UX impressions

So I just started to look at bdsmlr as a serious alternative, and decided to jot down some impressions, missing features and bugs along the way. This looked like the best place to post them.

First up, the main blog page view, in this case https://joshslater.bdsmlr.com/

Clicking the notes counter opens the notes overlay at the same place, related to the label, with no regards for how the page is scrolled. This often makes part of this overlay be positioned outside of the browser window. I would rather have it always be in view.
The notes overlay allows for empty messages if you happen to click the Send button. It should probably be greyed out until some content is entered (and the input box is not that obvious, but that is a styling issue) Also "Post" is probably a better name than "Send". It's not really a chat window.
It is not possible to edit or remove notes that I can see. (For example the empty ones I happened to make)
The note counter did not increase as a result of the empty comments I made on my own post. Perhaps your own comments shouldn't be counted...
Clicking "show menu" closes the notes overlay. Clicking the notes counter doesn't close the menu.
Only "show menu" has a mouseover tooltip.
The "show menu" menu appears way over to the left, and not at the icon.
I'm worried that the "show menu" menu is completely different in appearance than the cogwheel menu, as that indicates the UI is built manually not using frameworks or abstractions.
Super petty detail, but "show menu" is all lower case, the items in the menu is capitalized and the items in the cogwheel menu is all upper case.
When scrolling and getting close to the first post a perpetual "Loading..." appears in the lower corner.

Overall pretty good, with some easy fixes. I posted removing of notes as a proper feature request.

JoshSlater

April 22, 2019 14:52
Edited

Now, looking at the actual note overlay there are some weirdness going on.

Heart icons are not loaded.
Reblog icons are not round
Reblogs get a grey comment box even when no comment was made.
For some reason JD07201990 gets to be listed twice.
Comment box is non-obvious, which makes "Send" functionally non-obvious. In the non-blog view it does say "Write your comment" in the text box.

April 22, 2019 20:42

Going to the blog page shows a icon tool bar at the top of the screen, shown below, truncated in width. These are nice looking, but for some reason the right set of icons are not vertically centered as the home icon is. The are not only positioned a pixel or two higher, but the icons are taller as well. For some reason the excellent padding done on the left side isn't done to the right.

But now to the weirdness I really wanted to mention. If you click the permalink for one of the blog posts, the page you end up on has an entirely different top menu. This one is text only, only sits on the right side and doesn't have search or ask a question. It also doesn't put a box across the screen, thus effectively improving the viewing height of the blog view.

It's nice to be able to A/B test UI like this, and I'm a bit torn. Having the icons steals less attention from the main content than the text does, but the big shadow box doesn't really serve a purpose and just gets in the way of the content when you start scrolling.

Oh, and the ask a question icon appears to block the entire UI and can't be cancelled if you click on it. Reported.

UX impressions

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