For the last couple weeks we've been working pretty hard to improve the UI & UX on DEV. Our efforts so far were focused around the home page, but mostly under the hood. There's a lot of spaghetti in the frontend codebase and there were temporary solutions that were never replaced with more sustainable ones. Hence, the work that we’re doing right now is not really visible.
But some of it is.
First of all, thank you for feedback! We really appreciate it and you helped us spot and fix many bugs. 🙌
I mentioned a couple times that what we’ve shipped so far is just a step towards something bigger. It's still far from being ideal but we’ve had to make some changes here and there to make it easier in future to implement new things. This is an ongoing process and will take time.
Today I'd love to show you a sneak peek of where we want to be in some time. Again: it's not ideal, it's not finished and it keeps evolving (like literally every day :)). But I still think it's worth sharing with a broader audience!
From yours, the community perspective, it should be more readable, easier to navigate and more fun to use. From our perspective this will be a step towards not only a more maintainable design system but also a North Star for UI improvements in other areas and views.
Top comments (15)
Thanks for starting this discussion. It would be cool somehow to have two layers of view like Twitter has: a recent timeline/chronological posts and the summarized timeline of high traffic ones.
Correction:
Oh wait, we already have that. It just wasn't obvious to me.
I like the foregrounding of a story... though I miss the stream too.
I don't know if there is a way to further reduce the mental load or the busy look of the page. Sometimes I open it and then get overwhelmed at all the articles I haven't read yet
That and some other improvements and ideas for feed are on our radar :)
I just updated my comment because I realize I made an assumption about the product!
I like the new paddings and the icons, this makes it easier to spot the items :)
I also like the heavy shadow border around the popup on the user menu because it clearly let it stand out from the rest of the UI.
But I personally like the fact that the searchbar is centered at the top.
This looks great 🙌🏽!
How exciting!
🙌🏼Heck yes!
Site is nice! Be careful to ease-in changes.
Remember Microsoft Forums disaster?
Personally, I like the previous homepage layout more. Particularly because without clear and defined boxes the sidebar sections seem to be blurred.
That's exactly one of the things we're trying to address in that mockup above: we'll be bringing boxes back to the right sidebar at some point so it's easier to distinct each section. We will also try to clean it up a bit.
It looks good so far, I'm excited to see it when it goes live!
Is there somewhere we can see these mock-ups? I'm interested in ways we, as a community, can help with the visuals 😊.
I'll let you know once we have mocks available publicly. Right now it's all in "draft" state.
How the community can help with the visuals? That's a great questions. We haven't really established any processes just yet. Right now, we're working internally on Design System. Until we have that, probably the best way to help is suggest ideas and improvements either here, OR on #meta, OR as github issues. Once we have Design System, some guidelines and processes established, it would be much easier to "collaborate" on visual side.
The new home page UI looks great :)