New Website Feedback
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@hopebestman said in Beta Website Feedback:
Although i have one question, are those full volumes or just volumes that you lisecened but not traslated?
I can’t comment on whether all those volumes have already been licensed, however the volumes listed on the beta are volumes that have been released in Japan so far.
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Having all those JP volumes shown is nice for various informational purposes, but I think there should be a toggle to hide them for those who are spoiler-sensitive and don't want to look at later covers. (Or go the opposite way and hide them by default and have a button that shows them, whichever folks think works better.)
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I was so excited to see that the new site layout was being worked on. After poking around and using it for a while I wanted to point out a few things. I'm primarily using the dark theme while looking at everything.
Sorry for the wall of text.
General
With the heavy reliance on JavaScript I'd recommend showing a warning that it should be enabled to browse the site.
In the dark theme its rather odd that the J-Novel club brand color is not used at all.Desktop:
1. Home
The overall layout of this page is quite nice and visually pleasing. Unfortunately it lost the "Coming Soon!" section of the original version. Being a landing page for the main site it was quite convenient to see what was released today and if anything I was reading came out. Since following a series is now an option, when a user is logged it would be nice to have the latest 5 updates for series you follow.2. Titles
The filtering options that are provided seem to have somewhat odd constraints even from a potential querying standpoint. Overall the use of radials only make sense for "Sort By" as it is only possible to sort a list one way at a time. But, the use of radials for the different filters don't make as much sense as you can technically apply more than one filter at a time. By switching to using check boxes and what I'll call "additive filtering" you can remove the "Show All" option from each filter category.
I'll use "Title Type" as an example. Start by replacing "Novels Only" and "Manga Only" with "Novels" and "Manga". If nothing is selected you can potentially end up with a statement likeSELECT * FROM [titles] tWhen you do select something you can build the alternate statement of.
SELECT * FROM [titles] t WHERE t.[TitleType] = "Novels"Further still if you have multiple
SELECT * FROM [titles] t WHERE t.[TitleType] = "Novels" OR "Manga"Using "Title Type" as an the example may be a bit overkill, but "Publication Label" and "Publication Status" could benefit a lot from the change. For "Publication Label" if you add "J-Novel Club" as another option it will give users the option to view only the main label novels or the Heart label novels. If it is decided that a new label will be created by J-Novel Club the query logic won't change, just another "OR" would be added. In turn this would allow for a filter that could ie. see "J-Novel Club" and "J-Novel Not-A-Fake-label" effectively excluding "J-Novel Heart".
On the other hand, "Publication Status" could be simplified. You'd now have the options of "Completed" or "On Hiatus". This would allow the user to filter for explicitly "On Hiatus" novels instead of being forced to see both without losing that option.
Since it exists, and is marked on the series pages it may be worth it to add a filter for "Currently Publishing" to the "Publication Status". If that is on a volume basis instead of a series basis when querying, ignore the suggestion.
Lastly, I've been unable to find a straight search bar on the page. Hope I am safe assuming that that is a future addition, otherwise it is painful going page by page trying to find the series I'm looking for.3. Series Page
Existing Volume Entry
Once again the style of the page looks so good, but it can also busy at times. Overall each volume entry has so many font sizes, colors, button sizes, and button styles that its tricky to really focus on just one thing. By shrinking the "Currently Publishing!" tag and the "Show More" button to be in line with the size of the three other tags should help with the variability in sizes. As for the colors, adjusting the saturation of "Read Now" and the general "Subscription" color to match "Digital" could help with the appearance to a point. The "Subscription" color might simply be too bright for reducing the saturation to help, as it is hard to read the white text that is placed on top.
If I'm interpreting the intention of "Currently Publishing!" correctly it seems redundant. You can see the list of parts currently available and a non-expired publication date which would imply that the volume is currently being translated hence the tag being unnecessary. If I'm misinterpreting the "Parts Available" section and not "Currently Publishing!" then ignore the recommendation.Modified Volume Entry
The cluttered feeling is another thing to be addressed. By allowing the volume name and synopsis text to take up the vertical height of volume preview before the eliding a few problems can be solved. The amount of plain text can balance out the variability of the other items by pushing them into the margins instead of intruding on the synopsis. The amount of white text also helps balancing the variability by establishing a point that has fixed styling. The additional text also gives the user a bit more to work with when reading the synopsis rather than being cut off at a single sentence. Next, by forcing the "Show More" button to the lower corner it will stop moving horizontally allowing the entry to feel like it is growing in length instead of overall size. This will also make hitting the "Show Less" button easier as it would still be in the same vertical column.
The last issue with the volume entry is again with the "Currently Publishing!" tag. Assuming that it is necessary and not redundant, it might make sense to move it to the area with "Read Now" and "Buy". By doing so with the previous suggestions the entry can effectively be broken down into three sections, Book information (cover, title, synopsis), Release information (Digital, Physical, Prepub), and Reading Information (Read Now, Buy, Own, In Progress).Moving on from the biggest part of this page, I want to look at the header area. For the most part it is good, but the "Discuss on Forums" button feels odd. To comment on the forums you need to be logged in, so having it follow the pattern of the "Follow" button would help. Ie. showing "Login to Discuss". Another thing about the button is that on series with more than one volume it only points to the discussion page of the first volume. This is fine for one off novels. This would require some changes to the forum layout, but having a sub forum for each series would give that button a perfect landing point for anyone to discuss the series on the different volumes.
The part of this page that feels off is the legend. It's useful if you can see it, however it goes off the screen after 4 volumes. Unfortunately, I don't have an recommendations related to that.
