Please sign this petition to restore the previous ESRI website design!

MatthewGoulet1 · ‎02-01-2013

Is it me, or have the recent changes to ESRI's resources web pages become way more difficult to use?

Personally, I strongly prefer the previous look/feel and have found this new layout and design to be very non-user friendly.

If enough people respond in agreement, perhaps we may implore ESRI to walk back these new designs.

Please reply if you agree.

JeffPace · ‎02-01-2013

I have to agree, the forced "mobilification" of the styling is terrible for desktop users, which i can only imagine are the bulk of the developers.

derekswingley1 · ‎02-01-2013

As I said in the previous forum thread discussing the new design, we are not going to go back to the old design.

We've been listening and have been making changes to the site to improve usability. We moved away from a fixed grid for the main content areas (api ref, concepts, samples and tutorials) and have made the table of contents always visible.

One big thing the design did for us was to ditch the <frames> so that the URL in your browser accurately reflects the content that's currently displayed.

We are still missing search, but we are working on restoring that.

What specific things don't you like about the site? The site (content as well as design) is constantly evolving and if there's something specific you'd like changed or tweaked we can discuss that.

What does "forced 'mobilification'" mean? The site operates the same on mobile/tablets/desktop. In other words, it is not a responsive design.

JeffPace · ‎02-01-2013

For me its the super stripped styling that looks like it was designed for a tablet. Tons of wasted white space, big fonts, etc..
Its just a personal preference I guess. As long as it is functional.

It just FEELS like (especially due to missing search) that styling is being forced over function. That is the wrong direction, imho.

to be short, it looks like it was designed by marketing, not a developer. Fine for the examples, not fine for an API

derekswingley1 · ‎02-01-2013

Its just a personal preference I guess. As long as it is functional.

I agree, critiquing a design is subjective. Hopefully the site is still functional. With the exception of search (and I'm not trying to minimize the importance of search), the site should be more functional. It's much easier to link to specific resources.

A little more background on search... internally, we weren't happy with how search was working. The underlying search index was out of date and the infrastructure for maintaining the index was going to go away. We decided to re-launch the site without search since we didn't think anyone was actually using it because the results were so poor. Obviously we were wrong.

to be short, it looks like it was designed by marketing, not a developer. Fine for the examples, not fine for an API

We didn't quite go full Zeldman for the site but I'd be lying if I said we weren't at least a little influenced by design elements from the A List Apart crowd.

JeffPace · ‎02-01-2013

Yes thats it. Its just a frustration with the way the web is going.

Desktop screens are getting more and more landscape. Content is getting more and more portrait. It just doesn't work together.

DianaBenedict · ‎02-01-2013

If I might make several suggestions:

1) it would help me if I could resized the left panel to either make it bigger or smaller so that I have more "usable" area in the content section

2) It would be extremely helpful if ESRI could provided an object model for the Javascript API. Having the text is great, but a picture/model can say a hundred words (or whatever the adage is ). Sometimes I feel like I am navigating all over the place to find the objects that I need .. a model would help tremendously.

3) Please update the samples to include the AMD style of coding. According to your own documentation

Dojo 1.7 (the version of Dojo used by version 3.0 of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript) fully supports creating classes and modules using Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) style code while continuing to support the older, dojo.declare style of module and custom class creation

It seems like it will really benefit the developers going forward to have samples that show the new standards. I tried using the "SeatGeek" sample that you have and it did not work correctly - the sample is referencing an older version of the JavascriptAPI and when you plug in the 3.3 version it does not work. Also, your sample includes all the code in the HTML. I moved the code to a seperate js file and I am unable to get the ESRI modules to load correctly using AMD style programming. Your samples need to be updated to not only support the current version of your API but to help developers with moving forward.

To conclude, it seems like ESRI has already improved the Help site since it first came out and I have confidence that it will get better - Design. We appreciate your quick response. I do not feel like it is as cumbresome (since the fixes) but I do agree that there is a lot of wasted space (it's all personal preferences, right).

Just my two cents ... Thanks for listening!

derekswingley1 · ‎02-01-2013

Yes thats it. Its just a frustration with the way the web is going.

Desktop screens are getting more and more landscape. Content is getting more and more portrait. It just doesn't work together.

My take is that the web is mimicking print more and more. As our displays become more capable (hi-def, retina, blah blah blah), content on the web can be presented the way content is presented in print. I personally like this trend. Take these two presentations of the same article:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story/?hp
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story/?hp...

Which do you like better? Even with the ads and additional junk, I prefer the first. The second, while it uses nearly all available space is harder to read because it is so wide.

JeffPace · ‎02-01-2013

My take is that the web is mimicking print more and more. As our displays become more capable (hi-def, retina, blah blah blah), content on the web can be presented the way content is presented in print. I personally like this trend. Take these two presentations of the same article:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story/?hp
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story/?hp...

Which do you like better? Even with the ads and additional junk, I prefer the first. The second, while it uses nearly all available space is harder to read because it is so wide.

Fair enough, but the new site here is more like the second, just with a narrower width. It is the ads and "additional junk" that is the value add that feels like its missing.

Maybe not.

derekswingley1 · ‎02-01-2013

If I might make several suggestions:

1) it would help me if I could resized the left panel to either make it bigger or smaller so that I have more "usable" area in the content section

Can you use the "Hide Table of Contents" link? If that doesn't work, the other option is to resize your browser window which will cause the content area to become bigger.

2) It would be extremely helpful if ESRI could provided an object model for the Javascript API. Having the text is great, but a picture/model can say a hundred words (or whatever the adage is ). Sometimes I feel like I am navigating all over the place to find the objects that I need .. a model would help tremendously.

We haven't had an Object Model Diagram (OMD) for the API since 2009. We'll look into publishing one again.

3) Please update the samples to include the AMD style of coding. <snip>

I'll get these updated, hopefully today. Edit: I'm only referring to the samples linked from the Dojo and AMD help topic.

To conclude, it seems like ESRI has already improved the Help site since it first came out and I have confidence that it will get better - Design. We appreciate your quick response. I do not feel like it is as cumbresome (since the fixes) but I do agree that there is a lot of wasted space (it's all personal preferences, right).

Thanks for the vote of confidence :).

Can we talk more about the wasted white space? Outside of the home page, I don't see it. I've attached a screen shot with some annotations, please provide feedback.