In properly completed games it is almost never necessary to adjust scoring. With incomplete games it is best to use the ‘resume’ option to complete borders for example. Unsettled positions may confuse the auto-score as it relies on playouts for it’s evaluation. Occasionally, it fails to provide an assessment in which case all stones will appear to be alive often voiding territory. This too can often be overcome by resuming and then returning to scoring, especially with correspondence games.
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Ah, yes, found the ToS using
the Search facility:
“By using our service you agree not to:
[…]
Disrupt the normal flow of dialog or otherwise act in a manner that negatively affects other users’ ability to communicate through or use Services provided by Online-Go.com”
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Thanks. I think I have had just one game where there was a mistake (over a seki). Neither my opponent (a fellow club member) nor I knew what to do, but I thrashed about a bit, clicking, and eventually got it as we agreed it should be. Now I’ve rtfm, I should be okay if it happens again.
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To get back to the main topic, I think part of the problem is that OGS is quite cluttered visually. I’d break this down into two separate problems.
The first is that there are too many elements on pages, making it hard to find any given element. For example, the global horizontal nav at the top of the screen, which is generally the primary navigation on a website, contains twelve entries. A basic rule of thumb in UI is that menus should contain around 4–7 elements, or they become too long to read at a glance. In this case, every entry in the menu is duplicated in the dropdown hamburger menu, which is redundant, and makes the dropdown also unduly lengthy. A fairly simple improvement would be to identify the 4–7 most important items in the horizontal nav, and remove the others so that they only appear in the dropdown.
I would see the primary function of the site to be playing Go online, so I would give priority to the entries that relate to playing games (Play, Games, Tournaments, Ladders). Maybe the secondary function is community (Chat, Groups, Forums). So the entries to exile to the dropdown menu are the ones that are educational (Puzzles, Joseki), the one that nobody understands and may actually be broken (Leaderboards) and arguably the two that are available in other forms in the site’s global navigation (Home, Profile).
Note that you want to group related items together so that the user gets a sense of where to look for certain kinds of information: games here, chat there, information about the site there and so on. The dropdown menu currently groups entries into three sections but I don’t see the logic underlying the division, meaning you have to read through the whole 22-item menu in search of what you’re looking for.
As many people have already suggested, Search should be in the global navigation, not hidden under a dropdown. Top right of the screen is the usual place, but that’s currently occupied by notifications so a bit of thought needed on how to arrange things.
Other elements that to me add clutter without being that functional are the histogram on the Play page, and the 4 x 4 grid of different ratings in your Profile, but getting the primary navigation right is really one of the most important aspects of design in any website.
The second problem is that OGS does not have a strong visual hierarchy. The majority of elements on any page are text, and the majority of the text is the same font in the same size, making it hard to pick out which are the important elements. Certainly I think the navigation should be more clearly distinguished from the content of the page — it’s a bit old-fashioned but styling the menu elements to look like buttons or tabs could be helpful. More white space to separate groups of elements can also give structure: for comparison, check the Play page (different elements set off from each other) versus the Games page (no clear distinction between navigation, filters, and the game list itself).
I find that the clients for the other servers I routinely play on (IGS, KGS) do a better job of presenting information in a clear, easily navigable way. This may be because they are trying to do less than OGS — the visual clutter of the site is partly because OGS arguably has too many features — but it does mean that OGS is markedly more difficult to talk new users through, and many of my older Go-playing friends dislike it because they find it so difficult to identify where to do fairly basic things. And that’s a pity because the main strength of OGS should be accessibility: the server that doesn’t require you to install a client.
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Excellent post.
From my experience, the 4 most important things are [Play, Chat, Puzzles, Forums] but people who play ladders might want that in there as well, and I’d like to move [Settings] in there.
Do you think it would make sense to have a “basic view” and “advanced view” toggle somewhere, hiding all the awesome additions?
