asking for.
Keyboard navigation can cause the pop-up toolbar to show over the main photo. Because the vertical and portrait main photos occupy different screen space, it's possible for a keyboard navigation from one orientation photo to the other to cause the mouse to suddenly be over the main photo and for the toolbar to popup and go away as you do keyboard navigation. When this happens, it feels really bizarre. One solution would be to not pop up the toolbar if the mouse is over the image when it's first shown until the mouse is actually moved above some threshold. This would keep it from popping up during keyboard navigation.
Thumbnail alignment. This may be a personal opinion thing, but I've never liked how thumbnails are aligned when you have mixed portrait and landscape thumbs. They appear to be left/right centered and top aligned in the up/down direction. This leads to a very jumbled look when you have a mix or portrait and landscape thumbs. I think they would look a lot better if they were aligned to the bottom-left corner. Then, columns would all line up on the left edge and rows would all line up on the bottom edge. You'd feel like it was a grid.
Problem in single image screen. If you are in the smugmug style and you click on the main image, it takes you to the single image viewing page. If you then click on the next arrow, it loads the next image. But, something weird is going on because it keeps the "Loading..." status up on screen long after the current image is displayed. It must be loading something else. The problem with this extra delay is you can't click next until the "Loading..." thing goes away. So, this makes do next, next, next a lot slower than it should be in the single image view. Sometimes, this delay is as long as 5 seconds after the image is fully shown (and that's on a T1 line).
No toolbar in the single image screen - missing functionality in that screen. Once you're in the single image screen, you expect to be able to access the same functions you could access in the thumbnailed Smugmug style. You expect to be able to change sizes (you can do that at the top of the screen. But, you also expect you can save the photo or see the EXIF data. You can't do either of these from this screen.
That's it for now. My personality doesn't generally supply many kudos for all the things you've gotten right in this latest release, so please don't feel like all I'm doing is complaining. I'm just trying to give you as much feedback as I can so you can make it ever better than it is.
Need loading feedback. Smugmug viewing style: In cases where the L version of the image is not pre-cached yet and you click on it's thumb, you really need some sort of feedback that it's being loaded. Becuase it's JS loading it, the normal browser "loading" UI is not active. If it takes more than a second (which it can do if you're on a slow connection, you're on a busy connection or Smugmug is just not responding quickly), then you think that nothing is happening. In all the other places of the design you doing a "Loading..." animation to show the user that something is being loaded. Here, in the main UI, there is no feedback. IMO, there should be something.
Flexible number of thumbnails based on screen size. I'm hoping you are planning this for a follow-on release, but a huge benefit that I want out of the new JS-controlled UI is that you can put more thumbs on a big screen and simplify navigation/viewing a lot.
Fix info palette. The photo info palette just doesn't work for me. Because of the way you lay out the window (you center the smugmug style in the browser window), it's next to impossible for me to find a place to park the floating palette that doesn't overlap something. In fact, because of the centering, I need double the extra space on the sides to find room for it. So, the modeless benefits of it are completely lost. I'd rather have it in a separate window (like it was before) or weaved into the actual layout of the page below the photo. Per my comments on the earlier beta, a few simple graphic presentation improvements (divider lines between sections of info, combine a few pieces of info onto the same line) like this
would make the info palette massively easier to scan and find info on.
Pop-up toolbar not discoverable. I still believe you should offer an icon somewhere near the large photo that invites a user to click on it which will pop up the toolbar. When a first time user sees a Smugmug screen, they will have NO idea how to change sizes, download originals or see EXIF info. They will assume that stuff can't be done. They will have to accidentally discover it. That's not generally a good UI design principle to rely on accidental discovery.
Vertical shots lay out funny. I still think that vertical shots lay out really funny in the Smugmug style. You center them left/right, but you left align the caption and keywords. These shouldn't be opposite. Pick the same for both. I'd rather see left aligned for both since I don't like the main image being moved away from the thumbs because of it's centering. But, just being consistent either way is better than the way it is now.
