On Tue, 27 Mar 2018 11:03:00 +0100, Paul Moore wrote: > Digging into this further, the design work on the Warehouse site has > been ongoing since late 2015, and there was an extensive user testing > phase,
Oh? What did they test the user for? Whatever it was, it was a pity they didn't test them for good taste before letting them approve the current design. (And yes, I hate the front page of the main python.org site too. At least the documentation pages are nice.) There's no point in raising a tracker issue. The web developers are invested in the design, they've spent months working on it, its their baby. Then there's the whole "sunk cost" thing, "we just spent a small fortune redesigning the site, reverting means we wasted it". And the fact that *by definition* the process is biased towards change whether it is needed or not. If the decision-makers didn't think change was wanted, they wouldn't have started the process in the first place. And no matter how cheap the price, "leave well enough alone" was never going to be the winning proposal. So anyone (like me) who likes the old design is going to be pushing crap uphill with a straw, *even* if our opinion had been asked early in the process. > PS I just realised, what I was seeing as "in your face" was the red > "this is a test instance" banner - and that's in your face by design! > You'd have thought I would have realised this earlier, but what can I > say? Once I dismissed that banner, the page looks fine to me. Too much bold blue space. Too much low-contrast pale blue text and icons on blue background. Too much unneeded frippery, like on the home page, which each of the featured projects has a box around it (why?) and an identical icon of a pale-grey cube. (Presumably the cube is meant to symbolise the interconnectedness of all life in the cosmos, and it is faded pale grey in order to signify the ephemeral nature of software.) Too many (*one* is too many) instances of the stupid design fashion for putting *active UI elements* in pale grey, the better to make them look inactive. E.g. the text in search boxes. Speaking of which... oh the irony... in the 1980s, I had Mac with a 9- inch (23 cm) screen, and that was enough real estate to put the instructions outside of the search field: Search for: [ ] ( Find ) and still have a roomy search field AND an actual Find button. (Presumably for people who couldn't push the Enter key). Today, I was using a monitor the size of one of the smaller European countries. Three quarters of the active window was either covered in ads or blank, and yet most webpages have a microscopically small search field with a grammatically ambiguous command, apparently grey-out and inactive, in the search box itself: [ Search ] Yay for progress! As an extra bonus, even when searching is not reliant on Javascript, mangling the text in the search box often is, so unless I'm extra careful, whenever I want to search for (say) "aardvarks", I invariably end up searching for "searaardvarksch". At least the new PyPI search box is better than that. They get a point. -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list