February 25, 2019
Hello everyone!
The first round of improvements to site navigation we have been talking about are now live - you will see a "mega menu" on desktop browsers.
Keep in mind that while some of the nav consolidation discussed below will be found in mobile/tablet resolutions, a full overhaul of those menus will come in a later iteration.
With the mega menu, we have the following goals:
- Usability. This goal was our guiding star for these updates. The previous menu navigation structure became difficult and frustrating to use. It required fairly precise mouse pointer movements to navigate the numerous rows/columns, and we received considerable feedback that it was not easy enough to get where you wanted to go on the site. The mega menu should alleviate the need for precise pointer movement and be generally easier to read/absorb. Goals folding up into usability were simplicity, scalability, and visual appeal.
- Simplicity. The previous nav had multiple layers of nested selections that were overly complex, and our analytics demonstrated that the large majority of users were simply clicking on the "top level" selection anyway. The mega menu exposes those top level choices in an easier to consume manner that should help usability.
- Scalability. The complexity of the main nav menu really started to stand out as we got into 2019 (and beyond) planning for features. With what we saw, there was no reasonable way we could introduce the considerable amount of new functionality that we have targeted for the next several years unless we made some changes. The re-grouping and consolidation of some of the menu items you now see in the mega menu sets us up to be able to add in encounters, interactive maps, DM screen, and all the other additional features in a sensible way.
- Visual appeal. As with anything we do on D&D Beyond, we seek to provide a level of visual polish that makes using DDB a delight. The mega menu updates are no different.
Now I'll give a rundown of the new sections of the menu to hopefully ease everyone's transition:
Sources
The Sources menu contains all official D&D digital content, from the Player's Handbook to Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Each source is recognizable by cover, and be sure to try using your scroll wheel on the carousel to get to the book you need faster.
As we move forward, you will start to see that all D&D Beyond content and functionality will start to be grouped by these sources. For example, soon you will be able to click on the cover for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist to see not only the book's Table of Contents and links, but also all the listing or game rules information (including encounters once those are implemented) all in one place. This menu will also incorporate other types of products that D&D Beyond releases over time.
Game Rules
The Game Rules menu consolidates all the listings for game mechanics that were formerly in separate Characters, Spells, Magic Items, and Monsters menus. Here you'll see Races, Classes, Feats, Backgrounds, Spells, Magic Items, Equipment, and Monsters selections. This is the menu you use to reference official game mechanics - not the things you create from those mechanics (like your characters or campaigns, that's the Creations menu summarized below).
This menu will allow us to expand into things like Encounters and other potential (emphasize potential since these elements are currently in playtest and not published) mechanics like Sidekicks or Vehicles.
Creations
This menu collects all the things you or other players create from the game rules - like My Characters, My Campaigns, My Homebrew Collection, My Homebrew Creations, and the place to Browser & Create Homebrew content. This is the menu you use to find your stuff - the things you've made - or the stuff others have made.
This menu will also allow us to expand to some exciting new types of creations in the future, but we're not quite ready to talk about all that too much yet.
Tools
This menu will provide an easy place to find all the digital tools we provide now and in the future. Currently, you'll find the Character Builder and Twitch Extension.
The idea is this grouping will allow us to expand as we release the encounter builder, interactive maps, initiative/ combat tracker, DM screen, and more, and hopefully those will all be easy to find in the Tools menu.
Marketplace
This menu will have our Store and Subscriptions areas as it always has, but also the Redeem a Key page and an easier way to access your Order History.
We will also see this menu expand its options over time as we introduce other types of product offerings.
Media
This menu collects all of our original Articles content, as well as an easier way to find our new streamed content such as the (now) weekly Dev Updates, Heroes of the Vale, and Todd Talks. Clicking through to Articles also provides a portal to access all the posts in a particular article series - like the new Encounter of the Week.
Over time, we expect this section to also include other types of multi-media content, such as image galleries, desktop wallpapers, and some other exciting new opportunities we can't talk about yet.
Forums
This menu will continue to take you to our Forums - join in on the discussion, there's a huge, active community there!