Page navigation glyph looks funny. The page navigation glyph (down arrow in a gray circle) just looks funny to me. I'd rather see you put it after the second number than in between the two numbers. Here you are following the discoverability recommendation of putting an icon near something that brings up a pop-up (like I recommend for the main pop-up menu over the main image). But, I just don't like it's location. Wouldn't it look a lot better visually to put it after the second number: Page 3 of 4 icon here. Also, I'd make the entire "Page x of y" space be active for the navigation popup. Why limit it to just the first number.
Need more visible keyboard focus in the thumbs. Now that you support keyboard navigation, I think you need a more visible indicator of which photo thumb has the keyboard focus. Right now it appears to be a one pixel border that changes from white to green. It's really hard to discern. If you're trying to figure out which arrow key to go to next, you often want to know where you are in the page and can't find it. The keyboard focus indication also looks the same as the state when the mouse is hovering over it so you can have two thumbs that look identical, but only one is the actual keyboard state.
Share button should do a popup window. It seems odd and kind of like an incomplete design that so many parts of the UI now bring up a sub-window that floats over the original page, but the share button takes you to a whole different page and requires you to press back to get back to where you were. I like that the themes button just pops up a little menu and you either pick the theme you want or you close that palette. I'd like the share button to do the same thing. After all the share button isn't really taking you somewhere else, it's just trying to show you info related to your current page, so it would be great to put it in a pop up window. Then, you could use Javascript to let the user click on the link they want and just copy that to the clipboard for them rather that requiring them to do Copy Link Location from their browser. Cleaner presentation, easier and quicker to use. One of your competitors has a very nice implementation of this feature similar to what I'm asking for.
Keyboard navigation can cause the pop-up toolbar to show over the main photo. Because the vertical and portrait main photos occupy different screen space, it's possible for a keyboard navigation from one orientation photo to the other to cause the mouse to suddenly be over the main photo and for the toolbar to popup and go away as you do keyboard navigation. When this happens, it feels really bizarre. One solution would be to not pop up the toolbar if the mouse is over the image when it's first shown until the mouse is actually moved above some threshold. This would keep it from popping up during keyboard navigation.
Thumbnail alignment. This may be a personal opinion thing, but I've never liked how thumbnails are aligned when you have mixed portrait and landscape thumbs. They appear to be left/right centered and top aligned in the up/down direction. This leads to a very jumbled look when you have a mix or portrait and landscape thumbs. I think they would look a lot better if they were aligned to the bottom-left corner. Then, columns would all line up on the left edge and rows would all line up on the bottom edge. You'd feel like it was a grid.
Problem in single image screen. If you are in the smugmug style and you click on the main image, it takes you to the single image viewing page. If you then click on the next arrow, it loads the next image. But, something weird is going on because it keeps the "Loading..." status up on screen long after the current image is displayed. It must be loading something else. The problem with this extra delay is you can't click next until the "Loading..." thing goes away. So, this makes do next, next, next a lot slower than it should be in the single image view. Sometimes, this delay is as long as 5 seconds after the image is fully shown (and that's on a T1 line).
No toolbar in the single image screen - missing functionality in that screen. Once you're in the single image screen, you expect to be able to access the same functions you could access in the thumbnailed Smugmug style. You expect to be able to change sizes (you can do that at the top of the screen. But, you also expect you can save the photo or see the EXIF data. You can't do either of these from this screen.
That's it for now. My personality doesn't generally supply many kudos for all the things you've gotten right in this latest release, so please don't feel like all I'm doing is complaining. I'm just trying to give you as much feedback as I can so you can make it ever better than it is.
This continues to be like gold.
Many of these are scheduled for future releases. We like to release-early-release-often and we're upset, internally, over how long it's taken to get this far.
I have skimmed all these replies and not seen any comments on this but if there have been and I have missed please forgive me for the repetition.