4. Calendar
The filter recommendations made for the Titles page and the color recommendations made for the Series pages apply here. There also appears to be a bug in "Followed Titles Only" where it can only find Manga that are followed and not Novels.As for the rest of the page, the amount of information being presented at once is a bit overwhelming. Having this page default to showing the release for the next 7 days from today gives it a better short term use as you will start on today's date rather than the first of the month. This is not to say the full month view is useless. Having it as an option that you can switch to allows for the effective long term planning like it currently offers.
5. User
This page is fine for the most part. It'd be nice if the volumes showed their proper names rather than "Volume X". It'd also be nice if clicking the volume name lead to the Series Page so that you could read the synopsis if you wanted to.Other than those nit picks there are simply two bugs I found. One is in regards to the Member tag. When you are a "Premium" member it shows the user as a "Regular" member. The other is the User icon, if the user name is too long it will reduce the width of the Icon. The best solution to that would probably be to elided the user name if it reaches that point.
Mobile
2. Titles
The "Back" button that appears in the header appears to be redundant as it functions identically to the "Previous" button on the page proper.
3. Series Page
The business of the volume entries are actually worse in mobile than it is in desktop, but that is probably due to the nature of mobile devices. The only thing I can really recommend is moving the "In Progress" tag to join the other bits of Reading Information.
When comparing this layout to the desktop version, it appears that the "Currently Publishing!" tag has been renamed to "In Progress". This should probably be standardized. Also the "Show More" button expands downwards on desktop but on an Android browser it expands upwards requiring the user to scroll up to read the text.
Lastly, I understand that screen space is precious, but maybe showing a little more than half a sentence from the synopsis would be nice.
4. Calendar
In the mobile view the information overload is even worse as you need to scroll through double the length of the desktop page to get to the same point. Once again starting with a week view solve the problem for the most part. -
In tittles area, i couldnt find "search by name" area or "followed" area. When i wanna go the a series that i know its name, what should i do? Also, in calender i have a problem. Im following many series and i can see that some of them are in the calender. For example, Lazy Dungeon Master, Ascendance of a Bookworm or Series of Marielle Clarac but when i click the followed tittles only, i only see Marielle's series, cant see the other two.
8 parts, 8 weeks to read a book, than binge read the same book within' 2 hours again.
Myne: Did we deceived him?
Ferdinand: Indeed we did.
Myne: *surprised myneface -
It would be nice to be able to see the Version number of the book along with a stats of when the book was last updated in the user profile under your owned books. also if you are following it in your user profile it would be nice if you could get to the series though there even if you don't own one of the books yet. having a way to link to it though there saves time for looking for it in the future
maybe this could be automated as well by adding the version to the file for example..
ascendance-of-a-bookworm-part-2-volume-2-ver1.0.epub
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@hopebestman If it's worth anything your follow list is on the user page which also has a "search by name". Also I saw a similar thing in the calendar. My hunch was only followed Manga show up not followed Novels, and looking at your issue reinforces that.
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@Sylvanader but i cant go the the page. In user side, its only shows that the books i bought.
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Playing on it again right now and noticed a mild inconvenience. There's the cool ability to redeem credits without having to switch pages, but there's also the alternative retailer links there too. When you buy with a credit though, you lose access to the alternative retailer links since the button just changes to "In Library". It would be nice if you could still get access to them. (Also maybe add Physical Release Links too.)
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When trying to sign on using my Ipad (IOS) it gets stuck loading.
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When I tried to purchase credit from the beta site I was redirected to the usual page but the prices seem a bit off.
I didn't try going through with the order so maybe it's just a display error.
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@Raitoiro Getting credits as non-member costs some real premium $$$, apparenly.
Probably something similar to how going to how /redeemCredit won't load all required data. (or you just plain forgot to log in on main site as opposed to beta, logins may be separate and there is probably no reason to change that).
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@_08 Yeah I don't think I was longin on the main site only on the beta.
Doesn't seems like I could have purchased credit anyway, so probably not something that need to be fix. -
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under user screen would be nice to be able to clear the NEW after you are done downloading it also if the book is updated maybe have a tag a different color labeled UPDATED for anytime an ebook gets updated.
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so looking at the bata site and i see this when you go to buy and I have to say I absolutely LOVE it
"Note: Availability on Amazon may be limited due to their unpredictable moderation policies."
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Found 2 bugs:
I can't display Rokujouma's page on my phone, first it display "Loading..." then "Failed to load data: Error: Request failed (500):".
Also Otherside Picnic's page lists the first vol of the manga in the upcoming volumes.
Do you like death, war and misery ?
Do you like badass op loli who let nobody got in their way ?
Do you like vengeance story?
If so then then vote for The girl who ate a death god -
Rokujouma's series page isn't loading on desktop either.
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It might be a small part in the grand scheme of things, but the fact that he calendar menu and its entries use the same style makes it appear as if it there was an alignment error, and this grinds my gears.
As an easy mitigation, I'd recommend to simply make the border a bit thicker.
(expand spoilers to show image)
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@strangeattractor said in Beta Website Feedback:
There doesn't appear to be such a setting in the Amazon Silk browser that I am using.
Like most accessibility settings,
prefers-reduced-motionis a system-wide device setting that applies to all apps, including web sites. Individual apps or sites shouldn't have this setting; they should honor the system setting.In Android devices like the Fire the setting is at “Settings” → “Accessibility” → “Remove Animations”. I believe the setting was introduced in Android 9 “Pie”, so it should be there on the Fire 7 or later. (My test device is a Fire 5 so I can't confirm.) If the setting isn't there, or if it isn't propagated into the browser, then it will be time to lobby Amazon.
In other devices the setting is called “Reduce Motion” (Macs & iDevices) or “Show animations” (Windows).