Next Steps
While this first iteration should make things much easier on desktop, we will continue improvements for navigation in the near future:
- Mobile/tablet menu overhaul
- Accessibility updates to allow for better screen reader use/keyboard shortcuts
- Work to allow "hover" on desktop but "click" on tablet, even if resolutions are the same
As always, let us know if you have any feedback regarding the main nav changes in our D&D Beyond Feedback forum!
I appreciate the feedback and the time you took to share it.
I feel like I can share fairly candidly with you as a well paid full stack developer consultant that this is simply the first iteration of something that will evolve over time to meet the needs of as much of the community as possible. We will take a look at the feedback over the next couple of weeks, see how that changes after the initial reaction to change wears off, and make adjustments from there.
Thanks!
A couple of my recommendations:
The CLASSES image feels more like it's about race than the RACES one. Would suggest an image that's less obviously a certain race, and maybe make that tiefling image for RACES instead.
This redesign is ok? I don't think it's been made any simpler as it takes as many if not more clicks to get to most places. Overall, the navigation will just take some getting used to even if I don't like it.
My main problem is the way homebrew sections have been laid out. It was incredibly hard to figure out where the homebrew stuff went! Finding the tiny "browse homebrew" button within the other pages was the exact opposite of intuitive. I guess I can deal with the other changes, but something really needs to be done with the way homebrew sections have been laid out.
... This makes it harder to navigate to a specific class... The drop downs allows for ease of access. now because of this, I have to jump from one page, to another, then scroll for the appropriate class, then go in...
:-D And many thanks!
please give me a way to change it back I hate this new layout, I liked having my characters and campaigns in the top corner. new layout is frustrating.
I'm going to have to state I do not like the changes. It now takes me twice as long to get anywhere due to all the direct links being removed. If I'm a DM and need to quickly bring up a specific class, or if I'm a player and need to quickly look up feats because I levelled up it nows take 3 clicks to get to the right page and though multiple page loads rather than what I had before: 1 click, 1 page load.
This is also much worse for mobile devices if using mobile data instead of WiFi. The big menus are hideous on a small device, they're bigger images which means bigger file sizes and there's more page loads to get where you want -- this translates to more data being used to get where you want to go.
And the biggest thing I hoped for was better organisation - a separation of between pages for Official content, UA content and Critical Role content, so that we could finally have a sensible way to access the Gunslinger archetype if we needed to look it up. Currently you don't link to it anywhere, not on a separate menu, not on the Fighters page, nowhere. When I raised this I was told it was of WotC being concerned people would mistake it for official but a future menu revamp was planned and could address this by oranganising the menus. It took me making a fuss about this twice before somebody finally put a link to it on the forums (which isn't good enough, but better than nothing). But, alas, here is the menu revamp and this problem still hasn't been addressed (which, given how easily it could be fixed, is shocking).
All in all, from my perspective as somebody who uses this site daily, the ravamp has done absolutely nothing to help and made things harder. Not cool.
Overall, I find the new menu system a substantial improvement. The hierarchical nesting of menus with the 'slipping' problem was extremely frustrating in the old layout. I find this one far superior. For example, I find it much faster to hover over 'Game Rules', click classes, and then click the class I want than the old system of hovering on classes, hovering on official, and then hoping my mouse skills were adept enough to get down the list to where I wanted without losing the menu. It's not even close.
I do have one observation about 'Game Rules' that perhaps pertains more to search than the new layout. But the new layout makes a gap in the current system even more readily apparent. If I'm a user and I see 'Game Rules', I think "Awesome. I have a quick question about how two weapon fighting works. I'll just click on Game Rules and then . . . Oh. There's nowhere to do that. The Game Rules aren't actually here."
Yes, I can type 'two weapon fighting' in the global search and get there. Or I can navigate my way through the PH as a source if I'm feeling old fashioned. (Though I'll also note that if I'm not just right with my game rule search that the global search will fail me. Say, for example, I type 'grappling' instead of 'grapple', things don't go so well). But I've more than once wanted a search category (equivalent to monsters, spells, feats, etc.) that was actually specific to looking up those sorts of rules. When I saw 'Game Rules' I got all excited.