Is there any upgrade to the Comments and notification section being made. 2 things come to mind. When leaving a comment under an individual photo they seem to stay under any photo regardless of which one you are looking at making it confusing which photo is being refered to. And secondly when one leaves a comment on another persons gallery, when the owner replies you have no idea they have made a reply and youy need to remember which photo it was and continue to return in case a reply requires a further reply. Are you planning on making it possible for email notifications to be sent when an owner relies to one of your comments on their galleries?
Otherwise I love the pre-loading and speed and other things seemed to have been covered by everyone elses comments. Thanks for your efforts looking good for the future.
I dislike how choosing "Large" from the flyout just pops up lightbox now. I preferred the previous behavior where you could still see the rest of the gallery page and associated links, controls, and info (like keywords, purchase, share, map, next page, etc.).
I dislike how choosing "Large" from the flyout just pops up lightbox now. I preferred the previous behavior where you could still see the rest of the gallery page and associated links, controls, and info (like keywords, purchase, share, map, next page, etc.).
You can, just do it from any of the other viewing styles
I do not want to see my site adjusting the number of thumbs on the page based on screen size.
I dont know about anyone else, but I have clients tell me all the time that they like the second one on the third page. They do this even when I make the file name the caption. If they have a different number of thumbs per page than I do, I will have a pretty rough time of it. Just my thoughts.
Also on the medium sized image, the mouseover window shows a "Save this image" option. I certainly hope I will be able to turn that OFF.
I do not want to see my site adjusting the number of thumbs on the page based on screen size.
I dont know about anyone else, but I have clients tell me all the time that they like the second one on the third page. They do this even when I make the file name the caption. If they have a different number of thumbs per page than I do, I will have a pretty rough time of it. Just my thoughts.
Also on the medium sized image, the mouseover window shows a "Save this image" option. I certainly hope I will be able to turn that OFF.
I also have people describe images by position. Rather than handicap everyone's viewing experience to solve this problem, I wish each thumbnail could have a tiny little number somehow by it that made it easier for viewers to refer to it. Maybe the number only shows when the mouse is over that thumb. I haven't thought about how you'd present it. If they could tell me "I want image number 14 in the waterskiing gallery", that would be a whole lot better for everyone than the third one on the fourth page and would allow for the dynamic viewing that is really useful to all viewers.
"Save this image" always saves the original, not the medium no matter what size you are viewing. That's the same as the "Save Photo" link did in the old design. If you disable access to originals, it makes the "save" function go away completely.
Yes I have the same. Are we expected to put in our actuall CC info in the beta site?
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Matthew SavilleRegistered Users, Retired ModPosts: 3,352Major grins
edited January 12, 2007
Hmm, the little pop-out info stuff kinda smells like Zenfolio. Personally, I'm not a fan of things happening without clicking. Sometimes it's annoying. But I'm sure I'm quite alone on this, so I'll learn to love it.
Other than that, yes please do make a "loading" thingie to let people know that their image is on the way. I LOVE how the page doesn't refresh, whether or not it's faster I can't tell but it annoyd the heck out of me to have to scroll back down each time I clicked on a new image in Smugmug style. In fact I requested that pages not fully re-load about a year ago. It's so nice to see the continued work you guys put into this site! I swear, after each release I think to myself, "wow, it can't possibly get any better than this, Don and family must just be kicking back and letting the income roll..." ...and then you go and make it even more perfect.
Thanks guys, keep up the good work. I recommend Smugmug to everyone I know, it is the best service on the market. Now all I need is panoramic prints and finishing services, then my life will be complete...
Comments
Pretty sure he is talking about the image pop-over, not the EXIF window.
thank you for your support.
Have you looked at how this new UI works on a non-broadband link?
