Freesound Forums

While I do have some admittedly minor criticism of the new UI, i do have one question. Why change it? I find it weird that this website, especially with how small it is would just switch to a completely new UI, with most people not exactly having the most positive opinions on it. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Of course I wouldn't care if the old UI was still an option, but the fact that the website is just giving up on the old UI because they are too small a team makes me want to give my two cents anyways.

Me, as old user, have long, long passed that stage of discussion.
I also had to get used to it, but the future wishes otherwise. Nothing is forever. Not even a user interface. (-;

Hi,

The main reason for making a new UI has to do with code maintainability and overall sustainability. The old UI grew in a very uncontrolled way, the code is a bit of a mess and that makes it very difficult to maintain and to add new features (for example, it would have been impossible to add proper support for devices of different screen size). During the last years, we did a very similar thing with the "backend" code (the part which is not "visible" to users), and also with the infrastructure that runs Freesound. Precisely because we are a very small team, we need to keep things as simple as possible to maintain end evolve.

Given that we were going to make a new UI, we also decided to update it visually and not re-implement it the same way (which actually would also have been very hard considering that we had to change some of the development tools*). However, it was in the design principles that the UX would be kept almost exactly the same and all the features and flow remain almost unchanged (except that we added some new features, you can read about here https://freesound.org/help/faq/#what-are-the-new-features-brought-by-the-new-user-interface). By updating the graphical design, we wanted to make Freesound cleaner, easier to use, and to have a simpler look that could last for many years.

With all the feedback received in the last year, we've been able to improve the new UI, re-introduce things that we missed, fix a lot of issues, make visual updates following user requests, etc. Of course it will be a big change after more than 10 years with the "old" UI, but I'm quite positive that you'll get used to it and enjoy its many benefits.

*For those interested in development stuff: we updated the js/css toolchain to make it a bit more modern, but only a bit. We consciously avoided complex JS frameworks that keep on changing constantly and for the most part simply rely on good old html/js/css techniques. This is again to simplify code maintainability.

I hope this explanation properly addresses the confusion