I don’t think OGS has too many features, we fought hard for each of those, but I agree that new players might be better off with a set of nice defaults and tidier page layouts.
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I’d list [Home, Profile, Play, Games] as the 4 most important for me, with Forums and Joseki right behind. But I don’t participate in live chat, or the site ladder, and haven’t used the puzzles feature much. From the hamburger menu, Demo Board would also stand out to me as being useful to have on the main bar.
Maybe Profile and Settings could go under the upper-right dropdown where you can change site theme? They should still be in the hamburger menu, of course, but I think this would allow both to be dropped from the main bar.
As to hamburger menu organization, maybe sections like this? I think I included everything. The order within each section is mostly random; largely the order in which I saw the items to add.
Go
[Home, Play, Tournaments, Ladders, Demo Board]
Community
[Games, Chat, Leaderboards, Groups, Forums]
Resources
[Learn to Play Go, Puzzles, Joseki, SGF Library, Other Go Resources]
Control Panel
[Support OGS, Profile, Settings, Documentation and FAQ, About, Logout]
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On one level I think that the last thing that OGS needs is another toggle. But yes, if I had the option of selecting an “OGS Light” theme that would present a clean, simplified version of the site with sensible defaults, I would switch it on and never look back. Maybe to say that OGS has too many features is not quite correct, but I certainly feel that there are too many options. More choice isn’t always a good thing, it often just leads to decision fatigue.
Yes, that’s what I would do too, give or take a few details (to my mind Games belongs with the other stuff in Go, and Demo Board with the more instructional stuff in Resources). That would be a small but immediate improvement.
What’s interesting to me is that both of you list four menu items as the most important to you, but they’re quite a different list in each case. I would guess there’s a broad division between people who see OGS as primarily a place to play Go, and those who see it as a place to hang out. The challenge would be to serve both groups well in the global navigation.
It’s also interesting to me that you both think Settings is quite a high priority item. It’s quite an important page in the sense that a lot of intersting options are buried in there, but it’s a low priority in navigational terms because once you’ve tweaked the Settings to your satisfaction, you’ll rarely look at them again. You save your prime locations for the pages that people visit again and again.
I find it a bit weird that one of the more accessible controls in OGS is the theme switcher: how often does anyone want to change it? I’m guessing that for the average user the number of times is somewhere between once and never. I can’t think of another server that allows you to choose between half a dozen options for board colour, stone design, notification sounds etc. and I never felt the lack.
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My guess would be because that’s where lichess has it.
I wouldn’t mind settings only being in the hamburger menu, but I would expect it to be in the dropdown with my avatar, since on many sites, clicking your avatar is the first step to getting to the settings or preferences page (it is on Discourse, for example). So it’s less a matter of how important it is, but simply where I would expect to find it.
Yeah, part of the reason I posted was because I noticed how I would pare down prominent navigation buttons (while still keeping them available, just with more clicks, of course), differed from what other people were suggesting, and other people were already suggesting quite a variety.
I had Games under Go, but moved it after I had filled out the Community section, because the reason I click on “Games”, is to kibitz with other people, and at the minimum, it’s to see another person’s game, not your own. Either way, it’s social in some aspect, but it does blur the line. Leaderboards, Tournaments, and Ladders are also a bit on the edge of the division. I think this division is particularly fuzzy because Go, being a two-player game, necessarily involves some level of social interaction and thus community, and this site, revolving around the game of Go, necessarily brings Go into most of its community aspects.
I had Demo Board up in Go because it’s like opening up a game, but with review tools too. I was thinking of resources as collections of information, while with a demo board you have to play stones and add variations and annotations and chat, and then it becomes a collection of information, and thus a resource. But when you click on “Demo Board”, it’s not bringing you to a resource.
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But it needs to be readily apparent so that people do not miss the opportunity to switch to dark mode as anybody ought to.
Unless of course we make dark mode the default. 