I ran an unintentional experiment today. I was uploading 60 photos to my Smugmug account which tends to pretty much saturate my DSL connection and make it pretty darn slow for regular internet browsing. While that was going on in the background, I happened to be playing with my beta account. I thought it was completely busted and not loading new images that I selected at all and it was giving me absolutely no visual feedback. I would select a new thumb to view and "nothing" would happen.
As it turns out, something was probably happening. I think it was busy trying to pre-load a bunch of images and because a whole bunch of images were in flight already and the connection was slow, it was taking a long time to respond to a user action. In the old design, I'd get the typical browser busy signal (flying windows in IE, rotating circles in Firefox). In the new design, I see nothing. This made me wonder what happens for users on a slow connection. Does this new UI work for them at all?
At the very least, I think you would want to make some sort of progress indicator so the user can see that the app is responding to their input. You may also want to dial-back the amount of data that's inflight at once if the connection is slow (if you can figure that out) so that more bandwidth can be available to respond to the user's action.
Works fine on a normal DSL connection. Doesn't work well on a slow DSL connection which I presume means it doesn't work well on a dial-up connection.
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We've done some testing, yes. We generally reserve "lanes" of communication for clicks to take precedence, so the browser isn't totally bogged down doing something else. Precaching isn't done in such a way as to monopolize the browser's resources.
I've certainly tested using a bottlenecked broadband connection due to uploads, and it seemed fine to me. Better than fine, really.
But we'll take a closer look and make sure we didn't overlook something.
Don
Made some updates and changes. Hope you like them.
We're getting close enough I can smell it... Keep the feedback coming!
Don
For someone who does this as a hobby on the side, you have an amazing eye for stuff that matters.
At one point there had been talk about doing some mouseover goodness with the flyout - maybe underlining texty things and giving backlight to the icon things. For goodness sake don't delay the release if that's in the pipe, but I was wondering if it was in fact in the pipe.
Swim for Them | WellmanHouse.net | AlbumFetcher | SmugShowBuilder
The slowness was driving me crazy and now it is much more pleasurable.. now i can view a lot more photo's and see more work. I would get tired of waiting and leave the site in spurts. I also will read more comments because their there.One thing that you have not changed that is annoying is that in slide show,i have to keep checking off the fade and info boxes everytime i see a new slide show.it would be nice if it remembered.it gets repeditive.:D
p.s. I love your new update.. you will gain a lot more customers because of that. Good work.. and by the way mr. ceo... your pretty cute!
Thats all I did and it works just fine. The smugmug blog says its going to be deleted any way later on
Canon 60D
Canon Rebel XTi (400)
Canon 10-22mm, Canon 50mm f/1.8 II
MacBook, MacPro
thanks digitalpins!
Will it be possible to use the old style photo rank popup? Im personally not to keen on all that moving around stuff
Cor
http://uwimages.smugmug.com
Along the same lines Allen had. http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=459448&postcount=22
Today I checked my beta site and found the captions on two images have been changed.
It looks like there is a problem with the apostrophes.
I have not done any edits on those two captions, the captions came from the image's IPTC info.
The images have been up on the beta site since December.
Problem images:
http://richw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/32#5166
http://richw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/32#4955
Originals:
http://photos.lmsportspix.com/gallery/1425061/1/67673891/Medium
http://photos.lmsportspix.com/gallery/1425061/1/67673066/Medium
I just uploaded a copy of one of the problem images. I added additional caption information. This is the caption i put in the IPTC using IrfanView. Viewing on the site the apostrophe has been removed.
http://richw.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/32#6378
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Maybe it don't like us midwesterners,
Al
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Various UI thoughts:
- Need loading feedback. Smugmug viewing style: In cases where the L version of the image is not pre-cached yet and you click on it's thumb, you really need some sort of feedback that it's being loaded. Becuase it's JS loading it, the normal browser "loading" UI is not active. If it takes more than a second (which it can do if you're on a slow connection, you're on a busy connection or Smugmug is just not responding quickly), then you think that nothing is happening. In all the other places of the design you doing a "Loading..." animation to show the user that something is being loaded. Here, in the main UI, there is no feedback. IMO, there should be something.
