Give us as much detail as you can in the feedback. What’s the good thing or problem that you’ve seen. Why is it good/bad? What steps can we take?
When I login to MoT I first see these two big images and then have to scroll down to see the content/ click on the items from the horizontal menu… It takes me more steps to get where I want to … It might be good to map out the user journeys of the site and see how many steps it takes to get places… for first time users and then users that login continuously. Also, I would suggest to make the images smaller, so that the headings are visible and I can click on them without scrolling.
For some reason, for me, I don’t use the vertical menu at all…maybe it’s not in my immediate vision and that I’m use to horizontal menus on sites. Interesting! Maybe there is some UX info about this…
I have to agree, I find it a bit hard to navigate throughout everything
This is also called “forum” and not “Club”
Whenever you click on Community Chat:
There is no way back, even the back button in the browser doesn’t work.
I’m also quite annoyed that when you hover over for example Discover, the submenu’s are not popping out. I actually need to do another click on Discover to show the submenu’s. But not all things have submenu’s like Community Chat.
Reading post like this makes me think how great it is to have a forum for testers, since people who are involved in the community stuff are usually pretty enthusiastic there won’t be any issues that don’t get reported. Not just bugs, but also suggestions for potential usability improvements and similar.
Usability often gets overlooked in a lot of products… It can change whether someone continually uses the product or finds an alternative… I could rant about this all day @mirza
The inconsistent navigation is jarring, as I use the forum/club often, and it reminds me how much I miss the top navigation on the main site
Again, it is jarring when I click on say “events” and it takes me to a differently styled page, the top navi s back! huh?
I’ve got an ultrawide monitor, the very narrow list of icons for the left nav feels lost over to one side, but I maybe an outlier
Some menu items have sub-menus (content), this is surprising as others don’t (events). I feel the things in the content sub-menu are a bit hidden, and I wouldn’t know where to look for them.
Home page
The two top “hero” boxes feel very sparse, and currently inconsistent with each other (one has headline text, the other has an icon as the only top row
It is not immediately obvious for me to understand the domain language being used in the “Our Testing Community” feed. What tab do I want, if I want to to learn learn more about test automation? no clue. Some sorting and filtering based on intent of what I want as a visitor would be an amazing addition
It’s very confusing trying to understand what “Testing Community” content is MoT, and what is external community links - the title makes it sound like it’s all external, but actually the majority isn’t external blogs - except maybe timeline
The timeline, could do with a date/time stamp so I know… what the timeline is
I love it. Especially when one person initiates feedback, a chain of bugs and improvements is followed by others checking it out. I’m so guilty of this myself hahaha.
But this is probably one of the best ways to find bugs by ‘customers’… well maybe not to find bugs but to report them.
To be honest, I haven’t loaded the main MoT website https://www.ministryoftesting.com/ since ages… I always open the club site and from there I navigate into other areas when interested or a topic is thrown up in a thread.
And having subscribed to the newsletters I also get informed, so one less clicking for visiting the main homepage…
But to add - I like the nice and great construtive way others here respond and help. This is so great. And I will have a look more on the main homepage to gather some experience and thoughts before I can add something here
Just a quick message to say I’m aware of this thread.
Lots of great comments in here, that I’ll review in more detail in a few weeks. I’m teaching all this week, and away at MoT Athens next week and a Ruby conference. Andrew is also off this week. So, will struggle to action many changes.
Context for you all. We are mid themes right now. 70% of the site is on the new theme, and in coming weeks it will be 100%. We are trying to do this page by page, instead of a big bang.
We are also looking to just be better than the last page. I think we’ve achieved that. And will then look to make small continuous changes.
Regarding the nav, we’ll be making changes to this, to bring back the top nav, but that will have a CTA to trigger the sidebar. It’s also important to acknowledge will the sidebar that I’m tried to make it very accessible. Which limits some of the comments.
It’s not called the Club as new people won’t know that name. Forum is more universally understood.
I’ve no idea why you can’t go back, after clicking chat. Disocurse maybe doing something.
Hoovering is possible, but not a very accessible.
If I hover, where do I move the focus to? On the hover button, or onto the first menu in the nav?
If someone ‘hovers’ via keys the nav bar would continue to popout as they tabbed through.
Or I do both, but then it’s inconsistent, and also makes everything more complex.
This will be resolved once one on one theme, we are very close to this.
Again, events yet to be moved.
Limited with what we can do on what res. We use bootstrap.
They will. Be that requires more features to be able to populate said likst that don’t exist yet. So this was the decision I made to focus us getting over themes. All will have menus eventually.
Home page
Was a suggestion the team had, announcenemts on the left are currently hard coded, soon the team will be able to dynamically create and set these.
Those are the key verbs of MoT. We are planning changes to our onboarding to allow folk to maintain a list of tags they are interested in. e.g. test-automation. api-automation. exploratory-testing.
Agreed. we are keen to hear whys to improve that. We are hoping to pull in OG info, and somehow make it clearer what is MoT domain, and what is external. Keen to hear your ideas.
4 Timeline has time stamps like a year ago, community asked them to be removed.
I very much like how you’ve framed a “Why am I visiting today?” approach as “short session” and “long session”. And we’ve got a brilliant opportunity to satisfy both as we continue to enhance the MoT site and its integration with The Club.
Followed by highlights of areas you think either:
A. I’ll be most interested in (based off of usage data, don’t guess, use analytics)
or
B. Things you want to promote, things you want me to be interested in (other than sponsorship, I’m thinking like upcoming events, recent new content you want to feature)
And finally, navigation of last resort being categories, to browser when I don’t know what I want, but I want to see what is on offer.
If you put search first. You are encouraging folk away from A & B. That’s how I feel about it.
I think I’ll put search back in the top nav (so search bar always there on all pages) when it returns, but I’d like the home page to focus on things curated by us. Either things we are promoting, or things we believe you’d like based on what your’ve told us.
Curated based on behaviour/interests
MoT promotion. MoT needs.
Search
Discover - scroll lists/timelines
Navigation
Sounds very reasonable Richard! Looking forward to the top nav coming back. Overall, it’s really great to see so much effort going into re-designing the site. I think it’s headed in a great direction and will ultimately have huge benefits when it settles down.
