Freesound Forums

The new user interface is terrible. You've fallen into the trap of making it "tablet friendly" but that is NOT the way your users use it. The buttons are too large. Way too much scrolling. You've made the site MUCH harder to use. This is really terrible. Please go back... or at least let us pick.

Hi @klonghofer,

I'm sorry to hear you're not enjoying the new UI. The new design was never thought for mobile or tablet devices "first", but of course we wanted it to be better compatible with these devices than the old UI. Please have a look at the list of new features as there are some things that you might find useful like the "grid mode" for the search page which might result in less scrolling for you. Unfortunately we're not going to be able to keep the old UI up and running, the option to switch back to it will be removed in the next hours/days.

Cheers,

frederic

How do I change to the classic UI?

Hi,

Unfortunately it is no longer possible to use the old UI.

Frederic, you told me in this forum just a matter of days ago that I'd still have thee same vertical scrolling for managing my uploads as I've had so far.

That is not correct. I cannot use the abomination that I now have to contend with, at least without a lot of stess and eyestrain. I've looked around carefully and I can't find any different option.

No more uploads from me unless / until I have a straightforward vertically scrolling list of my uploads to work from, one item per (wrapped) line.

From now on my uploads will be just to YouTube. — Sad, but there are some very blinkered individuals in your team who are rigid in their outlooks and ignored the complaints and warnings from me and many other users, all for the sake of a very common policy of 'if it's not broke, get on and break it to make it look "cool"'.

For now, at least, I'm done with uploading to FS — great though the service is. Deeply sorry about that.

Philip

It's starting to become evident that the new codebase will, in time, reach a much greater level of functionality. At this moment, I think their respective levels are about the same.

There IS too much scrolling, describing things IS too laborious, and so on. Sound descriptions on user pages are too short - you can only write about 50-55 characters before they're cut off. But I do see notable improvements here and there. The waveform and spectrogram images are way better, you can see who downloaded something without having to open the sound page, we have mass management/editing of sounds, etc.

Now yes, if it were me I would've just modernized the old layout, but that ship has sailed and it won't benefit anyone to go out into the waves and paddle after it. We just have to do our best with what we have so the good times continue to roll.

Yes. Apparently quite a few spears have been broken regarding the new interface. And everyone is right and wrong in their own way. Well. I still feel like a blind kitten when navigating the updated site. And this is very unpleasant. Don't know. Maybe I'm just so used to the old version that I don't want to let it go. But as has been repeatedly noted, despite all the advantages, there are a lot of significant disadvantages that are associated with the comfort of staying on the site. I'll try to get used to it, of course. As dear Philip said, ordinary politics really does take place. I don’t understand why we need to see the total number of downloads, better return the usual number of downloads and comments under each sound. I can’t really believe that it’s very difficult to get it back. It's sad to realize that enthusiasts are starting to leave because of something seemingly stupid like the interface.

Philip_Goddard wrote:
Frederic, you told me in this forum just a matter of days ago that I'd still have thee same vertical scrolling for managing my uploads as I've had so far.

In the new UI vertical scrolling is used in the search page, and also the search page is used for more things that with the old UI, so for example the list of sounds of a user is shown using the search page. Therefore you can get a list of your published sounds with vertical scrolling. You should get it here: https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/

Nevertheless, the search page also has a "grid mode" that will show sounds ina grid like in the front page and in the user profile page. This is so that more sounds can be shown on screen without having to scroll. It might be happening that you have this option enabled and this is why you don't see the vertical list? To enable/disable it you click on "advanced search options" in the search page, and untick the "display results in grid" option. I hope this helps!

newlocknew wrote:
As dear Philip said, ordinary politics really does take place. I don’t understand why we need to see the total number of downloads, better return the usual number of downloads and comments under each sound. I can’t really believe that it’s very difficult to get it back.

Well, while designing the new UI, both the designer and us made the decisions trying to make Freesound as good and usable as poossible, based on our experience with it and on looking at the data we have available about how people uses the site. It is clear however that we'll rarely agree on everything. But just to comment on that example that you mention, the total number of downloads is something which was not present in the new UI and we added it because it was requested by some users and there was a nice place to add this info in the UI. The number of downloads and comments from the sound players in grid mode was removed because thre's much less space used by the players and we did not find the place to put it nicely, but the code is there ready to do it if we come up with a good idea. I already mentioned that in a different thread. Nevertheless, if you use the search page in the default mode, there you do see the number of downloads and comments per sound just as before. Also the search page is used in more places than before, so we thought it was not such a bad thing to remove that info from the players in grid mode. The goal here is to put more sounds on the screen so people can listen to more of them, which we think is a nice idea.

Yes, Frederic, I've now noticed that search results are in vertical list format, but are far too spread-out and diffusely formatted, so that only a small number of items can fill a desktop screen (I noted that the 'display as grid' option was unchecked)., and I have to spend time looking at the whole width of each entry. That makes searches laboriously slow.

In any case, it's still true that in the 'Manage Sounds' list, there is only grid, and no option at all to change that. Either way, I cannot sensibly use this interface without significant modification, which clearly is not going to happen. Hence my ceasing to upload here. — Sorry.

