Freesound Forums

I'm slightly autistic and hate these kinds of changes. However I'm only a casual contributor and although I dislike buttons and functions I'm never going to use cluttering up the page I appreciate they are important for "power users".

Way too much white space and no lines/borders delineating related sections/info/titles and links. This is part of the autism thing(for me) where the screen becomes a wash of "stuff" that my brain can't interpret and sort into relevant order. Significantly less info per page hence more pages to visit. (This is why I still use Win Vista, with UI tweaked to my liking over many years, whenever I can despite also having Win 10).

To do the daily casual browsing myself, and probably a majority of registered users do, will require much more scrolling and button clicking than currently on NG. Will get used to it no doubt but for me it makes browsing FS more chore than fun.

Luv the new "original poster & date" info on Forum posts. always thought of asking for it but never did. Would like to see the newpost/unread flag that resets cookies on opening as in FS version 1.

As I say, I'm a low power user and want simplicity. But fully appreciate FS must change to accommodate the needs of the pro/semipro users who keep the blood flowing through it's arteries.

Sorry I have no specific actionable suggestions as the previous posts do.

Wibby.

I read 'too much white space' on the title and knew I wanted to chime in and add my 2cents regarding the new interface.

I consider myself also a casual contributor, but these changes from a simple to a more modern UI make me a bit uncomfortable and has me thinking of how I loved the internet before corporations took over and made everything look, I dunno, 'corporate', 'color coded' and minimalist. Maybe a just dark mode BW would solve this but then again, what I like the most about NG is that it is a straight-to-the-point-wysiwyg website where all friendly buttons, colorful icons and relevant info feels balanced and in relation to each other.

I may miss the point here because I have little to no visual design intelligence (I'm a soundie lol) but, for example, just browsing the Sounds page reminds me of a retail shop catalog, instead of a user-generated sound database with a bulletin board edge to it. I feel a bit lost in the shop while the BB is intuitive and practical.

But, as the only constant is change, I'm excited for the new feature to timestamp comments on a sound. Should also work for when describing a sound, right? Also, you can now insert images in descriptions? Nice! Thank you FS team for all the work you've put into this wonderful website.

strangely_gnarled wrote:
... Way too much white space ...

+1. What about adding a "dark mode" ?,
like YouTube has ... https://youtu.be/w4h5MYqoaL8

Timbre wrote:

strangely_gnarled wrote:
... Way too much white space ...

+1. What about adding a "dark mode" ?,
like YouTube has ... https://youtu.be/w4h5MYqoaL8

Thanks Timbre, and Diegolar, that helps the jaggy zig-zags on the optic nerve, but I already control most of that by keeping my screen brightness down low. I personally find "dark modes" easier on the eye but even less helpful in aiding cognition(?) of the information on the screen. I think Diegolar has a pretty good handle on my concerns whereby the modern trend seems to be for "presentation" to over-ride "usability" - Form over Function.

Poorly expressed on my part. I used the phrase "white space" to mean "uninformative/wasted space", whatever the background colour. Large Icons and Font's just spread out whatever I might be interested in over a larger area usually involving more scrolling or page clicking.

When searching through say, a hundred+ sound previews, I find it easier to scroll down a single vertical list, preview pane left hand side, all relevant text info/links neatly next to it on the right, forefinger on mouse scroll wheel, than to keep shifting my visual focus along rows and columns. I sometimes have to skip my attention back to make sure I don't miss a row or read it twice.

I also find it reduces "thinking stress" if different regions of functionality are separated by either boxes or differentiated by coloured backgrounds. For me the all white "continuum" needs conscious thought to navigate, which distracts from the main fun and purpose of my love of freesound.

I appreciate these are only my personal mental "quirks" and 90% of people won't know what I'm talking about. I've always been a bit like this, but after I passed through my 60's and reached my 70's my brain is noticeably slowing down.

Having griped on for an hour, I really have to thank the freesound team and whole community for making FS my first port of call each day when I go online.

Thank you to everybody here.

Wibby

For this new UI change, I would really enjoy a dark theme, perhaps toggled in your 'Edit profile' page, below your 'Display spectrogram in sound players by default. It could say, "Turn on dark mode" or something like that. This is just a suggestion, by the way.

Way too much white space and no lines/borders delineating related sections/info/titles and links. +1

I would really enjoy a dark theme. +1

I have to preview a lot of different sounds in a short space of time in order to find the exact type of sound I am looking for. This can sometimes take a little while, and unfortunately, the new UI makes it more difficult to do this speedily. It involves more scrolling, and less sounds per page.