- Flexible number of thumbnails based on screen size. I'm hoping you are planning this for a follow-on release, but a huge benefit that I want out of the new JS-controlled UI is that you can put more thumbs on a big screen and simplify navigation/viewing a lot.
- Fix info palette. The photo info palette just doesn't work for me. Because of the way you lay out the window (you center the smugmug style in the browser window), it's next to impossible for me to find a place to park the floating palette that doesn't overlap something. In fact, because of the centering, I need double the extra space on the sides to find room for it. So, the modeless benefits of it are completely lost. I'd rather have it in a separate window (like it was before) or weaved into the actual layout of the page below the photo. Per my comments on the earlier beta, a few simple graphic presentation improvements (divider lines between sections of info, combine a few pieces of info onto the same line) like this
- Pop-up toolbar not discoverable. I still believe you should offer an icon somewhere near the large photo that invites a user to click on it which will pop up the toolbar. When a first time user sees a Smugmug screen, they will have NO idea how to change sizes, download originals or see EXIF info. They will assume that stuff can't be done. They will have to accidentally discover it. That's not generally a good UI design principle to rely on accidental discovery.
- Vertical shots lay out funny. I still think that vertical shots lay out really funny in the Smugmug style. You center them left/right, but you left align the caption and keywords. These shouldn't be opposite. Pick the same for both. I'd rather see left aligned for both since I don't like the main image being moved away from the thumbs because of it's centering. But, just being consistent either way is better than the way it is now.
- Page navigation glyph looks funny. The page navigation glyph (down arrow in a gray circle) just looks funny to me. I'd rather see you put it after the second number than in between the two numbers. Here you are following the discoverability recommendation of putting an icon near something that brings up a pop-up (like I recommend for the main pop-up menu over the main image). But, I just don't like it's location. Wouldn't it look a lot better visually to put it after the second number: Page 3 of 4 icon here. Also, I'd make the entire "Page x of y" space be active for the navigation popup. Why limit it to just the first number.
- Need more visible keyboard focus in the thumbs. Now that you support keyboard navigation, I think you need a more visible indicator of which photo thumb has the keyboard focus. Right now it appears to be a one pixel border that changes from white to green. It's really hard to discern. If you're trying to figure out which arrow key to go to next, you often want to know where you are in the page and can't find it. The keyboard focus indication also looks the same as the state when the mouse is hovering over it so you can have two thumbs that look identical, but only one is the actual keyboard state.
- Share button should do a popup window. It seems odd and kind of like an incomplete design that so many parts of the UI now bring up a sub-window that floats over the original page, but the share button takes you to a whole different page and requires you to press back to get back to where you were. I like that the themes button just pops up a little menu and you either pick the theme you want or you close that palette. I'd like the share button to do the same thing. After all the share button isn't really taking you somewhere else, it's just trying to show you info related to your current page, so it would be great to put it in a pop up window. Then, you could use Javascript to let the user click on the link they want and just copy that to the clipboard for them rather that requiring them to do Copy Link Location from their browser. Cleaner presentation, easier and quicker to use. One of your competitors has a very nice implementation of this feature similar to what I'm asking for.
- Keyboard navigation can cause the pop-up toolbar to show over the main photo. Because the vertical and portrait main photos occupy different screen space, it's possible for a keyboard navigation from one orientation photo to the other to cause the mouse to suddenly be over the main photo and for the toolbar to popup and go away as you do keyboard navigation. When this happens, it feels really bizarre. One solution would be to not pop up the toolbar if the mouse is over the image when it's first shown until the mouse is actually moved above some threshold. This would keep it from popping up during keyboard navigation.
