Update: The new version of Unity Answers has been up now for a week. We’re resolving issues that occurred after deployment and addressing visual and design changes. We read all the feedback that you provide and want to thank you for helping us out in this process! If you run into anything wonky or want to share your opinion, don’t forget about the META space we set up for site-specific posts.
We have been working on improving Unity Answers and are pushing the new version of the site live today. You can read about the new features that have been added in this blog post.
A user guide has been provided describing the new features and how to navigate the site.
We’ve run into a couple of speed bumps implementing the new version on to production, hopefully these will be fixed soon and we’ll be back on track for a full upgrade.
We keep encountering issues and when they are fixed we get more problems so the date keeps getting pushed, don’t want to reveal it incase we don’t make it.
I couldn’t find any better place to complain on new Unity Answers design (aka suggest changes for public discussion) so here we go:
Speed downgrade. For example (excluding “visit site” step):
Access moder queue - before 1 click, now 2 clicks.
Check your answers (obviously, if you haven’t saved them as bookmarks/favorites in browser) - before 1 click, now 3 clicks.
Missing things. For example:
Reputation chart.
Activity button in profile, you now need to visit direct profile link in order to see it…(not that I used it anyway, just seems illogical).
Counterintuitive. Why would I need to click “anon” picture to access moder queue? (it even should be a profile picture in first place, you can say that it is just in order to “fit” forum but hey why couldn’t it be on forum as well? it shouldn’t be hard to do).
Design (aka visual representation). Probably the reason why I started to write this post in first place, so here we go:
Question, answers and comments almost like melded together (except the accepted answer), no way you could fast scroll now, IMO they should be visually separated a bit more. (e.g. it can be a “frame” for question/answer + their comments and a fat line separating each comment, or even better a frame as well and preferably with some bg color).
I don’t like the new “mini profile” on q/a/c and moder queue. Previously you could see karma and badges, now to see the first one you need to hover avatar/nickname and for the last one visit profile. (it kinda helped to distinguish new users) Nickname under/above avatar would be better as well.
Where did colorization go? For example previously in profile page answers you could clearly distinguish accepted answers (green) and not, but now you can’t. Why on questions answers count is green and after accepted answer it just becomes darker with green back-light? (if you want to distinguish reply with no reply just make it yellow or something and make back-light a bit darker.
Why “Hide/Show comments” “button” uses IBeam cursor?
+Problems in META space
If you could make all of the above as a custom non-default style (haven’t mentioned all but I guess you have saved an old one somewhere, so you have an idea) it would be great.
The only thing that old engine really lacked was some sort of a “private moder queue” where you could send a perfectly fine question that lacked some info to be answered properly without a guess (e.g. the user described the issue but hasn’t provided unobvious for him information, like settings of some component), and you’re imposing anti-helping behavior ("If you comment on a post in the moderation queue, you must immediately either publish or reject it.") instead of adding that feature (now I’ll just leave that type of questions in mod queue without my comment [if that’s what you want, though I still don’t get why, it’s not like moder queue will be increased by my comment], so that I won’t feel bad for discouraging new users with perfectly fine questions to use Unity Answers), it would be fine for me if there was a question with lack of info hanging in my personal moder queue for half a month or so instead of rejecting question or approving it with lack of info. There were situations where I left comment in moder queue and it got rejected by someone and the ones which were approved, some of which got update from OP later and some of which are still being unanswered due to lack of info and no update from OP (you can find examples of those in my comments history), not even to mention that there was once a situation where user spammed few copies of same question due to some moderator rejecting his initial question or I think I don’t even need to mention a usual “why I got rejected” question in moder queue.
Yes, I’m not a fan of hiding info. Anything important, such as the mod queue, needs to be right out in the open, not hiding behind clicks. Because even if you can figure out where stuff is, you tend to forget about it if you don’t see it. If that makes the design less “clean”, so be it. Anything to get the design world moving away from “clean” and back into “usable”…
Despite the title, I’m not going to go on some rant or anything, just thought it was important to briefly give my feedback as to how much worse the new Unity Answers layout is.
It’s more difficult to visually parse and navigate. You can’t see your user points without clicking on the user symbol icon. You can’t view your own badges without going to the user profiler…
The user profile page is a mess, it shows “your activity” which is just a jumble list of bullshit you don’t care about. I have to click “my answers” or “my questions” to actually view the things I care about.
Everything is all rounded and post/point counts are minimalistic and not well outlined like they were previously. Fonts seem bad. No separation/spacing between an answer’s user info and the answer content. No more downvote button? You think you’re better than the most popular stack exchange sites which all have downvote buttons? Reply counts and answered indicator is on the right instead of the left where your eyes defaultly go to and thus the title and counts are totally separated.
There’s more I’ve probably missed because I’ve used it for all of 5 minutes. It just looks worse. Why fix something that wasn’t broken or even remotely problematic?
Yeah, I think it would be better if they kept old answers look, but add new features and only do slight adjustments in look when features can’t absolutely positively be added without these adjustments (such as button/box for “beginner” section, etc.).
The thing is, the old site was broken. There were several issues that needed to be fixed, which is the reason we decided to move on to the new system and move away from the outdated system we were on.
We also needed new features, such as Spaces, autocomplete when asking Questions, autosave, refined search etc. In order to add new features, we needed to get on the new system that supported these.
There are bugs now on the site that are being fixed, and yes, change is difficult. We are taking in all the feedback and evaluating what needs to change back to how things were, and what we will keep.
Well I gotta say that the new version has not done the expected effect.
Many infos are now hidden or too small…
A few examples:
the plus button (became “like” ?!) is now at the bottom in the middle of other infos. When looking for help, the amount of likes (since it is now likes) is primordial. An answer with no “like” tells me right on that I should consider another one. Sometimes, an accepted answer gets less “likes” than a secondary answer.
I guess the like situation goes along with the new following/followers. You should consider changing the name to Unity Social.
The visual is clumsy, there is no separation between two answers.
No more downvotes? or well hidden?
But I found a reward user, this one is funny…and useless. No one will ever give away their precious.
This is just a few shots at stuffs I did not find convenient but hold on this is not all bad, there are some improvements. I have yet to find them though but I am sure there are there. Lurking in the dark.
We’d like to keep all the feedback in this thread, so if some posts seem out of sync it’s because I’ve merged them into this thread so that we can keep track.
Remember this is the first launch so we do need feedback to find bugs and issues so we can fix them. But as Sara said, we were on a very old version of their platform so getting anything fixed or adding new features was close to impossible.
Also we’re using the default style right now, so please note anything visually wrong but don’t assume it will be here to stay.
I guess all of us do appreciate the efforts that were put in this during the last few months. But the first things that stroke me is this move towards social network something closer to reddit and such.
I think (but I could be wrong) you should keep it as an extension to the official Unity doc as it has been.
This.
Also, the indication that an answer is accepted was far, FAR better with the old system, when the whole question box in the overview was green. Now, it’s just a small box to the right so I have to take a double-take when scrolling through the newest answers.
I’d suggest making space for each type of question (UI, physics, etc.). This will make answers more organized and much tidier - so someone who has experience in say AI and feel like answering some questions related to that field could do so without running into questions related to physics or UI.
Just noticed a thing that is extremely annoying to me: When writing an answer or comment, and trying to insert code, the new code window has a fixed size and can’t be resized like the old one; the actual area the text is in can be resized, but not the window itself, as was possible previously. Now, when pasting large chunks of code, especially long lines, I have to scroll around a lot and it’s pretty hard to get an overview of the whole chunk. The window is fairly small, too.
