How intuitive is OGS for new users?

game start button : always on in every pages

if guest can find game start button by clicking one or two step, not intuitive.

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Especially here in the forum. The complete separation between forum and main site is a real pain. Just think you need to switch to check if someone played in your correspondence games, and not only that.

Besides what should be there itā€™s important how it should look. Space on screen is limited, even more for mobile. For usability everything needs to be on the right place and there should be a common theme through all pages, so you can develop intuition on where to look for a specific function. Design proposals are more help than 10 polls showing that everyone wants more features than we currently have.

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I think youā€™re right too. I havenā€™t a good idea how to organise proposals for changes and ways to vote on them.

Of course we could post every idea to Github, but I also donā€™t expect everyone to go out of their way to do that, possibly needing to make an account. Here is more natural to post and discuss ideas.

On the forums, I feel as benjito said

Itā€™d be nice to keep track of and vote on suggestions somehow, but polls are also annoying in that I donā€™t think they can be edited after a while, or they probably canā€™t be added to without losing all the votes (say one wanted to keep all ideas in a single poll).

One could try to keep lots of ideas in one post at the start of a thread and keep editing, but then expressing agreement/disagreement seems messy.

One could have a thread with one idea per post and no discussion in that thread, all the discussion to be moved to another thread? Then the hearts at least show agreement. The only problem is there wonā€™t be much organisation to the ideas, and after a while - say thereā€™s 100 posts, I imagine not many people want to read every post before suggesting something. Similarly it can be tricky to use the Forum search to find an old related post before making a new topic.

Back to this idea, I wonder would having menus that dropdown when you hover over them be useful (not sure on mobile). Iā€™ve seen lichess and chess dot com have menus that expand on hover. Iā€™m imagining this for the Play button, so that a quick way to start a game, or a quick way to get straight to the settings for a custom game is there no matter where you are.

Would that make sense? It doesnā€™t mess up the current UI layout really, doesnā€™t need thing to move around that is.

Egā€™s Chess dot com hovering the play button

lichess hovering the play button

Of course you can still click the play button in both instances as well to be brought to a play page (say the current play page for us)

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Itā€™s a little hard to explain in detail in English, so I drew a picture. :slight_smile:


this is home scene when I just logged in.

(allowed only one embed)

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this is home scene I editted.

Iā€™m not saying it has to be like this, but if I make it, Iā€™ll try to make it like this.

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If you want to see a list of pending games or graphs, you can see them in the play menu, and I think itā€™s best to make you want to play a delayed or new game of go right away when you log in.

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New post, and then make it a wiki post, where people can enter their ideas.
Second step: select the best ideas and put them in Github, for which you do need an account (I have one).
I think it is smart to work with little teams in conceptualising the ideas into solid proposals.
And if you need help, feel free to ask me.

I donā€™t think there should be a thumbs-down function anywhere on OGS.

Negativity isnā€™t fun ā€“ letā€™s stick with our charming Discourse :heart::heart:

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What? Iā€™m just saying a discussion about major changes should involve some way to express dissentā€¦

EDIT: My apologies. I see you were responding to another suggestion I made for a dissent option >.< (WOW am I that negative??)

In the case of puzzles, I see what you are saying, but actually I donā€™t think the question is whether or not we want to express negativity, but in how much detail (binary vs. quinary)

From OGS main chat

sketchybrush: how do you challenge someone to a game if you know their username?
[ 9:21]Vegetable: top left, search for the player, click name, click challenge
[ 9:45]lightornight2z: challenge?
[ 9:46]FrostedNuke: click any name and you will see the challenge button in there
[ 9:46]lightornight2z: OK

This is one of thr most common question on OGS and to me Itā€™s not intuitive to proceed like that. Some are searching a direct challenge button, and donā€™t think to click on their opponent name first. Both ways should be made available.

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From OGS help chat

[17:35]ryh5ujue5: how edit joseki?
[18:05]AdamR: the joseki dictionary is not publically editable to avoid it being cluttered with sub-optimal/outdated information, only several high-level users have direct access. Depending on what you want to achieve you might try commenting, starting a thread at the forums or contacting Eugene
[ 7:19]Groin: If you simply want to explore your own variation Itā€™s possible (just use the joseki explorer like a demo board )
[ 7:20]Groin: But you cannot save them

Well the question was a bit short to know exactly what it was about but itā€™s not first time i see it in chat and i think itā€™s not always because the players want to contribute materials to the OJE but simply because they start to study variations from a OJE position, have a need for more tools like trees, labelsā€¦ and want to keep these studies for themselves. Maybe have more fonctionalities like with a demo board, and save them. Intuitively OJE offers you the freedom to play sequences, but then all you can do is screenshoting before throwing them to the trashbin.(unintuitive and frustrating)

Something similar with comments which are not always of high quality but maybe then players do that for themselves and i highly doubt that they are aware that comments are automatically copied in that Joseki forum topic.

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How to search for people by name is the one server-related question I answered most on OGS (ā€œWhen do I get my rank?ā€ would be second). OGS burger menu/search-box should be more visible to newcomers.

How about putting in a ā€œMenuā€ next to ā€œHomeā€, ā€œPlayā€, ā€œGamesā€? It might even make sense to have a search-box in display next to those, without having to go into the menu.

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new users should have way to mark themselves as ā€œbeginnersā€ for others to see
and if new user chose so, additional page with explanations should appear for beginner to read

Both new and old users are confused now, even in chat

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As someone spent a lot of time research the origin of kyu rank, I find it quite interesting that most introductions about Go omit to mention rank or rating and go straight into rules.

The learn-to-play-go page on OGS has no mention of rating/rank and how to get a rank either, but only mentioned it inside FAQ textwall.

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Explaining how ranks work,yes! and not give too quick access to the rank system, by a self declaration to be a beginner from the start (instead of the beginner self determining his rank). OGS then will give the correct first ranking.
IMG_20211027_100833
Thatā€™s what a beginner is looking for, not to rank up by playing as a 12 (or 6?) kyu. I hope he can get it asap by some rethinking of the welcoming of beginners.

Side note: after being rejected by 1k bot, this beginner will be rejected by beginner level bots because his rank will beā€¦ too high!

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or this:

menu

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I feel like the Menu is quite easy to find, the three horizontal bars are a well-known symbol.

However itā€™s easy to miss the search bar. Intuitively my eyes will look for this kind of search bar on the top right corner of the screen, not hidden in a menu. It took me a while to find it.

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I would love to see stats of how much all the various OGS features / buttons are used.

Like, Iā€™ve never used the ā€œChatā€ top nav link, but no idea if others do. Might help us all break out of our specific experience.

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