Freesound Forums
I would love for the new UI to be a lot more compact than it currently is
Started November 22nd, 2023 · 14 replies · Latest reply by WangleLine 10 months ago
this is the main thing, really. the rest is fine in my books (though squircle or rounded square icons would be much better), i'm just tired of the march of whitespace in every application, on every website, everywhere, all the time. please use my screen real estate for information, not padding.
Hi, thanks for your comments. Did you try using the "grid mode" in the search results? You might like it better, you'll find an option in the advanced search panel.
the freesound team
Hey frederic,
This is about pretty much every element in the new design. Everything is spaced out too much and I can't help but feel like there's a hell of a lot of wasted space between every bit of text, every image, every button etc.
That's because there IS a lot of wasted space. Any other site would resize the page dynamically to fill the screen no matter what device you were using. I don't know why this is such an esoteric concept or so anathema to the chosen design philosophy. People have complained about it from the beginning and even the previous UI had this problem...
VOUCH! the UI definitely does have potential but it just feels like something is missing... like there are things that should be there but aren't, and it makes the website feel empty and incomplete, the old UI felt more compact and put together in a more structured way, and you just knew that the website would function just how you expect it to. but ever since this UI has been released everything just feels too spaced out and fake, its like someone put a huge mask onto the website. i'm not used to the extremely simple colour palette and the rounded corners everywhere you go.
What really gets me is clicking "show more sounds" on a page, only to be shown the exact 15 sounds I was looking at on the previous page a second time, and then having to click to Page 2 to see new ones.
My 1080p monitor has space for five columns of sounds - six if you move the stats and "most common tags" out of the way.
The packs view is god awful and so is its default sort mode. I never look at anyone's packs anymore, which is probably for the best, because this is where I encounter the majority of server errors.
Hi,
What really gets me is clicking "show more sounds" on a page, only to be shown the exact 15 sounds I was looking at on the previous page a second time, and then having to click to Page 2 to see new ones.
Then "show more sounds" button is actually called "show all sounds", and yes you're right that it redirects to the first page of sounds so you have repeated sounds. If you use the compact mode for search results you see twice the number of sounds, so you see 15 more sounds without loading page 2. One option would be to add some logic for going directly to page 2 of search results (when not using compact mode), nevertheless the idea for the account page in some future is that the sounds displayed there will be selected by the user (like "featured" sounds), so there might not be overlap when you click "show all sounds".
The packs view is god awful and so is its default sort mode. I never look at anyone's packs anymore, which is probably for the best, because this is where I encounter the majority of server errors.
You mean the pack page (i.e. http://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/packs/33640/) or the search page when displaying results as packs (kind of pack search)? Pages related to packs in general (including search) are slower than those related to sounds. Simplifying, this is because these are not as optimized as sounds in the database, but we'll make that better at some point. In any case the speed it is not worse than what it was with the old UI. And about server errors please let us know when you find one. Other than the fact that editing large packs can be problematic (for uploaders), our systems have not been alerted of other server errors in pack pages so if you find a bug please let us know. Thanks!
the freesound team
The individual pack view is fine. I'm referring to the search page you see when trying to view a user's pack listing. It was once sorted alphabetically by default, but now alphabetical sort isn't even an option. This means I have to try to remember how long ago something was uploaded in order to correctly guess which search results page the pack will appear on.
That is also the page where I encounter errors. Usually a bad gateway. After the UI switch, I got this error on my main page about 75% of the time I tried to load it, but that seems to have stabilized and now I get this issue mostly from the packs search page.
The individual pack view is fine. I'm referring to the search page you see when trying to view a user's pack listing. It was once sorted alphabetically by default, but now alphabetical sort isn't even an option. This means I have to try to remember how long ago something was uploaded in order to correctly guess which search results page the pack will appear on.
Yes you're right, the way packs are listed in the new UI has some new features but also does not support well some of the old ones. We are aware of that and it will be fixed at some point not too far away. What happens is that, in order to reduce the number of pages in Freesound and make it more maintainable, in the new UI we are using the search page for more things than what we used to. We also use it to list packs (note that before the new UI this was not possible, as packs were not searchable). The problem is that the database/search engine is not yet optimized to list/search for packs, and now these pages are slow and miss some of the old features like sorting (but you can indeed search for packs, which was not possible before 
). Once we optimize pack searching, then we can re-add the sorting options and make the pages load much faster.
Because pack pages are slow, sometimes you get server errors, although I did not expect such a big rate of errors. This also happened with some user profiles (because stats shown in the new UI need to be computed and this takes some time), but I already optimized the code to avoid these errors (as you have noticed).
the freesound team
Was wandering round the forum, and I recognised WangleLine's profile pic!
Had an Email from Bandcamp about a new album like today lol
Small world! Glad to see you here.
On the topic.
I share the feeling of things being too spaced out.
In almost every menu there's 3/5ths of the width of the screen used (on my 1080p horizontal monitor). I'm sure 1/5 extra to show 4 sounds instead of 3 can be done.
In sounds search window. The extra width by having 2.5cm of margin on each side rather than 9.8cm could keep as much description, but have the "pack/download/comments/attribution/rating" info into it's own column, tightening down the height (in none grid view)
Id even go as far as to say, there should be a "display results in letterbox" option. Really compact lines, Almost no waveform, just the title, description, username, and an Icon displaying that there's a pack, and the attribution icon. Downloads, comments, rating, date of publish, user profile picture all optional. And definitely no room for tags in this "letter box view" imo x')
A sound block, currently uses on my monitors (24") 6.4cm of height, I'm sure id be fine with 4cm or even 3.5. It's even 7cm high on the home page.
(THAT SAID, it's important to keep accessibility! Keeping things spaced out, big title fonts is probably very useful for a lot of users. I hope this isn't an OR situation. But there should be a way to accommodate both an easy view, and a power user view.)
Out of topic, but still UI related.
-Could the "show advanced search options" have a colour or shade bubble around it? Or be moved to the left filter column. I think it's easy to miss or not really highlighted despite being an important search tool!
Further opening it, maybe a question mark button could show up (or somewhere else), to pop/up or redirect to a formatting info page. Like how we can search with +keyword +keyword.
Maybe a call for some UI scale sketches, or a proposal surveying some drafts of how big/small the UI could be before spending precious time editing would help ?
I'm sure the community is more than willing to help any way it can, so Freesound team don't hesitate to ask for sketches, opinions. Flood us with polls and we will like it 
I know the new UI gets a lot of beef, so I'll at least finish on some positivity.
There is room for improvement, there's some things I preferred in the old UI, there's stuff I prefer in the new UI. However I personally like where it's going.
I'm finding myself more engaged in the forum posts.
I think the "freesound" top left button page is more inviting, it's kind of a habbit to check it out every now and then to check the forum read the top donor, top new sounds and all. I enjoy it.
The old design did look old. I think the new UI will be more inviting to new users by being less prone of thinking "what dodgy 1998s website did I end up on" which will be good for the community.
I prefer the new upload sounds menues/ui.
I can't recall the "map" feature on the old one, there's something neat about that thing.
So overall, good stuff, keep it going!
Hope I'm not too harsh, much love Freesound team!
Sadiquecat wrote:
Was wandering round the forum, and I recognised WangleLine's profile pic!
Had an Email from Bandcamp about a new album like today lolSmall world! Glad to see you here.
Oh hello!!