It would be nice to have the option of "number of sounds per page", similar to how online clothing stores have number of items per page.

10 sounds per page could include more detail and larger waveforms, whereas 25 sounds per page could be smaller waveforms and less info about the sound, but more condensed.

I'd also just like to say thank you for all your hard work

As a software developer myself, I know how difficult it can be to get a UI "right". I'm not particularly skilled in that area. So I appreciate the efforts here, and hope you don't take this one criticism the wrong way.

I too, saw the title and wanted to chime in agreement, though it appears the OP was kind of almost contradicting himself. Just for my own tastes, I recognize that properly-placed and meaningful white space is crucial, but I also detest this recent trend over the past several years for scrolled interfaces like web sites to go to such ridiculous extremes in putting way, way, WAY too much empty space all over. Come on, this has to be -- oh please, let it be -- a horrible fashion that goes out of style as people come to their senses and return to making interfaces functional and easy to navigate and intuitively easy to use again. White space should be used in very small amounts to indicate logical separation -- not to create marketing copy.

White space beyond a logical indication is worse than just a waste of valuable screen real estate. It actually makes it much more difficult to see what all is available in a glance. The only way to fix it is to reduce the scaling, making everything smaller, but then the text is too small to read, so it's overall even worse.

Carefully designed layouts arrange things logically so that they are all quickly reachable, easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to use. When you have to scroll 3 page-worths extra to get to something that used to be available on the first page, that is not an improvement, IMHO.

So I share this opinion as a response to the most striking impression the new interface has on me so far. I haven't really gone very far with it, yet. But again, I do appreciate the work involved and the difficulty involved.

I was just noticing yet another egregious use of superfluous spacing, and it between the sub-areas of a single sound as displayed in a list of sounds. In particular, the owning user information is on a separate row that appears (due to the copious white space) to be a completely separate item in the list instead of a component within the information about the item that appears above it. All of those areas of different types of info need to appear to belong together and be close to each other, not spread out as if they are separate items. Just IMHO.

Hi Everyone,

First of all, thanks for taking the time to write your comments and suggestions. We'll do our best to adapt and modify our beta UI to optimize it as much as possible. We're not a big corporation, we're a very small team inside a research group of a public university, so things take time, but really we just want to make a better, usable and functional UI Also one which is easier to maintain from a developers perspective.

I see many mentions about a dark mode. I think this is doable and we'll look at it.

The other big concern has to do with compactness and white-space (also mentioned in other threads). We will also look into that. To do that however, it would be good to think of specific things to fix. For example, I can see that every result in the search page takes more height in BW. We can try to reduce that and see how much smaller we can make it. Are there other specific suggestions you'd like to make?

I use this site to download most of the audio I use and I would like to, as most people here already have, state my agreement with the OP. The old theme's appearance may have been a little outdated, but the layout was almost perfect. My display is on the small side, so the extra padding and bulkier design have a strong negative impact on my usage of the site.

I think that the contrast in the new design should be improved. Then, you should either make the design more compact, include a "compact mode" option, or allow users to opt into the old design if feasible (as was done by Reddit).

Frederic, I think compacting things (even if just vertically) as you suggest would go a long way toward easing the negative impact. I notice also even here in forums that the text line spacing appears to be about 1.5 or more when 1.0 would have been more "normal". I just can't see any reason for doing that sort of thing, which spreads things out vertically, making less information visible on the screen at one time, requiring a lot more scrolling, etc.

Timbre wrote:

strangely_gnarled wrote:
... Way too much white space ...

+1. What about adding a "dark mode" ?,
like YouTube has ... https://youtu.be/w4h5MYqoaL8

strangely_gnarled wrote:
Way too much white space and no lines/borders delineating related sections/info/titles and links.

The "Start browsing here" thing is wrong too. There's nothing (like, say, a box) to indicate a space to type search terms into. It looks like a mere page header.
AND ... it's not even for "browsing" as such. It's for searching for something specific, using search terms.
The word "browsing" implies that you will already see an arbitrary assortment of items, some of which may interest you or lead you into a rabbit hole, like a storefront window.

As far as "Dark Mode" goes, I don't really see the appeal, so I have no wish for it.

zimbot wrote:
Frederic, I think compacting things (even if just vertically) as you suggest would go a long way toward easing the negative impact. I notice also even here in forums that the text line spacing appears to be about 1.5 or more when 1.0 would have been more "normal". I just can't see any reason for doing that sort of thing, which spreads things out vertically, making less information visible on the screen at one time, requiring a lot more scrolling, etc.

