please test the new PyPI (now in beta)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2018 11:03:00 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:

> Digging into this further, the design work on the Warehouse site has
> been ongoing since late 2015, and there was an extensive user testing
> phase,

Oh? What did they test the user for?

Whatever it was, it was a pity they didn't test them for good taste 
before letting them approve the current design.

(And yes, I hate the front page of the main python.org site too. At least 
the documentation pages are nice.)

There's no point in raising a tracker issue. The web developers are 
invested in the design, they've spent months working on it, its their 
baby. Then there's the whole "sunk cost" thing, "we just spent a small 
fortune redesigning the site, reverting means we wasted it".

And the fact that *by definition* the process is biased towards change 
whether it is needed or not. If the decision-makers didn't think change 
was wanted, they wouldn't have started the process in the first place. 
And no matter how cheap the price, "leave well enough alone" was never 
going to be the winning proposal.

So anyone (like me) who likes the old design is going to be pushing crap 
uphill with a straw, *even* if our opinion had been asked early in the 
process.


> PS I just realised, what I was seeing as "in your face" was the red
> "this is a test instance" banner - and that's in your face by design!
> You'd have thought I would have realised this earlier, but what can I
> say? Once I dismissed that banner, the page looks fine to me.

Too much bold blue space.

Too much low-contrast pale blue text and icons on blue background.

Too much unneeded frippery, like on the home page, which each of the 
featured projects has a box around it (why?) and an identical icon of a 
pale-grey cube.

(Presumably the cube is meant to symbolise the interconnectedness of all 
life in the cosmos, and it is faded pale grey in order to signify the 
ephemeral nature of software.)

Too many (*one* is too many) instances of the stupid design fashion for 
putting *active UI elements* in pale grey, the better to make them look 
inactive. E.g. the text in search boxes.

Speaking of which... oh the irony... in the 1980s, I had Mac with a 9-
inch (23 cm) screen, and that was enough real estate to put the 
instructions outside of the search field:

    Search for: [                              ]  ( Find )

and still have a roomy search field AND an actual Find button. 
(Presumably for people who couldn't push the Enter key).

Today, I was using a monitor the size of one of the smaller European 
countries. Three quarters of the active window was either covered in ads 
or blank, and yet most webpages have a microscopically small search field 
with a grammatically ambiguous command, apparently grey-out and inactive, 
in the search box itself:

    [ Search ]

Yay for progress!

As an extra bonus, even when searching is not reliant on Javascript, 
mangling the text in the search box often is, so unless I'm extra 
careful, whenever I want to search for (say) "aardvarks", I invariably 
end up searching for "searaardvarksch".

At least the new PyPI search box is better than that. They get a point.




-- 
Steve