It's so nice to be able to make suggestions instead of carrying them out =]

These are the things I was able to find after a few hours snooping around the site.  The first two are really nitpicky, but take that as a compliment as to the overall quality of the site.

Help links on the left don't highlight when you enter from the top level Help tab.  For instance, when you go to Settings the Preferences section is highlighted in black, when you go to Help the How to Play section is not highlighted.

When I was in the Help section, when I moused over Designing Boards, it rolled up The Basics section.  My mouse was then underneath the About Wargear section, and when I moused back over it to get to the subsections of Designing Boards, it rolled up the Designing Board section.  It takes a relatively slow mouse move to do this.

When you go to my games and it shows you the table, the Game Name link takes you to Info, this makes sense.  The Board Name link takes you to general info about that board, which also makes sense.  The picture of the board takes you to the same place, which may not be the best... my expectation was that it would let me see the actual game board I was playing on.

In that same table, clicking the View button in the Action column didn't take me to a View of the Action (well...just saying), it took me to the Info tab of that game.

It took me a while to actually find the right way to load the flash and see the game.  The Launch Player link IS in orange, but for some reason my eyes read it as a secondary table header and not as an actual button.

The 5 links across the top [Player Info Board Cards Comm] were a little confusing at first glance as well.  'Player' to me means a human being, not the flash player.  When you are dropped in via the Info page, it's not obvious that the blue means you are on that tab, because there is a blue and red tab and three grey.  Only one highlighted means you are there, with two highlighted it just means different colors.

That's it.  Everything else on the website I clicked on made sense, and is so far ahead of WF from a UI design standpoint that it's sick.

I guess my main suggestion out of this would be to:

- remove the Player tab

- move the 'Launch Player' out of the table and make it it's own big-ass button below the action table, preferrably in the same green color as the WG logo

- change the View button in the Action column to load the Player, and maybe change the link on the thumbnail image to this as well.

It took me a while to actually find the right way to load the flash and see the game.  The Launch Player link IS in orange, but for some reason my eyes read it as a secondary table header and not as an actual button.

Agreed. And the suggestion offered is a good solution IMO.

Also, not sure the wisdom of the separate "Comm" tab. While I love the ease of use of the Comm interface itself, is it wise to ask people to have to click away from the board to post a message?

Wow, great set of suggestions thanks guys, I agree with pretty much everything you've suggested.

* Help links - fixed.

* Help mouseover problem - I increased the delay from 200ms to 400ms for activating the animation, how's that now?

* Board name link - I changed this to an image preview as suggested - I don't think this should launch straight into the Player, I think it's more intuitive that it shows you the board design, see what you think now.

* View button - my reasoning behind this is that the button changes from 'View' to 'Play' when it's your turn. When it says 'Play' it jumps straight into the Player, when it says 'View' it shows info about the game. How about instead it links straight to the Board tab of the info page, i.e. shows what the current state of the board is? That way you are viewing the action. I've changed it to this for now, if you still think it should launch the Player let me know.

* Player tab - deleted!

* Launch Player - I've created a big-ass button as suggested :)



asm - re: the comments about the Comms tab, I agree, I'm not completely happy with the way this is working at the moment - the reason it's the way it is is that I wanted people to be able to post and read messages without having to launch the full Flash Player as it's a bit cumbersome.

I'm thinking I need a re-design of how the messages and cards are shown in the Player, potentially the following:

- get rid of the Cards and Comms tabs and add buttons to the main view. Have these buttons pop up windows or flash or whatever when new messages are received or if you receive / capture new cards or a card set is available to trade or whatever.

Look forward to hearing your ideas...

ISO the ability to post messages prior to a game starting, while at the Join phase.

Yes that is definitely a good one thanks Yertle

I like the timing on the Help menu rollups.

I also like the giant green Launch Player button =]

As far as getting rid of the player button, when I suggested it it didn't feel like the best idea but I wasn't sure why. Now if you are on any of the other 3 tabs you have to go to the info tab to get to the Launch Player button.

Now that I've had another day to poke around, I think I know more of what I had in mind. I don't think the solution is putting the Player tab back, I think the solution is to get rid of the other 4 tabs.

You made the decision early on to only go with a Flash UI in order to avoid having to fix/change things in 2-3 different areas. With the HTML tabs and the Flash tabs you've left yourself a vestige of maintaining 2 different areas with the same content. When I have the player loaded, I have two rows of tabs:

Info - Boards - Cards - Comm
Play - Cards - Comm - Board - History - Info

I know there is a slight overhead with loading the Flash Player, but once your development stabilizes and you're not changing the flash object every few days/weeks, most people will have the flash player object cached.

It would require adding any info that is in the top tabs into the player, and also providing URL-triggered hooks* to tell the player to start in the 'Comm' tab (for instance) so that people can send links to just the message part of the game. If you had this in place the player would not even have to load the game information, just the Comm information. This would also speed things up.

* For instance: http://www.wargear.net/games/player/3614?tab=comm

So, more work up front but would save you effort in the long run not having to maintain duplicate content. Basically everything that is related to a single instance of a game should be inside that player. Everything else (like general info about the board) should be outside.

You would also free up a precious 15-20 pixels of vertical space for the game board =]

Now I'm not and will never be a Flash developer, so I have no idea how hard this would be. If it would take 3 days to do it might be worth it, if it would take 3 weeks to do then it might not be, depending on how much time you imagine making changes to those HTML tabs would take for the lifetime of the site.

Hmmm I get what you're saying but I'm not 100% sure that's the right way to go... to be honest I've always been one of those people that hates Flash websites so I wanted a way to quickly browse through the state of your games without having to dive in and out of the Player each time.

It's not so much the loading of the Flash code as that will mostly be cached but the time taken to retrieve the game data from the server once the Player has loaded. You'll always see the game loader loading game info, board info and board image each time it started. Although I could change the code so it only loads the information you need to see for that particular tab which would speed things up.

Happy to go with a majority view on this one, anyone else got thoughts on this?

It's not going to impact my enjoyment of the site either way, so if you're happy with the way it is then so am I.

I hear you about Flash, although most of the hatred of flash comes from Mystery Meat Navigation, as in 'Oh, I didn't realize you had to click on the rhino horn to get to your Contact Us page, thanks.'

One thing I think you should still do is order the flash tabs to be in the same order in both:

Info - Boards - Cards - Comm
Play - Cards - Comm - Board - History - Info

to:

Info - Boards - Cards - Comm
Play - Info - Board - Cards - Comm - History

...with the bookends being the things available in flash that aren't available on the other.

I say do away with the whole set of first tabs (Info - Boards - Cards - Comm), and make the Info tab have a snapshot of each thing.

So:

• Do away with the Game Settings box; we don't need to know that information after we've already joined the game.  (on second thought) Actually, the boot time and type are useful, maybe they can get fit in still.
• Make the picture of the map a smaller version of the Board Tab with the player-owned fills in place.  The only difficulty here may be in have legible troop count numbers.
• I'm not sure what the "Actions" column is for on the Player status.  It doesn't seem terribly necessary to me, so make that the column for Total Bonus instead.
• Then, you can turn the space currently inhabited by the bonuses box into a box for the comms.
• You can put a Cards box in there somewhere too, but I'm not sure how much that is needed.

Then, you can link any of these boxes of information to the pages that the tabs currently navigate to.  If it's your turn, then clicking on the board will launch the player, otherwise you'll just get to what is currently the Boards tab.

I like your idea Toaster - you're right, the other tabs could all be bundled together quite easily to form one simple page.