What are you thinking Adobe? This forum is a wreck.

[sinious]

You produce tools to help novices make great websites, yet you absolutely unequivocally destroyed your sites usability.

A few examples?

Getting into an actual forum using the whole 'discussions concept' which deviates from the vast majority of forums was never a good idea. Now I can't even find my own way into certain forums unless I already have a post there and can click into it and back out. But, I can't always back out to the discussions.

Is this a joke? The text collides? Navigation hindering?

Can you tell me why the text "Discussions" isn't clickable? It was previously. Moreover can you tell me what person is responsible for allowing the text to run into other text? This is seriously novice. I realize I can hit Mobile Development but then I'm required to click the tiny blue Next > link at the bottom to actually get to the discussions? Why can't I just click Discussions as before to return?

Next, what were you thinking with space with this abomination of text size and utter terrible planning. Note this is at 100% text size, not zoomed.

Can you explain why you're using a font so horrifically large while wasting most of the space you could have used IF you wanted to use this huge text by condensing the useless grid on the right?

Your footer doesn't even try to stay within the area it should. If you're a designer, would you ever put that drab blue on top of a dark gray and call it accessible?

I can give about another hundred or more examples of what are you thinking but I'd love to hear it from Adobe about uh, who designed your site? Please try to use your own products. They are very good. This forum is obfuscated and barely usable. Seriously question the designers and developers who made it. The old forum was bad enough with, again, the discussions format. This? This... I have no words..

[Nancy OShea]

They're working on it.  See "Known Issues in New Forum Skins"

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/999431?tstart=0

Nancy O.

[sinious]

Point being, who deploys before they're ready? At least use basic best practices.

[John Waller]

Agreed.

I'm rather puzzled at the slow and clumsy way in which Adobe has rolled out this forum upgrade, with little to no advance public comment about what to expect regarding broken features or formatting.

Seems to be design on the run - and no real reason for it. Perhaps those in charge are progressively fixing it in their lunchbreak.

The proper place for this thread is really the Forum Comments forum. Your voice will be heard there. And there are plenty of passionate people discussing it.

http://forums.adobe.com/community/general/forum_comments

[Ben M]

I'm rather puzzled at the slow and clumsy way in which Adobe has rolled out this forum upgrade, with little to no advance public comment about what to expect regarding broken features or formatting.

As clumsy as it may be, it's not as bad as how they leaked the Creative Cloud and the short-lived "upgrade from one version back only policy".   They need a little more discipline with their new releases across the board.

[John Waller]

As clumsy as it may be, it's not as bad as how they leaked the Creative Cloud and the short-lived "upgrade from one version back only policy".   They need a little more discipline with their new releases across the board.

Yes, Adobe's timing of announcements, and the effect of those announcements on users, is remarkably naive on occasion.

Hope they've learned a valuable lesson from the one-version-back-policy announcement debacle - although there's no actual change to the policy, just who it affects and when (CS3 and CS4 users).

[Noel Carboni]

sinious wrote:

Point being, who deploys before they're ready? At least use basic best practices.

Hear hear!  I was feeling a bit lonely in my exclamations of same.  I get the distinct impression someone tested it on one 27" monitor on a Mac.

See also this thread:  http://forums.adobe.com/message/4397452#4397452

-Noel

[Phillip M Jones]

One can design a good page on a Mac with 27" monitor. The key is not to hard code width os .css page with numbers rather, if you use percentages it will grow or shrink  according to size of monitor.

[Guest]

Very unfortunate Adobe did not Beta test the new look on the Forum Comments Forum.  Within 24 hours (1 hour?)  they would have discovered mass problems sending them back to the drawing boards.

Now everyone has to live with these problems until the problems are re-coded, which will probalby results in other glitches. 

[Noel Carboni]

Phillip Jones wrote:

One can design a good page on a Mac with 27" monitor. The key is not to hard code width os .css page with numbers rather, if you use percentages it will grow or shrink  according to size of monitor.

I wasn't dissing Macs!  I was making the arbitrary point that it's obvious there are about eleventy seven different systems they DIDN'T test it on!

But you're right:  One can design a good page on pretty much any system, and if one follows good design practices one doesn't need to actually test it on every system and every browser (though it is still a good idea).  The only way to achieve quality is to design it in - not test it in.

Curt Y wrote:

Within 24 hours (1 hour?) they would have discovered mass problems sending them back to the drawing boards.

Something I've noticed:  Adobe never, ever responds directly to feedback.  That implies they can't.

All development is a pipeline, but Adobe seems particularly incapable of receiving feedback, doing something with it, and turning around a new version of something in short order.  That's sorely needed - and expected by customers.

