If you have the chat box minimised, messages that you received from you opponent will appear along the minimised bar.
Where the chat box used to be will be used to display information about your opponent and your previous games.
"If you have the chat box minimised, messages that you received from you opponent will appear along the minimised bar."
So you will only be able to see like the last message of the chat? And to respond you will then have to press the up arrow and then go to where you type then press enter then close the whole thing by pressing the down arrow again? Are you kidding me? In any kind of game where time is short that is prohibitively time and effort expensive. If this is the case it will be very distracting and disruptive to the game flow to use the chat , to the point where I'm sure I won't want to use it at all :(
"Where the chat box used to be will be used to display information about your opponent and your previous games."
I find the value of having that specific information there constantly there taking up real estate to be very minimal when compared to what we are giving up. I don't usually have any inclination to research my previous games while I'm in the middle of a game and likewise about my opponents information. You have to do a cost benefit analysis when implementing changes like this- what we are getting vs what we are giving up. And in this case the value of what we are getting is very small at best compared to having a functional and convenient in game chat.
Perhaps there would be some people that would prefer to have that other information there instead of the chat, but couldn't you please give us the *option* instead of being forced to have it like this?
The best test of design changes is that the new way gives people more options instead of forcing them to do it in ways that they hate-sacrificing convenience and functionality for something that we find of minimal value.
The moment I came to Lichess, I fell in love with it *for the very reason* of it's simplistic and light weight feeling design. What you are doing here I'm sorry to say is going in the *wrong* direction without a doubt. Please don't go the direction of youtube and mess up a system that was already working well and upset the vast majority of your user base!!
The new design is just bad. It's probably good for chatting with friends but it's not so good for chatting while playing. And you have a lot of unused space to the left of the chess board, it was a perfect place for chat. Now you need to open that window that is like half a screen in size just to say something.
If you're concerned about the design then tell me why it's better to hide it down bottom instead of showing it on the left hand side. Besides, you should use the width of the display since a lot of today's displays have greater horizontal resolution.
@abuddy He says the space will be used for something else now..
"Where the chat box used to be will be used to display information about your opponent and your previous games."
But tell me , how often do you like to research about your previous game history while you are in the middle of playing a game? Arghhh, this makes me pull my hair out it is so stupid.
Getting rid of something we love and use for something that is of no value to us.
And it's so easy to fix, just GIVE US THE OPTION of having the in game chat box where it was!! Please, I'm begging you. :`(
And it isn't like the design was a major problem. Of course, it's your site and you are doing what you want to, but wouldn't it be better to fix known bugs first instead of making design improvements?
What screen sizes and resolutions are you using?
You can resize the chat by clicking on the edge of the window and dragging, it doesn't have to take up as much space as you are describing.
avboats, I've been here a couple of years as well. I was quite skeptical of the new chat as well, but continual improvements are on the way.
As for making things optional, whenever a new feature is added on lichess, someone says "make it optional". lichess would be a sea of check-boxes and no one would know where half the features are if that was the case.
Because of the increase of features on the site, we will be shifting our attention to improving the current features of the site.
"As for making things optional, whenever a new feature is added on lichess, someone says "make it optional". lichess would be a sea of check-boxes and no one would know where half the features are if that was the case."
A sea of checkboxes? Hardly. You could simply have a tiny tiny tab above this new previous game information box that you say is coming. People who wanted the ingame chat could simply click on the 'chat' tab and people who wanted game history could click on the 'information' tab. Done.
Or you could have it in account preferences. There are *only three* options in the preferences page!! Hardly even worth having a preferences page.
But moreover if you want to limit peoples options then it makes sense to keep the most important ones and get rid of the less important ones. Isn't this just common sense? I'd venture to guess that having a convenient in game chat that's actually usable without too much hassle would be one of the more important options that you could offer to most people. It's a main reason I came here.
But if a tiny tab at the top of that pane is too much of a sea of checkboxes and you refuse to give us that option then just keep the old chat box!! because way more people would want that than to be looking at their previous game history while they are actually in the middle of playing a game. Why would anyone want that? No one likes the idea of having to go through multiple extra mouse clicks to type something in a chat while playing. NO ONE.
"we will be shifting our attention to improving the current features of the site."
If only you could have followed that philosophy!! The in game chat box WAS a current feature. You didn't improve it at all. Depending on how you look at it you eliminated that feature or replaced it with something a lot worse.
We are looking into the prospect of different versions/styles of lichess for different sizes of device. We recognise that the chat is not the most appropriate solution for screens under ~900px in height. These prospects include the possibility of having the in-game chat back where it was. But the current chat overlay will stay where it is.
If your screen's resolution is above ~900px in height and you have a keyboard and mouse, you should be able to make use of the current chat perfectly fine.
The current chat will be here for a while as it allows for much simpler communication with other players around the site, such as friends, teams, TV, spectating, and language specific channels. All of those have been unified in one place.
This sheds some light on it then. I was wondering why some people in the comments actually said they like the new chat. They must be the ones with resolutions above 900 height as you say.
I think there are *a lot* of us however for who that is not the case. (eg those like me who are on a wide screen tv) My resolution is 1280x768 so even if I have the new chat section 'minimized' the *extra* space it consumes means that I have to get rid of my navigation bar or even minimized it will overlap with my game board!!
I'm glad you said you are looking at the prospect of maintaining the old chat box for those of us who this new system just will not work. And I hope you really meant it. Please keep us in mind too!! And thanks for being responsive to our feedback. This is the first big problem I've had with your otherwise outstanding website :)
what a shit they did with a chat. It sooooo bad now. |Bring the old layout please!