Just a couple cents!
AD
Well played sir, well played. :D
I think it'd be really great if there was a UAT environment where customers who were interested might log in from time to time and provide feedback prior to significant interface changes... or a Beta switch that could be thrown back and forth so we could test, then give feedback prior to releases.
(edit: User Acceptance Testing for the uninformed.)
I will parse out the feedback from your post, but I will clarify where you are wrong on several fronts to hopefully reduce confusion for anyone else reading the thread:
The only menus in the former structure that had the individual items nested underneath them was the books (rules and adventures) and classes. You never were able to "quickly look up feats" via the main navigation. There's no way we could list every single feat, spell, item, monster, etc. in a dropdown menu. So in that scenario, same amount of clicks.
Unless you are using some kind of truly-exceptional mobile device, you will not get "big menus" on mobile and no images are loading and no additional data is being used.
The gunslinger archetype not displaying in the menu has nothing to do with menu functionality, and this is not an issue on any of our lists. At the end of the day, we will decide how/ where to display that subclass when we prioritize it. It has not been prioritized to this point because there are thousands of other things that we are working on and there has not been enough demand to warrant this to bubble to the top. If someone replied and said it would be included at some point in the past, I can't say much about that other than "always in motion, the future is."
I empathize because this is that "one thing" that you want badly, but we have to prioritize based on what we perceive as the most impactful thing to work on at any given time.
I do appreciate your engagement with D&D Beyond, and we will consider your assessment here in our overall view of the feedback. It definitely helps to have more specifics on root cause of your pain points, but we also can aggregate the "gut" feel too.
Thanks!
Unable to get to pages like "https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/class/druid" via menus now.
This is indeed the approach that we have elected to take with upcoming major features such as the encounter builder and the approach taken with our growing moderation staff for mega menus. We will share more details about that in the near future.
W00t! Thanks for the great product. Also another positive... I just noticed when I filter my spells there are numbers above the spell slots indicating how many matches in each one. that's great!
Maybe add a number below them so at a glance I can tell how many spell slots I have across all my levels?
We're updating the mobile menus to reintegrate those sub-options. We'll review some ways to reintegrate them back into desktop in the next several days.
Thanks!
I think the new layout is okay at first glance. It will take time to see how much of an improvement it is, however, consider how used to the old method I am. .
Not necessarily a layout issue (more overall design), but please consider changing the default color scheme for Creations/homebrew content. The light blue color works okay as a border color or on icons, but when used for larger buttons (as on the Browse/Create Homebrew page), there is very low visual contrast between the button color and the white text, especially with a smaller font size -- making it difficult to read the text and likely causing eye strain.
Perhaps a darker shade of blue (though that could conflict with other sections, such as the Articles sections which also uses a darker blue), a different color such as green (but still somewhat dark to contrast with the text color), or changing the white text on the buttons to black (probably the simplest option from a design standpoint)?
Overall, the update is aesthetically pleasing. :)
However, the Sources carousel is really disappointing. It's a lot more work to get to the adventure or rule I am looking for when it's midway through the carousel (or at the end since I haven't memorized the positioning of certain books yet). Additionally, I think the old grouping of Adventures being collected into a separate category was helpful, since it sped up the search process. Carousels may be useful for things like news announcements (see the Battle.net launcher as an example), but I think that the more content you add to it, the less usable they become.
I like the other categories - and I think Rules, Creations, and Tools seem particularly helpful.
The previous drop-down menus were indeed a chore to navigate, but the new “Sources” display is actually worse, and requires an excessive amount of scrolling due to the size given to each source.
Please give this another go. An expandable sidebar where you could quickly access purchased sources would be much more helpful then what you’ve done here.
Also, are there any plans to allow the option to restrict search results to a specific source? The inability to do this is, for me, the most frustrating part of D&D Beyond.
We can't navigate the menu to a specific class anymore? Boo