Yes, the manage sounds page is grid-only. That page however did not even exist in the old UI, so I’m not sure what type of tasks you could do with the old UI and the vertical list that you can’t do now. If you want to clarify I might be able to help. And yes the vertical display takes a bit more height per sound than in the old UI, even though we did make it more compact with respect to the original design. It is hard to make it smaller, but the difference is not that big at the end. In any case our solution for that was the grid view, and if that does not work for you then I think we won’t be able to do much more at the moment, I’m sorry.

change it back

frederic.font wrote:
Hi @klonghofer,

I'm sorry to hear you're not enjoying the new UI. The new design was never thought for mobile or tablet devices "first", but of course we wanted it to be better compatible with these devices than the old UI. Please have a look at the list of new features as there are some things that you might find useful like the "grid mode" for the search page which might result in less scrolling for you. Unfortunately we're not going to be able to keep the old UI up and running, the option to switch back to it will be removed in the next hours/days.

Cheers,

frederic

Congratulations, you lost a user. I was thinking about donating too.

frederic.font wrote:
Yes, the manage sounds page is grid-only. That page however did not even exist in the old UI, so I’m not sure what type of tasks you could do with the old UI and the vertical list that you can’t do now. If you want to clarify I might be able to help. And yes the vertical display takes a bit more height per sound than in the old UI, even though we did make it more compact with respect to the original design. It is hard to make it smaller, but the difference is not that big at the end. In any case our solution for that was the grid view, and if that does not work for you then I think we won’t be able to do much more at the moment, I’m sorry.

frederic.font wrote:
Nevertheless, if you use the search page in the default mode, there you do see the number of downloads and comments per sound just as before.

I like the new UI, the old one had light mode on and it was burning my eyes

I used Dark Reader browser extension to turn it dark grey. I'm still using DR, so the new freesound is the same color as the old one to me

Well except at the page bottom, but I don't mind the pop of blue so much, although I do think dark desaturated red would be better suited

frederic.font wrote:
Yes, the manage sounds page is grid-only. That page however did not even exist in the old UI, so I’m not sure what type of tasks you could do with the old UI and the vertical list that you can’t do now. If you want to clarify I might be able to help. And yes the vertical display takes a bit more height per sound than in the old UI, even though we did make it more compact with respect to the original design. It is hard to make it smaller, but the difference is not that big at the end. In any case our solution for that was the grid view, and if that does not work for you then I think we won’t be able to do much more at the moment, I’m sorry.

A lot of this comes down to the fact that I provide detailed notes with each upload, and this usually involves referring to other recordings of mine, which I need to look up. It's usually quite a lot of work as it is. Uploading my recordings without that would be pretty pointless, and I'm busy with a lot of other indeed higher-priority things going on, and simply don't have more time to spend on a laborious and frustrating and visually stressful UI getting in my way.

I'm also not encouraged at all by all the stonewalling about this — all the attempts to persuade me and others that it's really okay and we'll get used to it, sort of thing. No, basic understanding of ergonomic visual focus is lacking in the whole design, and I can't work with that without ongoing significant stress.

newlocknew wrote:

frederic.font wrote:
Nevertheless, if you use the search page in the default mode, there you do see the number of downloads and comments per sound just as before.

Yes. But this does not work in the SOUND MANAGEMENT section. It's still not there either. Therefore, this can be considered a half-measure.

I have an update about that . Many of you asked to have the downloads and comments count in the grid sound display, not only in this thread but also in other threads and during the public beta. For that reason I decided to give it another go and I found a way to add the information in the displays which I think looks good. So yes, now you'll see number of downloads and comments in the manage sounds page as well (note that it might take some hours until this update is applied to all sounds).

Basically what I've don is to add this information next to the other icons which were already present (geotag, pack, license...). If the sound has no downloads or comments, then the icons for downloads/comments are not shown (the same applies to the other icons). The only issue is when a sound has many downloads and many comments and also has a pack and geotag (...), in that case many icons appear and it might feel a bit cluttered, but not as bad as I thought it would be. And in any case for the average sound I think it looks quite good.

Philip_Goddard wrote:
A lot of this comes down to the fact that I provide detailed notes with each upload, and this usually involves referring to other recordings of mine, which I need to look up. It's usually quite a lot of work as it is.

With the new UI you can search and filter your own sounds, that might help finding the sounds you look for without having to scroll that much. This was not possible with the old UI so maybe this helps. Also, if you find the description interface not good for your uploading workflow, you might want to try using the "bulk describe" feature which will allow you to describe sounds using a spreadsheet editor (like Excel). Maybe that works for you. Here's information about how to use that feature: https://freesound.org/help/faq/#i-have-many-sounds-to-upload-is-there-a-way-to-describe-many-sounds-in-bulk

I have hard time seing the new UI interface in dark mode color, can Freesound member available the light mode version? So we can change from dark to light color.

And I think the web too seamless??
Like when you on the homepage. The part on the center & the right side (random sound of the day, rating, forum), too difficult to distinguish because they have the same color or maybe the distance or spacing too close, or too wider.

Thx~

I had a look. The grid sound display changes are great. I can appreciate compacted views provided they have enough informational density to them. This helps us see how our batches are doing and helps downloaders find sounds that have never been used before. I did spend a lot of time clicking around between profile page, sound management page, and search page to get to all the different info, and now I don't have to click around as much.