One of my hats over time has been Engineering Process Manager.  While development may be a pipeline, and due process can be a good thing, it actually IS possible to have systems and processes that allow a big company with geographically separated developers to remain responsive.  One of the best practices is to insert review as early as possible in the process.  For example, one can imagine that any web page change should need to go through a peer review process before being committed back into the source code control system.  That tends to catch boneheaded things early.  

But since we're actually seeing such (I'm sorry to say boneheaded) things released to the world, I think Adobe probably needs to learn to walk before they can run.  That probably implies a cultural shift.

-Noel

[Guest]

Noel Carboni wrote:

Something I've noticed:  Adobe never, ever responds directly to feedback.  That implies they can't.

Yes, sadly I agree.  They say they will take all comments and provide fixes.

But the reality, from past experiences, they begrudgingly make a few changes, then go merrily on their same course.  Almost like the one who came up with the concept will not bend to the users suggestions, and the committee can not see the headlights in front of them.

But the U.S. Congress is pretty much like this also, develop a program and "then heck no we won't change".  At least with Apple, Jobes did not allow committee decisions, so right or wrong it was his baby, but he was smarter than most. (own no Apple products)

[Chris Cox]

>> Something I've noticed:  Adobe never, ever responds directly to feedback.  That implies they can't.

Oh, sometimes we can.

And sometimes we're told not to.

And sometimes, well, if we can't say anything nice....

[Noel Carboni]

Chris, you personally are perhaps the strongest exception to my statement at Adobe.  It is always a breath of fresh air to hear from you.

But it really sounds like you Adobe folks in general have to fight through some process and cultural problems to get things done, and the web development area might be afflicted more than most.  I worked too many decades in environments that stifle real productivity not to be able to sense that.  I feel for you.

-Noel

[Phillip M Jones]

Everytime I add a page to my website. I test on

SeaMonkey

FireFox

Camino

Opera

OperaNext

OmniWeb

Google Chrome

iCab

Safari

Aurora

Mixes of Browsers that use webKit and Gecko and other type rendering engines.

If I had ability to use IE I would in it too. If they don't look exactly the same then I go back and adjust the size, by changing percentages more or less to fit.

[Noel Carboni]

Phillip, you should check out VMware Fusion some time.  Then you could run Windows on your Mac.

-Noel

[pwillener]

Phillip,  IE is the only browser that behaves totally different from all others.  You should really test on IE too, and you will see what I mean.  And there are, in fact, some IE users out there...

[Phillip M Jones]

I already have Fussion just haven't bought Windows7

[Noel Carboni]

Pat Willener wrote:

there are, in fact, some IE users out there...

I personally prefer Internet Explorer because I like the security model, and I see from my web site stats that about 1/4 of the people who visit are using IE - just a little less than Firefox.  Chrome is the big one nowadays, making up about 1/3 of my visitors.

-Noel

[sinious]

I'm in no way trying to be unhelpful with this post, or even hurtful. I love Adobe products. Where would the world of media be without them, especially small businesses? It just confuses me how a company producing some of the best software and practices can somehow fail to utilize its very own, self built essence.

Not that I think we should expect anything to change in the future but, just a $0.02. There was so much wrong here that I need not list that all users have experienced to hopefully at least bring up during some water cooler chat.

What I wonder, and will never know, is how much Adobe knew these forums were so 'alpha' yet still allowed it to roll out. We can't be the first people seeing it.

I look forward to the future progress. I hope the simplifications being added here work out well as this is sometimes the last bastion for help for people with deadlines as well as a place those of us who've beaten those deadlines can share experience. I think that's amazingly important and healthy for a product.

[Phillip M Jones]

Sadly I thinks we are the first to see. I doubt seriously whether the Bean Counters, BOD, President, other Officers, and CEO  have any idea this even exist, let alone use it.

[sinious]

I doubt they use it or perhaps even like it. Adobe Support Programs lose money any time a user gets solid advice from the forums so they don't need to purchase support. It's a fine line however. If you don't offer these free outlets, they'll crop up elsewhere and the products will suffer. Then the bean counters will notice.

[Noel Carboni]

Don't kid yourself.  Someone somewhere thinks there's value in not paying support people in India to do what we do out of the goodness of our hearts for other users.

-Noel

[sinious]

This is my latest favorite.. The phantom missing post and the 9 pages of scrolling.. Love it..

[Nancy OShea]

Notice all those boxes of Keyword Tags? 

This doesn't happen when people don't overuse tags.  Also, if you disable CSS in your browser, you can actually see the question.  So there are some major problems to be worked out with the Jive Templates & CSS.  

I don't argue that there should have been more testing before rolling this out.  But I'm glad I'm not the one responsible for customizing Jive.  It must be a nightmare to work with.

Nancy O.

[sinious]

Nightmare or not, it should still be in beta land on some enclosed server.