New blog format

I see the blogs section has had a make-over, but the text and even the images are curiously left-aligned making the pages all off-centre! Maybe waiting for something to fill right-hand side?
And all the new posts are shown last on front page!

As for the narrow column and big spacious text - is it tablet/phone focus?
This seems to be the standard for web design now but when most of your readers are probably on desktop, is it best?

Alternatively, instead of making minor suggestions to improve the blog’s new look, we could all just admit that the new blog is ridiculously cluttered and gross.

It is clear that that the changes were made to improve its marketing potential — why else would ā€œLatest Postsā€ not take the biggest part of the screen? Only random investors would care about seeing posts from months ago. Us Unity users who wanted to read (or even see) those posts again would have just deliberately searched for them.

Last nail in the Unity Blog coffin.
Oh well. :sunglasses:

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On the other hand, the comments are finally readable in mobile

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True, true, for all the website. I mean apparently Unity Pro is a product now, not a subscription level. Unity free is a learning resource or something…

The appearance of the new blog is very beautiful.

I liked the organization by categories, but it is still cluttered, and also belt lack of a tab to see the recent articles, moreover it seems pretty cool

What a cluttered mess. Information dense with no practical focus.

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Another thing: I can’t see the English version of the blog. Visiting blog.unity.com redirects me straight to blog.unity.com/de (German, my native language). This makes no sense really as all content there is written in English.

(I assume it’ll eventually get translated, since the other languages have indeed fully or partially translated versions of these articles - e.g. Spanish, Japanese, Korean)

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I think it’s fine! It seems like the upper part allows them to highlight/sticky important posts that I used to have to search for. The latests posts are still easy enough to see down below.

I could disagree on what an ā€˜important’ post is though, it seems to definitely be geared towards the enterprise/investor customer and not so much on the most interesting posts from a developers point of view. It seems to me that the company is moving it’s focus away from games to industry non-game tools. They are still probably the best choice for a mobile game, but the competition in other areas is pretty strong. Especially when it comes to things that ā€˜just work’.

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Previously I could simply read all posts in chronological order. Now I can’t understand where newer posts and where older. In ā€œLast publishedā€ section there is an article that was published 19.08.2020. Is it really last?? Just return the feed as it was before and add some filter somewhere. Do not overload the design with elements, otherwise everything will look the same as unity.learn - difficult and not practical

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For some reason, the images in the blogpost are cropped now?!!

I can’t really the column header or the edges of the picture showing the flow diagram

Time to go back to the good ol’ RSS reader. Thanks Unity.

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I often wonder if users are ever actually consulted regarding these changes. It might be a sensible practise, to you know, see if a sweeping change will positively or negatively impact the user base before fully going all in to something? :slight_smile:

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I do not agree with the changes, but I don’t agree with this either. It is a mistake to ā€˜consult with users’. Users will tell you to STFU, don’t change anything ever (take a look at any web-based company, what happened when they asked the users and what happened when they didn’t: users are moaning for a while, then move on, also, forum-change, anyone?). Obviously it doesn’t work like that. What is happening is that we’re arriving to the ā€˜democratized’ game development where the unprofessional, marketing- and PR-driven solutions will work for Unity, since we are too many people.

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It’s a mistake to do a bad job of consulting with users, or to take what they say literally. Lack of user consultation is just as much of a mistake.

If you don’t know how your users are reacting to your work, or what impact it is having on them, then you are at best working based on hopes and guesses.

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Obviously you need to put out surveys and whatnot, but I wouldn’t call it ā€˜consultation’. Data gathering and processing. But sure, I should have more precise here.
(I just got the second shot and I’m getting all the side effects they listed. On one hand I’m bored like hell, because I can’t work, on the other hand, I’m even more scattered than usual. :smile:)

Definitely not.

ā€œDon’t fix it if it ain’t brokenā€ applies.

boldly going forward seems to result in unity connect. Or that time when unity screwed up the forums.

Sometimes, sure. But being stubborn about this is how people end up doggedly doing things using outdated methods, or being overtaken by competitors. You can improve a thing that’s not broken. It happens pretty regularly.

The way I see it, the idea is not to axe the old and put a halr-broken new replacement into it, but to maintain a reliable trusted solution while polishing a potential replacement and have them both available.

A/B testing and introductory run with limited userbase are important, the designers need to see how people are using the new things and they can adjust accordingly if needed, This seems to missing here, to be honest. Or at least we don’t know about it.

do not like the changes
Most important thing on the old blog for me was it’s strict chronological order. Now its - as already said - a cluttered mess
I see me stop looking for new blogposts in my usual daily morning update run - its far too cumbersome

So PLEASE bring back a strict chronological list-like layout option !

Update:
Seems Unity Blog is chronologically sorted ?
Whats sorely missing is the posting date/time clearly visible on each listed post entry
You could ditch that idiotic manager-focused ā€œreading timeā€ field anytimes for me …
If one cannot judge how long it’s gonna take to read some article, he/she’s a lost case anyways…

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