"One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say." — Bryant H. McGill
I appreciate you having the staff’s back. I truly do. As a union member, a sometime employee, and a sometime boss or manager, I agree completely that it’s the right thing to do. And I hear you: you’re working on fixing some of the stuff that has us tearing our hair out, and I’m grateful for that.
But I want to focus on how the beta feedback was handled. To me, that’s a critical part of this change that hasn’t been adequately addressed.
Here’s the thing… This whole business could have gone so much more smoothly if what the beta testers said from the very beginning had been listened to.
“There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.”
― G.K. Chesterton
The users said outright that our concerns were functionality, efficiency, readability — and tech team said outright that their concerns were bugs. And the key issues you’re fed up with hearing about? Functionality, efficiency, readability.
I know this seems like a condescending thing to say, but please consider it carefully, because it’s not condescending at all: The designers, tech team, you — none of you use the site the way committed users do. They just don’t. You just don’t.
"The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people." — Woodrow Wilson
If they and you did, things like having to load an entire story with all its comments, just to read a reply and to answer someone, would never have happened. We all brought this up in beta, and it was — as far as I can tell — flat out ignored. Because you and the designers don’t have the experience of doing that, multiple times a day, every time you’re on the site. You don’t engage daily the way the rest of us do. You post, you hang around a while, and you’re gone. Which is as it should be: you have important things to do. The tech team? Not interested and don’t have time to spend immersed in the community. They have an tough job to do that doesn’t allow for that. Admin and Front Pagers? Same deal: no time for that. It’s those of us for whom this site is home, the ones who might hang in a diary on and off for a day or more, the ones who check our replies often and click to see what was said to us and respond if necessary, the ones who use all the tools you and your crews have created, sometimes dozens of times a day — we’re the ones to whom readability, functionality, usability matters.
Don't get me wrong: that’s not criticism. Like I said, you all have other things to do, and I’m glad you’re doing them.
"The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them." — Ralph Nichols
But we were not listened to when we reported these issues — reported them from the moment beta opened up to us.
“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.”
― Bernard Baruch
Committed kossacks — I mean seriously committed — interact on the site in a way admin, designers, techs, and front pagers do not.
We’re not all just pissing and moaning because we hate change. These are things that are wasting our time, using up our devices’ resources, and killing communication here in this essential community — the very thing you say you want to improve.
These issues don’t apply nearly as much to writing blog posts. The consensus is that the draft options are far easier, though the headers and photos could definitely take up less space, and we still need a preview option (‘cause what you guys call WYSIWYG isn’t).
The problem is, always has been, the comments section, where most of us live our online lives. From jump we stated as clearly as we could what the problems were.
- That there was something wrong with the font, even if we couldn’t pin down what it was
- That there was too much white space, with no reference to the left margin of the comments
- That easily accessing replies, searching in list mode, finding the rec button… myriad issues… needed to be restored and were too cumbersome and confusing in the new version
- That there was no easy way to see whether we’d rec’d a comment
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That we don’t care about avatars (which slow down loading) as much as being able to clearly see who posted a comment — not who posted the parent comment
- That rollovers doing what they do all over the page as we mouse around are a pain in the ass and a time-waster
- That searching for new comments needs to be easier (the j/J thing doesn’t work if you reload, and is presently highly unreliable anyway)
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That some of us deliberately elected to not have pages auto-refresh so that we could search for new comments easily, and that with that option gone our navigation of the site is compromised
- That waiting seconds, sometimes minutes (sometimes many) for the comment box to be ready for us is a huge distraction and a maddening time-waster — and that sometimes by the time it loads we’ve forgotten what it was we wanted to say so very eloquently.
The recs matter to us. It’s how we talk to each other without posting an actual comment — just like nonverbal communication in the corporeal world. Right now, it's impossible to tell if we’ve rec’d a comment when we return to a diary or reload the page. You have to hover over that impossibly tiny star (seriously — could it be smaller?), and wait for the pop-up. Moreover, the list of who’s rec’d a comment it is at the bottom of the comment rather than at the top. Some comments (including some of mine) are damned long, and it helps to see who’s rec’d it before we scroll (there's a lot of scrolling here, you know) all the way to the bottom to check it out. It needs to be back at the top. Sometimes who’s rec’d a comment tells us whether or not we want to spend time reading it. We need a quick way to see, no matter how many times we reload or migrate away from the page, whether we’ve rec’d a comment or not.
“Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.” — Madeleine L’Engle
“It's not at all hard to understand a person; it's only hard to listen without bias.” — Criss Jami
The old comment section worked because it was compact: you always knew where you were. The information you needed was right there at the top: who rec’d it, and more or less what its subject was. The radio button indicating whether we had rec’d it or not was right freaking there underneath. You could scroll down a page and pick out comments you’d missed that you might yet want to rec. We mostly read a lot more than we comment, and reccing a comment is a way to say I saw you, I read what you said, I respect it.
northanger wrote a post this week: DK5: 53 Contrast Ratio Failures, in which she discussed accessibility of the new design. By all means, read the link, but I also asked her to clarify some of what she wrote for those of us beneath that level of comprehension. She said this:
The Illuminating Engineering Society identifies Six Factors of Visibility: Luminance, Time (speed), Size, Contrast, Color, Age. Basically, I verified DK’s accessibility using a WCAG-compliant tool that can analyze a website’s “luminosity contrast ratio”. Two other tools I checked gave similar results.
My post’s objective was making a technical case to prioritize an issue. W3C’s Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is currently the only Accessibility “standard” for the Web. The DOJ is looking at updating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for Web accessibility, but rates WCAG quite highly.
Technology Users always give sufficient feedback, but don’t always get the appropriate response. When Kos said “constructive criticism always wins over [complaints]” & “people get used to the new look” [that] meant, imo, deciphering “my eyes hurt” into techospeak — which sounded like an Accessibility issue. There’s plenty of Accessibility technospeak for the Web.
Kos needs to realize he has two weeks to make DK more accessible. Because two weeks is an eternity for the disabled. IOW, Disability Rights are not net neutral.
…
DK has a powerful web footprint and needs to keep the DK brand accessible on all platforms. Kos may not be able to pay for in-house QA, but he can sure contract companies who can verify his developer’s code.
IMHO, Kos is highly responsive — let’s make sure the DK User base provides “constructive criticism” to help identify and prioritize site issues.
(Emphasis is northanger's, and I have her permission to post her comments here.)
You want us to understand what you and the tech team have accomplished, and what you’re all dealing with. I think we’re all trying to do that. It helps when you explain along the way as you’ve been doing, and we are grateful for that..
We want you to understand what we’ve been dealing with, and why it’s so important. So we’ve been trying to explain. Not whinging. Not whining about change. Explaining. You have users who are so committed to this site that even though it triggers migraines, they are coming here to try and explain their issues to you.
"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply." — Stephen R. Covey
It’s not that we’re complaining that things are different from DK4 — it’s that they just don’t work as well — as functionally, as efficiently, as easy to read.
So I would ask that the next time you do this — and there will be a next time — more concern be shown to the people who use all the tools here; who interact multiple times a day, sometimes all day; who use the site the way no tech person has time to. I’m asking that they — that we — be listened to when we say something that isn’t a bug is still a big issue.
Had those early reactions been attended to in the first place, you wouldn’t have the users of this vitally important site up in arms, you wouldn’t need to defend your tech team, and we wouldn’t be taking up tons of real estate with diaries like this.
It’s about listening, and trusting what you hear, rather than diminishing its intent by dismissing it as resistance to change.
"It is the province of knowledge to speak And it is the privilege of wisdom to listen." — Oliver Wendell Holmes
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