Weekly Release: March 24th, 2009

mine is doing the same thing as Beth, no thumb nails !! just shows the main picture

It would be nice to have the NEXT and PREVIOUS button back. Much easier than the scroll bar.

So with ALL the negative press on the photo section, why hasn't meetup chimed in with some feedback on what everyone's saying? Do they even read this forum or are we wasting bandwidth?

Hi Gregg:

So with ALL the negative press on the photo section, why hasn't meetup chimed in with some feedback on what everyone's saying? Do they even read this forum or are we wasting bandwidth?

We're reading through the feedback intently and working on resolving issues and addressing concerns behind the scenes here. I apologize for not chiming in sooner - this was a huge change and we're still working out the kinks.

Thanks for your patience, and please keep the feedback coming!

Andrea

Hey all,

We do have some significant fixes and tweaks launching tomorrow morning that will address a lot of your concerns.

Thanks for all the feedback -- we are listening!

I really like the new photo format. It took a little bit of effort to get used to it, but once I did, it was easier to do next/previous by clicking on the photo instead of the arrows that were there before. The scrollbar makes it easier to slide around from beginning to end and still be able to see.

While I originally found the scroll bar annoying because it blocked part of the picture, once I got used to moving the mouse a little bit to the side I began to appreciate the minimal amount of mouse movement now to do things versus the old way of having to go all the way across the page and then scroll the thumbnails up and down to find specific items.

The 'last uploaded' needs to be there, and I'd like to see a 'mini-gallery' list to make it easier to find older galleries.

I have had no negative feed back from any of the groups I organize, or the photo group I belong to. I did notice an increase in picture loading from some of my members, so they must like the easier upload capability. I used it yesterday to upload a handful of photos, and it was much easier, plus the progress bar is very helpful.

The only comment I saw was people didn't know how to go from picture to picture, so I think either a description of where to click or adding arrows as a secondary navigation would be helpful.

I could do with either less crossfade or none at all if it would speed things up.

One bug, I noticed that photos that were vertical were not showing up on scrollbar.

Thanks for the feedback all. We will be launching some changes tomorrow geared towards easing usability.

Stuff that is changing
- We are adding in a next/prev arrow w/ a counter (i.e. 4 of 36) above the photo
- We are adding a page which will show all albums in a grid view (if you have more than 5 albums in your group) to make it easier to navigate. You will be able to sort this page by create time or last activity time in the album.
- We added a link to "See all sizes" which allows you to easily access all sizes of the photo (original down to thumbnail)
- We fixed numerous little annoying bugs

We do however have no plans on switching back to the old view. We don't see a way to make the old layout work while keeping larger images as well as comments.

I came here to complain, but I see the problems are being worked on - thank you!!

Next / Prev arrows for photos (I dislike the thumb-strip blocking the photo bottom)

Un-bold the caption

Grid view for all photos (I miss being able to zip through and middle-click each thumbnail into a background tab.)

We're reading through the feedback intently and working on resolving issues and addressing concerns behind the scenes here. I apologize for not chiming in sooner - this was a huge change and we're still working out the kinks.

Thanks for your patience, and please keep the feedback coming!

Thanks for listening.

Thanks Greg,

I think with a little work the old gallery style could be made better, like the area under the old preview pane could be used for comments. With thumbnails to the right as they were. The grid preview for a gallery was quite handy. Your idea to help the new interface by adding a grid view for all galleries may not be as useful; but it will be better than having them all stuck on the far right and down under (and lost) as they are now.

I think of UI flow as either top down. Think of how nearly everything you see starts on top. Eyes, face, body, feet. We're trained from birth to that order. Next is top down mixed with left to right (sorry, Western bias, but it seems to work since most computer savvy people in the world are used to it). So for Meetup, the flow is something like:

Meetup:Photos:GallerySelection:Gallery:Image_in_Gallery:SizeSelection

Its a logical progression, and having controls work that order (consistently) work best for successful apps I've been involved with.

As they work today, it goes more like:

Meetup:Photos:Large_Image:hunt_for_Gallery_Image:unused_space(links and poster info):Caption/Comment_confusion (which is which?):hunt_for_Gallery_Selection:

So I find the logic in the layout quite confusing, and very difficult to follow. As do many members on my photo group (502), and apparently a few others who have posted here. What seems worse, the new flow is completely opposite of how the rest of Meetup does/has worked (which has worked really well, thank you very much!). But this new UI is - well, to put it bluntly, broken.

You are growing, which means new heads. Hopefully this new UI isn't a new trend. If so, especially if you have a new UI team, you should really consider more actual user testing before you let the new pages go live like this.

Sorry this note is so long winded, but I live this stuff at my day job and hate to see good tools made unusable by well meaning folk who don't actually understand how the tools are used (you wouldn't be the first company that let that happen).

Thanks for listening,

Tim