A Mini Discussion On Story Box Design · 6:43pm Jan 30th, 2017
Something I've been working on redesigning the last couple of days, and having a hard time doing, is the full view story box. It's not a substantial redesign but there are parts of it I wanted to sort out.
One of the main things I wanted to change was removing the bar below. I've always hated this bar. I think it looks really messy when paired with the rest of the box and the general site design. Clearly though there are important things down there that need moving elsewhere, which is where a lot of the difficulty I've been having has come into play.
The "First Published" date has been moved into the chapters footer, and hovering over gives you the "Date Modified" information (which I think is fine there, it's not really all that important when the date of the last chapter already essentially gives you that information most of the time). The Stats button has been removed in favour of making the "views" counter clickable (and will go to a separate page instead of the current drop down). Add to groups has been moved into a "menu" at the top right which also contains story download links and the report button.
I think those changes are fairly inconsequential and I don't expect much reaction to them (I might also change them a bit to make it clearer). However, the elephant in the room is characters. For a long time I've been wanting to remove character images. There's a number of reasons for this. For one, it's extra effort when making tags that impedes the ability to easily add a lot of them. Secondly, a lot of characters are difficult to recognise at such a small size, especially if you have any visual issues. The fact that they sit below the story also means if you're looking for a combination of genres and characters, you have to jump up and down visually to identify those stories.
So...where do they go? Well, as probably anyone reading this knows, the goal eventually is to have a more fully fledged tag system. Clearly characters are part of this tagging system so I guess the better question is where do tags go?
Here you can see I've moved characters to be textually represented next to the story genres, rating and warning tags (sex/gore). Genres have also had their colours removed in favour of having a colour per tag "type".
Another potentially controversial change, I know. Colours for genres were a nice idea but over time I decided that it wasn't such a great idea over all. With an original small selection of tags with semi obvious colours, it worked out alright, but especially with the last batch of genres we added, the colours we had left to choose from was pretty limited and a lot of them share close colour schemes with other genres. Nonetheless, I do appreciate they do provide a visual indicator when scanning the page and I know 100% there will be a lot of push back against such a change. I think it's needed though. It also provides a much cleaner look to the page compared to the mess of colours that can currently be created on the site. I believe there's a balance between function and form here, and I think the different coloured tag types is functionally better than the alternative.
The last change is cover art is on the right hand side, so that all stories have their description line up and it makes it easier to scan down the page at descriptions.
I am interested in hearing if anyone has any alternate suggestions on the design approach here and whether you think it'd have a negative effect on your usage of Fimfiction.
edit: One thing I forgot to mention is that if this goes ahead, each tag has a specific id available in the CSS which means people could write extensions or just stylesheets to colour things if they so chose.
My worry is that stories that use many character tags with clutter up the top. Would it be possible to still use the images in lieu of names? Or do you feel that would aestheticly unpleasant?
Just food for thought! I like it overall
4402690 I think it'd be aesthetically unpleasant but that's not the main reason I wouldn't want to do it. As I mentioned in the post, images have quite a few downsides in general especially looking towards the future of tagging on the site.
I like where you're going, but I have to ask, do you plan on implementing a more robust filter system for users? Even a genre filter would do wonders for user experience.
4402702 Do you mean a global block list? Because you can already filter genres out on a browse page
I personally liked the design that you showed me, it looked cleaner and easier on the eye
Looks pretty good to me. The tag color change makes a lot of sense, especially with the upcoming expansion of the system. The colors were nice when we had just a handful, but that clearly doesn't scale.
The character tag change looks fine too and they make sense being with the rest of the tags. Like with like.
Most to the changes seem pretty in order. Although you were right about the push to the colored tags.
It may just be a personal thing, but I find colors to give more feeling to the tags. I mean it's kind of hard to take a "Gore" or "Thriller tag seriously if it's some bright color, especially if it just blends in with the other tags. It's fine for the "base" tags, but maybe have the more serious tags (e.g.: gore, sex, thriller, etc) be a darker color?
As for the characters, yeah. Some of them can be a bit difficult to recognise. However, I feel like putting the names up top with the tags could clutter it up for stories which make use of the max number of tags. Although I guess it would make it easier for readers to see what characters they should expect in the story. So in a way, this is fine. Still gonna miss the pictures though
Overall though, I still think it looks great. Just a few thoughts I thought I'd throw in.
4402719 Gore/Sex are already a different colour because they're a different tag type (Warning tags). I don't think it'd be prudent to arbitrarily make some darker based on how edgy they are though :V
Even with 5 characters tagged and several genres, it doesn't take up too much space but you're right it does concern me for the future which is making me sort of sit here and think for entire days rather than writing anything, but I do have some solutions in mind should it prove to be an issue.
It's sad to see character images go, but I'll get used to it eventually.
Are you actually going to call the expanded site Genfiction when it finally comes around?
