The New Tea Page
BTW, thanks to everyone who had kind things to say about the new design. I’ll just thank you here instead of replying to each individually in order to cut down on the number of updates.
I’ll respond to the questions/comments/concerns/criticisms directly.
An issue for me that would probably be a pretty easy fix is to have the longer discussions (such as “what packages arrived today” or “what did you order” start with the MOST RECENT posts….some of these threads are years long, although still good. If they were in the opposite order, they would be more relevant and I could see what I thought I might be “missing out” on and might need to order!
Though that’s not specifically the tea page, it is an interesting idea. It’s something we talked a lot about when we originally designed the discussions and we tried to look at different uses online, but it varies. Our approach seems to work for shorter threads (where it’s easy to catch up on the context) but falls down on the longer threads you mentioned (where it’s too long to catch up and the context changes over such a long period of time, or its a list and the context isn’t really relevant). We may go to something like that in the future, though hopefully we can come up with a solution that caters to both types of threads. Thanks for the input!
I think part of what makes this difficult is that there are 2 reply buttons. You can reply to the thread, or you can reply to a specific post (as I am doing here). Maybe it makes more sense to only have one reply button, but allow us to reply @username when we want to reply to a specific post/poster. For example, check out boards.weddingbee.com to see how they handle this. I think what they’ve done is very logical and easily navigable. I know that the most recent post will always be the last one and if I want to reply to someone directly, I still can easily.
I seem to have lost the ability to like anyone’s tasting notes, just in the last day or so.
I don’t know if this is just me, or my computer, but all the tea reviews on my dashboard are in italics, or some sort or slanted font. ?? Just started today, April 4 in the afternoon.
Edit: It still weird on my computer but shows up with normal font on my phone.
…are NOT in italics? Are you saying they are in regular font but are supposed to be in italics?
When I look at Steepster on my phone, the font is in italics. In Firefox it’s not. Maybe that’s what Lala is talking about.
I see it on my mobile browser. You can see a screenshot here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=488591CF5D9E872AAHEjMzhtS3Bo_IM&v=3&ithint=photo%2c.png
Of course, I’m using a windows phone so I’m probably in a VERY small minority of users.
K, thanks for the details. Not sure about windows phone but we’ll put it on the list.
I’ll weigh in…lightly. ;)
I mainly have two observations.
1) I whole-heartedly agree that I want the company’s description at the top of the page where it used to be. I far preferred the old layout in that respect. using screenreading software, it is far, far more cumbersome to be weighing through random flavour lists people are subjectively tossing out there, followed by random bits of tasting notes that don’t say much about the tea (I don’t know about other people, but when I’m preparing to try a tea, I actually read several tasting notes on it, I don’t skim—but skimming isn’t something blind people can do in general). But again, I think it’s worth taking note of the overwhelming number of requests you have to restore the location of the company’s tea description.
2) As a blind user, I cannot rate teas. Is there a reason that there’s a slider and not a combo box? this would still allow sighted viewers to rate their tea numerically, but would also allow blind users like me to use the up and down arrows to rate the tea. Would changing the slider bar to a combo box change the user experience in a significant way for sighted people?
Thanks so much for listening to what we have to say. Like you said, it’s indicative of how invested we are in the community.
I totally support your point about the slider bar. First and foremost because it’s not cool to exclude you from part of the tasting note process (though I’m sure it’s not intentional). But just in case that’s not reason enough alone (though it should be), I will also add that it is difficult to use the slider bar on a touch screen. Especially a small one, such as a smartphone.
Great points – I was hoping you’d weight in on screenreading software usability. I especially agree with this,
“…I think it’s worth taking note of the overwhelming number of requests you have to restore the location of the company’s tea description.”
Hi keychange, thanks for posting about accessibility. I echo others’ sentiments and wholeheartedly agree that the user experience should be the same for everyone. I personally would be just fine with a combo box instead of the slider bar. I hope that Jason and the Steepster Team make a concerted effort to make the site more accessible for you. This should be the #1 priority for them.
@keychange, thanks for weighing in. I know this isn’t the first time you’ve had feedback about our browser accessibility (and unfortunately I’m sure it won’t be the last). I can’t speak too much about the requirements for reading accessibility software (I don’t do front-end development), but we really want to give everyone access to the site, and hopefuly will be able to. I know it takes us much longer than we’d like to push certain updates out, but we’ll do our best to keep visual accessibility in mind as we keep moving forward. As always, thanks for being so patient and understanding.
Thanks for all the support, guys, and thanks Jason for acknowledging that this isn’t the first time I’ve contacted you regarding site accessibility. I do hope someone can eventually weigh in on the issue of a combo box vs a slider, because I can’t imagine that changing it from a slider to a combo box would be difficult—financially, technically, or otherwise. I am especially glad that making that change would be beneficial to more users than just me.
Thanks again!
I like it and like the “Similar Teas” at the bottom of the page as that will just help to build up my collection even more now. Damn you
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