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I think that the top navbar is unnecessary in the first place. Better grouping needs to be done on the left drawbar, and the primary functions of the top navbar, as other have mentioned, play, watch, profile, etc, need to be implemented into the home page.
Here’s my 5 minute sketch on how it can be done adaptively (columns are inside the row). Also something else needs to be in place of the green circle on the upper right, because the current UX understanding of that element is that it should open your profile settings rather than your board settings.
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Where would the ladders and groups go?
I hope profile and play and watch would still be their own pages for when you need more than the pared down view of home/overview?
Why should the top navbar be removed? It’s unused space otherwise, and just paring it down to the more oft-used options seems a more reasonable route to go.
Then i would put away the drop down menu and put remaining items there for access in one click.
Now it seems to me that your design will take too much space on a mobile phone
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Ladders and groups aren’t something immediate that an average user would open the website for. These things go to the drawer.
Profile and watch will be their own pages of course. The play page could be reduced to a page with just the open challenges, in case somebody wants to find a game manually.
The navigation unit of the website is the drawer, not the navbar. Having so many pages, you either go for a nested navbar (either dropdowns, or a sub-navbar design) or you use it for minor utility, such as search bars. Youtube and twitch use their navbars this way, for example, while the rest of their navigation is either in the main frame or in the drawbar on the left.
The reason why you need a single navigation unit is because it creates an intuitive UI. When you have 2 “sources of truth” for your navigation on the website, you need to constantly search both of them. A new user is also more likely to be lost in multiple navigation panes, especially when their semantic purpose is exactly the same.
You mean the top right settings? They should be in the settings in the first place in my opinion because it makes more sense semantically. You think “change configuation” and you don’t imagine yourself that there’s a hidden (or currently double hidden because it has your userpic there) menu somewhere on the navbar with these settings. You just go to the settings and end up finding nothing there.
It doesn’t. The mobile layout is as I outlined.
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No i mean that top left ogs hamburger menu, which is still on your pic. I assumed it was still a dropdown menu with all was not fitting in the layout (ladders,groups), so maybe what you call drawer?
Do you consider a place for news (system, events, notes added in games, asking friendship etc…)
I really cannot imagine how you fit these 6 boxes on a mobile screen
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The whole site needs a total visual overhaul, everybody knows it. The main problem is that nobody on either team, either the developers or the many volunteers on GitHub, specialises in UI/UX design… And so for the past decade the site has had patch on top of patch.
I don’t know that we have enough money to hire a freelancer, so I guess we’re just waiting for someone to come along with significant web UI/UX design experience to come along and want to help 
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I think this thread is making a good start though: maybe the OP (of this new burst of activity, Mr @rottenhat ) actually is a person with significant UI design experience?
What I mean by this comment is actually “let’s not go meta, let’s keep exploring actual solutions, while we’re on a roll”.
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One after the other I imagine, following the column order he wrote in the pic.
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I’m the OP 
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I don’t use the Ladders; I included it because it seemed like something someone who does might want, but I could be wrong. I do like the groups there, since otherwise there’s not much to do with groups besides the Chat page and waiting for announcements. Having the list on your home lets you easily go to a relevant one and check online players or (if you’re an admin) make an announcement. I don’t mind if they leave the navbar, though.
Cool.
I’d be happy if the navbar was fully redundant and just there for convenience. Then everything is still found in the hamburger menu, or the notification section of the navbar, but common things have shortcuts on the navbar. I believe that’s how it currently is.
I don’t think the navbar has anything (besides the notification area) which is not found in the hamburger menu, so I don’t think it’s a second source of truth. It’s shortcuts for convenience, albeit ones that could stand to be cleaned up some. As far as having the board graphic settings under the profile picture, I wouldn’t mind that moving to settings, but I’m not sure how that would negatively impact scripts which change the graphics of the board for blind Go or just different themes. My guess is that it’s there because that’s where it is on lichess.
Lichess does do it this way, but Lichess also has most setting which one might want to change available there.
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