4402723 No. Genfic is a code name. I have a name planned but it won't be revealed until everything is set up for it.
4402725 'knighty's Fiefdom'
4402703 Yep, I'm talking global. Click the gore tag and never see it again unless you unclick it.
4402732 Will probably happen, it's just something that has some minor technical concerns for me.
4402733 Good to know. I'm not saying we have to implement derpibooru's global filter (although that would be amazing if it were doable) but our current options are pretty much just mature on or off. If people didn't have to see things they don't approve of we'd have fewer people going into stories and giving negative comments or downvotes just because they disapprove.
I'd have decried the loss of genre colors, but pointing out how many there are, and how close some of them have become visually, I think it's the way to go. It'll certainly take some getting used to!
Maybe the character tags could go into the description box? but as words instead of a picture
4402722 Fair enough. But yeah, gore/sex tags being different, I understand. Others I guess are fine. Color is just a thing with me.
Well, you seem to have it under control. It does seem like a thing that would come up at some point. It was a good idea to put that limit on the number of tags. I've seen older stories that had about 10 character tags.
THAT would be a problem with this. But see how it goes. If it feels like it will be a problem, I guess you have a backup. I honestly look forward to seeing how it looks.
4402701 I'm in favor of removing visual tags in favor of text tags, for two reasons:
1. Like you said, for people with visual difficulties, it can be hard to identify the characters without mousing over them.
2. The move towards general fiction would essentially mean ditching the image tags eventually, so there's no time like the present to get rid of them. That way it'll be less work to implement a broader range of character tags later.
4402741 That would scatter them which goes against one of the reasons for moving character tags up there.
4402769 Honestly theirs not really anywhere they can go
Covers on the right just looks weird to me. It kind of breaks from the overall flow of the page (everything else if left aligned, so why not the cover art?)
If you want the covers aligned, it's easy enough to enforce a constant width for the cover art, either by downscaling, or padding smaller images.
The other changes, I quite like.
As far as tags go, they're okay. I liked them the way they were, with the different colours for each genre, and the separation of the character tags helped with distinguishing them. At the same time I agree it was rather odd having them at the bottom of the story.
Why not a compromise? Break the tags section in two, keep the genres on the first row with their colours, and all other tags below them?
Genre tags are unlikely to get that many, and they're likely going to be system/moderated tags anyway, so I see no problem with them being treated a little differently, or preferentially, over the other types.
(Pretty close to what 4402741 suggested, in retrospect. I guess it pays off to read the comments first. :/)
My biggest concern is the genre color tags. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I have a clean solution at the moment. But while quickly browsing over stories in my reading lists, I find those color tags to be very helpful - but I do agree that the overlap in color in some of the recent ones is annoying. Having two distinctions rather than one is useful.
I am also somewhat concerned over tag clutter - having the genre tags stand alone at the top was useful, and I think that you're putting three different sets of information in one place. For one thing, I think your old rating tag solution was actually better - that E/T/M next to the story title feels intuitive, and it doesn't make much sense to include it on the tags line, mostly because it feels like a different sort of information and it effectively adds another "genre" tag. It doesn't really add to the clutter, is very compact, is effectively "invisible" when it needs to be, and still marks a story as mature right up at the top.
The other thing is that the character tags there, again, clutter up the genre tags - I care about genre more than character most of the time, and on top of that, thinking about the future, we might want to stick more tags on stories - which is just going to clutter up that area further.
One thought - given that character tags are generally less important, why not stick them on the bar on the bottom as the only thing down there, and have the bar just not appear there if there's no character tags? That way they don't clutter up the top of the story, but they're still visible on the page if you look down. Putting the least important information down at the bottom makes sense, and if you end up adding other tags in the future, you can potentially avoid them cluttering up the top as well.
I don't know if it's just me, but I think that the rating tag (teen, mature, etc) looks better as is. It's one of the first things readers should known when seeing a story and shouldn't be placed with the other tags. You don't need to scroll up much to see it anyways.
I also agree that the color loss would be jarring but something I can accept given some time. However, this is going to make stories that spam tags look really cluttered. All in all, I'm curious as to how this design would work out.
(Now for a way to remove downvotes you accuidentally clicked on people's stories
)
4402786
Or really just a way to 'unvote' in general.
I suppose you could still turn it into an upvote.
I don't think character tags are nearly as important as the rating and genre tags are, so it seems to be working to cross purposes to put them up with the other tags. But, I also have no idea where else they should go, so I suppose don't listen to me.
Cover image on the right feels really weird, though. I like the cover image as the first thing you see about a story after the title.
4402791
I do, but the decision is much more controversial when it happens to your own stories...
Well, spent a few minutes thinking about this.
Here's one thing I came up with: three of the tags (Anthro, Equestria Girls, and Human) are more or less MLP specific (well, I guess Anthro is really a general furry thing). They aren't really quite the same thing as the other tags - they're closer to fandom tags.
2nd person is also kind of odd, but I can understand why it would be a top-level genre tag.
Anyway... those three tags could be treated, ultimately, like fanfiction tags on the genfiction site, however you end up doing that. They could potentially be separated out from the other tags and placed elsewhere - possibly up in the top-right of the title bar, or possibly as the very first thing on the far left (where I assume MLP or whatever will be on the Genfiction site). That gives you three more colors (potentially) to play with (or, I suppose, three fewer colors eating up space - at least potentially).
