Woah!

Hi all,

As you can see, AAC has gone through a major facelift. This is the third major re-design of AAC in the site’s 12 year history, and easily the biggest.

Over the past 4 months my friend Adam and I have been working nights on this re-launch. We’ve spent hundreds of hours on this, and I’m really excited about the outcome. The new design brings a much cleaner, and unified theme across the forum and the main book.

Aside from the new design, we’ve been hard at work with bringing original content to the site. Our goal is to work full-time on AAC, adding new projects and articles every week.

I’m absolutely open to all constructive feedback. This is major re-design, and I’m sure we have overlooked things while testing. Please let us know, we will be spending the rest of the week tweaking things.

The previous (vBulletin-styled) forum design will always be available to switch back to if any members feel more comfortable posting under that environment. You can visit this page, select the "vB 3.x - Fluid" style in Style, and save.


Thanks all,

Rob

 

Whoops, I posted this under a test account.

 

Jeez, you guys nearly gave me a heart attack. That is one hell of a redesign and I am glad there still is the old skin. The new one didn´t seem too practical at the first glance, but I really spent just a few seconds with it.

 

I'm certain it will be an improvement once the bugs are worked out -- Not the least of which is the login difficulty (described in another thread on this forum) -- sadly, the 'legacy skin mode' doesn't help that

Sincere thanks for your time and effort!

Best regards
HP

 

Nope don't like it. Orange makes me irritable. Well more irritable anyway.

*(Uses hulk smash maneuver to click on link to old format.)

Back to the old setup for me.

 

Thumbs down for the new site ware format, switched back to the previous format.

 

Blue was better.
Too bright for me.

 

Well hey! I think the new format warrants a fair shake! --- It seems a universal feature of human nature that all change (including improvement) is initially uncomfortable/unwelcome - Please evaluate it for a while prior to 'adjudication' --- Just my $.02

Disclaimer: Beyond my membership on these fora, I have no connection with the staff and owner's of this site whatever...

Best regards
HP

 

as much as i'm one with keeping up with change, sadly i'll pass on this one (back to the old format)

time spent on new format is appreciated

edit: afterthought - rather than throwing everyone into the deep end, would have been nice to advertise the change and give readers the option to try it

 

The orange color doesn´t bother me that much, but the huge font makes for a really worse user experience, instead of seeing 20 thread titles at a time I see only about eight.
The posts themselves are really vaguely distinguished from each other and it looks more like a chat than a forum,

 

I landed here after being told to sign in. But it was that I was login in..

Will this orange moment be the next stage in this forum's life ? At least it doesn't seems messy.

 

So far, I strongly prefer the old "blue" design. As kubeek indicated, it was both more compact and more readable.

Also, the new "orange" motif is missing what, for me, was a very important bit of functionality: in the old design, hovering the mouse pointer over a thread title, either in a forum thread list or in the New Posts or Today's Posts lists, would bring up a popup balloon showing the first few lines of the thread's top post. This was my main way (other than simply looking at the title) of determining whether a thread was one I might be interested in looking at (whether for an opportunity to learn something, or for an opportunity to help someone). Without that little popup balloon, navigating AAC is going to be very frustrating.

Maybe this new design brings some improvements to other parts of the AAC site; but for the forums (the only part I ever visit), I don't see any improvement. They weren't broke, and they didn't need "fixing."

 

Well I really hope the option for the old design stays.

 

For me, whose viewing is 98% on my iPhone, the new format is unreadable. Too large of a font, too much wasted space.
I have to scroll around just to find a post.
Definitely not optimized for mobile browsing. .

 

Ow! My eyes!

 

Well I like it, well done and many thanks for providing such a great, ad free electronics forum!

 

I don't mind change, but I'm afraid the new format was too much. It was very cluttered, difficult to navigate even on my big monitors, color was horrific. I am very glad the option remained to switch back to the old format. Could we start a poll to see who prefers which style? I'm curious what others think.

 

Gahh, Eurotrash orange that only the Dutch can wear! (Sorry, Bertus) The windowing on my Android phone is horrible; the write area is barely two lines tall. The new design even crops the important black corners off of my avatar in some displays. I'll switch to the previous format to restore sanity, if I can find the switch.

 

As others have said, the new font and graphics heavy layout make for way too much scrolling and not enough content. I mostly use the forums, and visit them almost exclusively from my smartphone. The new layout is giving me finger cramps from scrolling so much. Also, as kubeek pointed out, despite the larger text, I'm actually having to work harder to read post titles/subjects because the different components blend together a little too well.

Having said that, I like the look of the textbook section, as well as the new header and drop down menus. The orange was a bit of a shock, and blue happens to be my favorite color, but once I parked here for a minute I think the new design looks nice.

The new layout just isn't functional for me, at least not in the forums section. I'll be switching back to blue for now because of the size/scrolling issues, and I sincerely hope the blue option remains available. On the other hand, I'm not afraid of change and hope that we'll be updated if there are significant changes in font size and layout. I'd love to give the new look another chance if it can be made more usable.

Finally, despite my criticisms, I do sincerely appreciate the hard work that went in to this, and think you guys did a lot of great work here.

 

While I agree orange is the new YUCK there are some very good points about the new format, such as more of the screen devoted to content, and the content is presented in a larger size typeface.

So take this as one vote for GOOD JOB and thanks!