Hi, On 30.11.2013 20:57, SomeoneElse wrote: > Understood (hence my Henry Ford quote) but on that general point - can > anyone explain in what way the new site is better than the old one?
Most people who reacted favourably to the new design said things like it looked "fresher" or "more modern". Most people complaining were essentially those who had gotten used to the old web page and its quirks and therefore any change would require them to change too. > I'd > love to know what I can do with the new site or could do easier that I > couldn't do before. I think that anyone who was already using the old site regularly wasn't really the target group of this redesign because they would all have gotten used to how things were. This redesign was done by employees of MapBox, and they spent a lot of time on it. I'd prefer them to weigh in in this thread themselves but they may not be reading osm-talk so here's a quick run-down: There was a presentation at SOTM-US and one at SOTM in Birmingham, and there were numerous discussions online (in github tickets and on mailing lists). A play version of the redesigned UI was available for months, and the talk list was informed two months ago. Everyone had the chance to chime in, and many did; everyone was heard but of course not everyone's wishes could be catered to. The resonance to the redesign presentations was positive on average, but apart from the "fresher look" which is a matter of taste, there were also tangible improvements behind then scenes. For example, the new design is proven to react better to different screen sizes (especially smaller screens), and the code also allowed the closing of a great many bugs that were filed against the old web page. So. I'm saying this was a long process, which, albeit driven by a small group of people, got buy in from enough people (including devs and admins) to go ahead. This is how it works. Is it objectively "better" than the old site? I don't know and it is not really relevant. Enough people *found* it to be better. If YOU (meaning not you, SomeoneElse, but you, the reader) want to try your hand at a complete redesign or at micro-redesigning a small aspect of this, our new web site, then go ahead - your changes will be subjected to the very same process that the changes submitted by the MapBox team were, and if they are considered to have merit then they will be on the web page in due course. In fact, YOU (again, you the reader) or a team from your company or you and a group of friends could have done the exact same thing that MapBox has - make a plan, publicize and discuss, implement, submit for review, make fixes, and so on, and then after many man-months of work it would be YOUR design having gone up the other day (and it would be YOU being at the receiving end of all kinds of criticism because of course no design will please all). This redesign proves that it is possible to make changes to the web site, and I hope that it will encourage a broader spectrum of contributors to participate in defining how we present ourselves. The OSM web site is not some big untouchable thing that is somehow exempt from the way OSM works otherwise. If you don't like something, you *can* open a ticket and hope for someone to fix it. But now as always - if you make a pull request (which is newspeak for opening a ticket with a patch attached) then your contribution is much more likely to actually make a difference. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