- Thumbnail alignment. This may be a personal opinion thing, but I've never liked how thumbnails are aligned when you have mixed portrait and landscape thumbs. They appear to be left/right centered and top aligned in the up/down direction. This leads to a very jumbled look when you have a mix or portrait and landscape thumbs. I think they would look a lot better if they were aligned to the bottom-left corner. Then, columns would all line up on the left edge and rows would all line up on the bottom edge. You'd feel like it was a grid.
- Problem in single image screen. If you are in the smugmug style and you click on the main image, it takes you to the single image viewing page. If you then click on the next arrow, it loads the next image. But, something weird is going on because it keeps the "Loading..." status up on screen long after the current image is displayed. It must be loading something else. The problem with this extra delay is you can't click next until the "Loading..." thing goes away. So, this makes do next, next, next a lot slower than it should be in the single image view. Sometimes, this delay is as long as 5 seconds after the image is fully shown (and that's on a T1 line).
- No toolbar in the single image screen - missing functionality in that screen. Once you're in the single image screen, you expect to be able to access the same functions you could access in the thumbnailed Smugmug style. You expect to be able to change sizes (you can do that at the top of the screen. But, you also expect you can save the photo or see the EXIF data. You can't do either of these from this screen.
That's it for now. My personality doesn't generally supply many kudos for all the things you've gotten right in this latest release, so please don't feel like all I'm doing is complaining. I'm just trying to give you as much feedback as I can so you can make it ever better than it is.would make the info palette massively easier to scan and find info on.
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This continues to be like gold.
Many of these are scheduled for future releases. We like to release-early-release-often and we're upset, internally, over how long it's taken to get this far.
Look for more shortly after release.
Don
Is there any upgrade to the Comments and notification section being made. 2 things come to mind. When leaving a comment under an individual photo they seem to stay under any photo regardless of which one you are looking at making it confusing which photo is being refered to. And secondly when one leaves a comment on another persons gallery, when the owner replies you have no idea they have made a reply and youy need to remember which photo it was and continue to return in case a reply requires a further reply. Are you planning on making it possible for email notifications to be sent when an owner relies to one of your comments on their galleries?
Otherwise I love the pre-loading and speed and other things seemed to have been covered by everyone elses comments. Thanks for your efforts looking good for the future.
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I dont know about anyone else, but I have clients tell me all the time that they like the second one on the third page. They do this even when I make the file name the caption. If they have a different number of thumbs per page than I do, I will have a pretty rough time of it. Just my thoughts.
Also on the medium sized image, the mouseover window shows a "Save this image" option. I certainly hope I will be able to turn that OFF.
I also have people describe images by position. Rather than handicap everyone's viewing experience to solve this problem, I wish each thumbnail could have a tiny little number somehow by it that made it easier for viewers to refer to it. Maybe the number only shows when the mouse is over that thumb. I haven't thought about how you'd present it. If they could tell me "I want image number 14 in the waterskiing gallery", that would be a whole lot better for everyone than the third one on the fourth page and would allow for the dynamic viewing that is really useful to all viewers.
"Save this image" always saves the original, not the medium no matter what size you are viewing. That's the same as the "Save Photo" link did in the old design. If you disable access to originals, it makes the "save" function go away completely.
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Do we have to put our CC info in the beta site to get a pro account? I was just leary of CC info on a beta site.
Other than that, yes please do make a "loading" thingie to let people know that their image is on the way. I LOVE how the page doesn't refresh, whether or not it's faster I can't tell but it annoyd the heck out of me to have to scroll back down each time I clicked on a new image in Smugmug style. In fact I requested that pages not fully re-load about a year ago. It's so nice to see the continued work you guys put into this site! I swear, after each release I think to myself, "wow, it can't possibly get any better than this, Don and family must just be kicking back and letting the income roll..." ...and then you go and make it even more perfect.
Thanks guys, keep up the good work. I recommend Smugmug to everyone I know, it is the best service on the market. Now all I need is panoramic prints and finishing services, then my life will be complete...
-Matt-
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