I completely agree. It looks like you wanted to expand horizontally to fill up more of the page, which looks more modern, but the search results end up looking unnecessarily large. What if there were several smaller search results per row? Even if that is unfeasible, just compressing the search results vertically would make it so much easier for me to scroll through multiple sounds rapidly to find the right one. Also, more definitive borders between the results would help as well!

Long time lurker; first time poster here. Hello everyone and I must say that I can appreciate all of the comments I have read and must say Bravo! to the OP for creating this post in the first place. As web development has been my bread and butter to support my Professional Amateur music career, I love the feedback here like I love it with my guitar. If I had developed these changes, I would be smiling from ear to ear as I started work on an update.

This is great feedback and I wish that I had been able to benefit from it over the years. This design is common these days due to the push to make websites more compatible with mobile devices, which sadly are the most common way that the "average" person uses the Internet these days. All of this "whitespace" (which is perfectly fine to use as an adjective), is designed to allow flexibility for the browser to rearrange the site into a screen ratio that will fit on a mobile device and display similarly to the way it looks on a laptop or desktop.

As a result, we "power users" wind up with lots of websites with this same problem. For people like myself (and apparently many others), we find ourselves in this box with little or no creative options that wouldn't break this critical functionality. I spend most of my days breaking WordPress, trying to design as much of this out as possible because I just find it a criminal waste of space. I don't like "busy" websites at all (sorry kvr), but I do believe that any site should be as efficient as possible, whether it's on a phone, Tesla dash or full-blown gaming desktop. (Which also makes a great DAW workstation). Accessibility for the hearing and visually impaired has also become a large part of the development movement, to be fair. But this has it's impacts on design and function as well.

True be told, a lot of developers don't re-engineer though. It's time consuming, a pain in the bottom and a bit of a risk. Sticking with the design template, adjusting colors and trying to make your customer happy is the safest and most profitable bet, so most just do that. I have other income streams, so I can take more risk at the potential loss of a few pieces of gear if someone doesn't like what I've done.

All of this to say that maybe your voices will be heard. Most webmasters and developers want their people to be happy, so the nice constructive feedback written here is a good thing. I wanted to weigh in just to support my fellow musicians and my friend on the spectrum. I take care of my 37 year old autistic sisters and very much understand how something so seemingly innocuous can just out at you like a bad dream. They point stuff like this out to me every day, and I think it has made me a better designer of websites and sound for that matter.

Thanks for listening and stay safe!

I agree about the white space issue. I often play Freesound as a sample playback instrument in dance classes when an ambient texture is needed, so less scrolling would be great. However, I do like the new look of the waveforms and the larger play and loop buttons. I don't mind that they appear and disappear.

One thing I have always wished for is a way to adjust the volume of each sample in relation to the others, but this is just because of the (probably unusual) way I use Freesound. Is this possible?

+1 against the abundance of vertical white space.

A search for "crunch" on a MacBook Pro Safari screen on the old UI brings up 5.5 visible waveforms, while on the new one, 2.5. This seems like a big step backward in functionality. I just checked on Soundsnap: 7.5 are visible with the same search, though they don't have user accounts associated with the posted sounds—they do, however, fill the entire horizontal space of the browser window. If anything, keeping the same amount on the screen should be achievable.

Specific suggestions as requested: Fill the horizontal space, left column in search results can be much more compact, user name and info can be to the right of the waveform, font size could be much smaller and still readable (like this forum), the header of the page can be 1/4 of the size (everything up to the first result), less space between rating and description (rating can be very small and still be understood), the rating doesn't need "Overall Rating" written next to it, just the number of ratings.

The color scheme and clean look are good with me - it might be nice to give it a little more character because it's such a valuable and unique place on the WWW.

Big thanks to everyone who makes this place work. We should all donate to help get this new UI working well!

Add me to the people who are not happy with the new UX, and for, I think, mostly the same reasons.

You've vastly reduced the density of the home page, and I consider that a bug, not a feature, for my use case, and my perception of your target audience.

My problem isn't implementation or widgets, it's information architecture, and I think you've overly-dumbed down the homepage, and I disapprove.

Hopefully, we'll still be able to use it in future, even after you take bang-zoom out of Beta.

I have to preview a lot of different sounds in a short space of time in order to find the exact type of sound I am looking for. This can sometimes take a little while, and unfortunately, the new UI makes it more difficult to do this speedily. It involves more scrolling, and less sounds per page.

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