The Charley Project's new layout: thoughts?

[rkz]

Hello -

Apart from the Zodiac and EAR/ONS, one of my interests is in missing persons. I regularly visit Websleuths and The Charley  Project.

The Charley Project's old website wasn't the greatest - amateurish graphics and a clunky user interface were its greatest weaknesses. They recently revamped the site. The way the new website is laid out makes the user interface even worse than what came before it.

Before, if you wanted to research missing persons cases by chronological order, you could click on one of the decades (60s, 70s, 80s, etc.), and all of the cases from that decade would scroll up, divided by year. If you wanted to browse a particular year, you'd just scroll down the page to find the year, then click on any of the cases from that year. It was a decent search tool, not fantastic, but it at least allowed users to come back to an anchor page in which view all of the cases in order.

The new layout is...not wonderful. Now, if you want to browse cases by chronological order, you have to select a decade from a drop down menu. So you select a decade, and 25 cases scroll up. Not the entire decade, like it did before. Then you have to select, from a separate drop-down menu, if you'd like to see 25 cases on a page, 100 cases, or "all" of them.

If you choose 100, then you literally *only* get back 100 cases on a page, and they're all from the first year in the decade you chose - if you choose the 80s, then the first 100 cases will be from 1980.

If you choose "all," then one of two things will happen: a) all of the cases from those years will come up on your screen; or b) the site will crash.


I just tried browsing through cases from 1984 and the first two times I tried listing "all" of the cases from that year, the site crashed. The third time, it worked. I also just tried listing "all" the cases from the 2000s. Again, the site crashed.

It's not the biggest problem in the world obviously, but despite how ugly the previous site was, at least it was far easier to negotiate and navigate. If you are not as tech-savvy as you'd like, there's a good chance you might come away confused by the new site; it's not intuitive. Yes, the new layout *looks* better, but it is a much less user-friendly site now.

It just highlights how "new" and "improved" can sometimes be mutually exclusive.

Does anyone else have any experience using this site? What are your opinions on the change?

The Charley Project

[Any of N]

rkz --  Don't get me started on recent trends in software interface designs. Nevermind, you already did. If you want to make like a modern savvy User Experience Specialist, do the following with your next update:

• Oversimplify and take out useful features.
• Make other useful features harder to find.
• Optimize for tablets and phones with their crappy poke-n-swipe inputting methods.
• Make it more resource-hungry and release well before you've fixed the memory issues.
• Denigrate the older, superior interfaces by calling them "old school".
• Refer to the users who prefer the older interfaces as "dinosaurs". 

And if you didn't start doing all that, say, 10 iterations ago, you're hopelessly behind the curve.

It's been a long time since I visited the Charley Project and I don't remember the old interface, but your comments sound a lot like the common pattern. The site's owner and operator was probably just following current conventions in a well-meaning way.

[Nerdfather]

It's not bad. It did annoy me though because I had a lot of missing people pages bookmarked and when I tried clicking them it wouldn't work. That annoyed me. Lol. Other than that, it's alright.