Game in Progress page update

[GTSchemer]

The new view is missing a crucial thing - information whose turn it is.

I'm playing mostly slow async games with friends, and seeing who has to play the next move at a glance is useful in a number of ways:
- see how the round progresses, if it's stuck on one player and maybe they need a nudge, or is it slowly progressing
- "oh, my move will be next" - positive anticipation
- an opponent whose move can influence my situation the most played - let's see how's the situation
- in simultaneous games (like Race for the Galaxy) - it's easy to see if we are waiting for only 1 player (that I for example know, won't play during the night), or for everyone to make a move.

It might not be the most important information to others, but it's to how I consume games on BGA.

I definitely agree with this.

I provided feedback during the lab phase asking that the empty arena section be lower, since I don't want to always see a blank arena section ABOVE my tournament games when I never play arena. I'm not sure if that changed or not.

[zedmango]

Having a separate "games in progress" page is fine since I'll never use it anyway.

But please don't mess with the existing list in any way! I mean the one when you click the upper right icon.

Are you planning to change that list? Please don't.

[GTSchemer]

Having a separate "games in progress" page is fine since I'll never use it anyway.

But please don't mess with the existing list in any way! I mean the one when you click the upper right icon.

Are you planning to change that list? Please don't.

It has already been radically changed, and will go live. As testers, we provided lots of detailed feedback during the lab stage. Hopefully some of it was incorporated.

[zedmango]

I'll explain in detail what's wrong with the view on the "games in progress" page you posted a link to, and why the current view that comes up when you press the upper right is so much easier to read.

The current view has a plain white background, with no lines, boxes, or borders in the way. That makes it easier to see the list of games. Whereas the "games in progress view" on the link has boxes and a colored background.

The current view has the correct alignment. On the left is the picture of the game box, and then there is a narrow blank white strip between the game boxes and the text. Then on the right of the narrow strip, all the text is aligned and left-justified, making it easy to read.

The "games in progress" view messes up the alignment. The name of the game is centered, not left-justified, making it harder to go down the list of names to find one. There is no clean border strip between the game boxes and text, rather, the names of the players go all the way to the left, directly below ths game boxes, making everything harder to read.

The current view is ideal, and easy to read. The "games in progress" link view is a mess and painful.

[GTSchemer]

I tend to agree, which is also why I like the classic "Play Now" interface due to less visual clutter, and more accessibility for players such as myself with visual sensitivity.

Unfortunately, we may not have a choice.

[zedmango]

We do have a choice - we can stop using the site and switch to one of the many alternatives, and tell them why.

There's no reason to spend all this time and effort changing a perfectly usable interface to make it less usable when the site has so many bugs that need to be fixed.

PLEASE ALLOW AN OPTION TO KEEP THE OLD INTERFACE, OR YOU WILL LOSE MANY OF US.

[GTSchemer]

Unfortunately, looking at the screenshot, it appears to have at least one of the same problems as when we tested it:



It may be possible to use custom CSS to hide the arena section, but it would be great if we could move it.


In addition, it leads to heavier cognitive load and less of a smooth user experience, since the user's eye has to scan down, then across certain rows, then down again. This is instead of simply scanning up and down in an aligned column.

I would be happy to draw a picture of the how the eye moves around the page if this would help.

[zedmango]

How would that even work on mobile?

Can you make the web browser window narrower to force it into a column alignment?

[lordsilk]

There was an option to use only one-column list in the new layout I think.
Although on my monitor, currently it fits 8 tables, on new layout it was less I think (6? 5?)

[JimTacobs]

I think this new layout is really slick and I look forward to you guys modernising more parts of the site.

People will always fight against things looking new compared to how they're used to for years. You're never gonna stop that. Good on you all for deciding to move forward.