4402779 Padding cover art is messy and doesn't help if there's no image at all. Also, there are several other things right aligned so I don't buy that argument.
4402783 I agree on the E/T/M tags. I've been toggling them back and forward unable to make up my mind but they're definitely better up there I think. Clutter is something that also concerns me but I don't think it'll be as much of an issue as people think, considering how I have the tag system planned out in my head. I also agree genre is more important which is why it's at the start and in a different colour. I think that visually separates it enough.
4402793
...
You mean if you vote your own story? Yeah, I've asked about that in Discord and I think the consensus is it's normal to like your own stuff. :T
4402800
Maybe, but when I looked the image you posted, most of the text and tags are left aligned. It's only a few small, inconsequential things that align to the right and they're mirrored with something else to the left.
But I guess on top of it all, I'm used to having the picture on the left and it's the first thing I look for on a story. (Second is the title, third description, then genres, and characters.)
(Titanium kind of got to the issue better than me, I think)
4402800
Well, I messed around with the color spectrum a bit. This was about what I came up with (I arbitrarily added the Poetry tag because that seemed like maybe something you'd want for GenFic; I left off Anthro, Equestria Girls, and Human, but there are some extra colors down at the bottom, though I'm somewhat dubious of whether Extra Color 5 is distinct enough, and I'm not sure that 1, 2, and 10 can actually all be used together).
Still, it seems like there should be enough color space for the genre tags, though I might have cheated a bit, as four use black text, and that may be undesirable.
http://i.imgur.com/ypsbFYs.jpg
not really feeling the cover art change, unfortunately
i think it's because when you have a physical book, the first thing you see when you look at that book is the cover. with this tho, the first thing you see is words, then the cover, unless you're weird
i prefer the old alignment cause of the way the text sorta wrapped around the cover. i don't think descriptions should look like professional letters (where having the words all line up would be necessary in their case).
I kinda liked the little character pictures, but yeah; trying to maintain a system like that once the site expands from just poni to general fiction?
Mein gott; just thinking about the logistics involved in an undertaking like that hurts my brain,
Same for the colored genre tags... they're nice for identifying stories at a glance, but it'd be weird to keep the genre tags multicolored while the character tags used only one color.
In line with what 4402798 mentioned about tags like 'Equestria Girls' and 'Human'; would the plan be to have something like a 'fandom subset' of tags? For example, when you're making a story you pick 'MLP', which then adds a new subset of tags specific to pony fiction for the author to choose from? I have to imagine something like that would have to be developed on a go-forward basis for each fandom that needs it.
Then again I'm not sure there are too many fandoms with the depth and breadth of variation that MLP has garnered, so maybe it wouldn't be as much of a pain as I'm imagining,
Putting the image on the right is a huge fix. At present, I intentionally use tall images so that my words won't wrap over into "where the buck did the text go" territory.
Also: Please add rating tag to chapter view. If you get linked to a story chapter directly you never actually see the rating of the story, and this can be misleading. This even bypasses the M filter! You can ask ponies not to link to chapters, but it's easy to forget something like that in a non-M blog post.
After being so used to so many sites having the cover art right aligned, its giving me a bit of an uncanny valley feel. Not sure what else you could do without taking up more real-estate, like sticking the image on the top and everything else (descriptions) below, the way mobile does it.. Forcing all the text to the right would just be weird.
Side thought: Would it be better to have character tags be on the second row?
Ex
[Genre][Genre][Genre][Genre]
[Char][Char]
Looking pretty good now knighty. Shifting the image position makes the description a lot easier to read, and having more tabs at the top gives it a much neater look. However, I'd suggest giving character tags their own row to make them more distinguishable and not confused with genre tags.
If I can learn Swift and Sketch, I may want to make an iOS app for FimFiction (but that is a VERY FAR-fetched possibility)
First of all, I love the change in the cover location (and not just because I love vertical cover art and this is so much better for that). However, I'm disappointed to see the character pictures go (especially after we just added a whole bunch of them) and I think a redesign of the portrait would be more effective (small black border, for example).
While many seem to agree with the color change for genre tags, I have to disagree. The human eye can recognize color and images far faster than it can read. Personally, I avoid tragedy and sad stories. I'm hesitant about dark. I enjoy romance stories. I like being able to glance at a story and know instantly what type of story it is just from the colors. That will definitely impact my ability to quickly find the stories I like.
You're shifting from a system that can be identified with a glance (colors for tags and character pictures) to one that's going to require a reader to do a deeper investigation into the story (read each tag to find out what they want). I could see that hurting stories a lot. It's adding another barrier to entry for stories and quick comprehension of what the reader is seeing.
If that decision it made, I will definitely be using something that modifies it back to it's previous format, because I don't see myself being able to use FimFiction nearly as effectively with this system.
4402935 That looks awesome.
4402802 I accidently, while testing, found that indeed I could up/downvote my own stories, and currently only two of my stories I have touched. One with an upvote, since it didn't have any and I really like the story. The other is a story I downvoted, since I really, really dislike it. Anyway thanks for saying it is a consensus, it really helped. ^^
It is nice and practical. I can go for it, it also looks quite wonderful.