[mb-users] A Call For Feedback - "StructuredXHTML" branch

[Aaron Cooper]

On 7/11/07, Oliver Charles <oliver.g.charles at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Without furthor ado, the pages I've have reworked:
>
> http://musical.raccoonz.net - The main homepage, should let you get an idea
> of what the new site will look like (not much different)

The first thing I notice here is that there is a lot of padding in the
sidebar.  Personally, I don't like the sidebar taking up anymore space
than it has to and having more buffer above and below each section of
links just makes for more scrolling.  This also applies to the
headings in the sidebar.

I agree with Frederic's comments about the readability of the links
(they're a little faint) and the grey labels in the search boxes are
also not very easy to read.

Not sure if this is by design or not, but once a search box in the
sidebar is cleared and you leave the box, it stays empty.  This would
very easily cause confusion about what the heck the search box is for
(since we don't have labels near each box).  I guess you'd have to
refresh the page if you wanted to find out what search you were about
to do.

Another thing about the sidebar searches: It would be beneficial, I
think, to expand them to utilize the width of the sidebar rather than
leave some empty grey-space after the search box.  We would be able to
see more of what we're typing (which would be helpful because the
search boxes are pretty small at the moment).

If I could nit-pick one more thing, I'd say that the "[ ] Direct
Search" and "Other Searches" links may be a little confusing if you
haven't used them before.  Perhaps there could be some space between
the two links or maybe "Direct Search" could be moved above the text
boxes.

> http://musical.raccoonz.net/search.html - The search portal
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/search/external.html - External
> searches
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/browseartists.html - Browse
> artists (please try edge cases, such as the last page. I did have some bugs
> with this earlier!)
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/browsevarious.html - Browse
> releases
> http://musical.raccoonz.net/browselabels.html - Browse
> labels

On the browse pages, my first tab takes me to the search text boxes in
the sidebar.  I think it would make more sense if tabbing took you
first to the text field to enter the browse character.

>
> Not much so far, but if I could get feedback on these, and get as many
> people to agree on them as possible, I can get the bugs down, and start
> merging it into the trunk when we're ready :) I'm around in IRC most of the
> time, so if you wanted to talk with me and get me to mock some ideas up, etc
> - I'm there!
>
>
> Thanks for reading, I'll shut up now :)
> - Ollie / aCiD2

I hope you find my comments constructive - that's how I meant them to
be interpreted :)

Regards,
-Aaron (cooperaa)