I came here and registered specifically to express my displeasure with the new navigation experience on mobile. From the announcement thread at:
It’s noted:
Due to the limited space we’ve hidden the menus from the header. To access them simply scroll up a small bit.
No, no, no!
This completely breaks my navigation workflow. I can no longer see if someone likes a post or responds to me if I’m in a thread at a glance. I can’t quickly switch forums with a tap. I can’t quickly search with a tap. I realize it’s a “simply scroll up a small bit” but I do about 90% of my Discourse forum browsing on mobile and find this change incredibly disruptive to my navigation experience.
I can’t say that not knowing what topic I’m actively reading has ever been a problem for me. So, no I don’t really find it convenient.
I much prefer having my easy navigation buttons - and most importantly to me knowing when I’ve been liked/replied/messaged without needing to take a special action.
If Discourse is all about social engagement, hiding one of the most important indicators of engagement seems pretty counterproductive.
It is unlikely we’ll change it, but we need more time to gather feedback first. I suggest living with it for longer than a day before reaching any particular conclusion.
I dunno - if it gives me such a visceral reaction after using it for just a couple of hours I can’t see growing to like it.
I mean it’s not like I have any choice but to give it a chance, but I would beg you to at least consider doing something about the missing activity indicators on the top right corner. That’s more frustrating than anything to me right now. (I could get used to the other stuff… Probably.)
What you call a visceral reaction comes across as knee-jerk, particularly for those who have been watching the feature develop here on meta, provided feedback and watched the feedback of others influence the end result.
It’s possible further changes will occur, and informed feedback is usually the best way to make a meaningful contribution. A quick search here on meta will locate the pertinent threads, thus far people have been almost unanimously happy with the addition.
Well, bully for them. The more I use it the more I’m disliking it. Especially when I go back to a Discourse instance that doesn’t have this update.
I’m case I’m coming across as unnecessarily harsh let me say I get it. I’m a software developer by trade but all I’m seeing here is where it’s at now and I’m not liking it at all. I see it as solving a nonexistent problem at the cost of a really good UX that I rely upon.
I love Discourse a lot - it’s the best forum software I’ve ever used which is precisely why this kind of change makes me so angry.
If we are not allowed to make ANY users angry due to changes we might as well throw in the towel, that is where the journey starts it ends with us having phpBB.
You got to live with this for 2 weeks and then report back. Whenever cheese moves, there is anguish. That is the nature of cheese transport.
You have a super easy workaround which is scroll back up 10 pixels if you are on mobile and hanging desperately for notifications. Not saying we will never improve this feature, its possible we could for example flip back to header with notification if there is a new notification and page was still for N seconds. I don’t know. There are tweaks that may happen over time.
Easier access to hamburger / notifications is probably fullscreen swipe left / swipe right kind of thing anyway.
I’m fine with change. Change is good but I don’t see this as a good change. Dismissing my feedback as complaining about “cheese moving” isn’t really helpful (but I pretty much knew this would happen sooner or later - I know the score here ).
Like I said before, I’ll live with it - it’s not like I really have a choice if I want to continue to use the sites I love and use daily. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something.
I’ll be happy to report back in 2 weeks to let you all know if my opinion has changed any.
If that’s the main complaint then would having the UI swap back for 5 seconds when a new activity occurs before swapping again to the topic title be a good feature request?
Also I noticed that the search and hamburger icons shift ever so slightly after their initial fade-in animation.
I think the new changes from @featheredtoast coming in the next weeks will solve your problem, since notifications will be at a side panel permanently (swipe right for notifications).
I also noticed that the new mobile topic header (which I welcome) seems to come at the price of downgraded navigation UX, but I soon noticed that it’s not as bad as the first impression would have it: if you scroll upwards just a little bit, the “old” navigation header will re-appear. Are you aware of that? For me that is good enough a solution. Or am I missing your point?
Alternatively (or rather: in addition), pehaps it could be made so that tapping on empty space in the header (alternatively: on the right fifth of the header) could switch to the header with the navigation stuff (incl. search)?
I’ll admit I’m also missing the notification indicators. Personally, I’d love to see the avatar (with PM/notification icons) remain, and only have the search and hamburger menu hidden.
With that said, I’m excited to see @featheredtoast’s upcoming swipe menus, which will allow access to notifications without scrolling up, but I think I’ll still miss the notification indicators. Time will tell…
Yes, I’m aware of that and yes you’re missing my point (or perhaps I wasn’t clear about it in my frustration). Not seeing notifications without taking additional action is the massive sticking point for me. (The other stuff, while annoying, I can live with.)
We updated our site today and have agreement from everybody I’ve talked to thus far that this is a hindrance, not a boon, to browsing on mobile.
Knowing what topic you are currently viewing is a problem I personally have never had, and I have been using Discourse daily for almost two years now. The addition of this largely unhelpful information in place of genuinely useful features is a decision I honestly cannot comprehend. Blocking the hamburger itself is a bit of a pain, blocking the user icon is worse, and blocking the search feature makes using the forum as we do on a daily basis feel more like a chore than it should ever need to. These work fine on a computer, where no functionality is replaced, but on mobile they just add an unnecessary step that completely breaks the flow of navigation.
Forcing users to scroll up slightly to be able to access these features or return to the home page is something that, at the very least, needs to be able to be disabled both globally, on mobile, and also per user. It makes the act of navigating between pages feel clunky where it should be elegant, and was up until today. Please, please, please let us disable this.
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