Quote from SabreRunner >>

Quote from Ravsitar >>

The one thing missing that I'd like to see is that any "other possessions" do not show up anywhere on the exported sheet. I'm not going to go through the effort of creating custom items for all of the random non-magical stuff (hides, teeth, rocks, etc) that my players pick up so that it shows up on their character sheets.

 Other Possessions is a tab under Equipment.

 They are talking about the exported sheet, SabreRunner.

Any chance of making it so I can share a link that includes my notes and description?  Just as an option, or a toggle for the sheet.  I get why they are private by default, but I play pbp and it would be awesome to have a way to just post my sheet with my appearance and backstory.  Fully useable PBP would be a "pay for Hero TIer" feature.  I''m on the fence as it is.

I will state that the new interface suffers on mobile, but you probably kinda knew that,  I don't think its unusable, I just wish that nice swiping UI could have stayed.

Quote from BadEye >>

I'll just say while I'm sitting here getting the sand out of my hair that the tablet experience you mention won't be the tablet experience much longer.

Back to night-hunt for crabs!

 It isn’t a long rest if you work over vacation!  We want you back at full HP and with all your limited use abilities available when vacation is over!  Take your time away and stay off the forums until you are back at work!

It's all right, 1 hour of strenuous activity won't prevent you from gaining the benefits.

Quote from XIX >>

Sneak attack damage is currently not listed on the combat tab nor the Actions tab.  It would be helpful to have 2D6 Sneak Attack (or similar) listed up there.  For now I'll add a custom attack

 It's been brought up a couple of times but yes yes yes, this is absolutely needed. My main character is a rogue and because I have a terrible memory I always have to look up how much the sneak attack damage is. It'd make so much sense for it to be listed near actions/combat. 

It's a huge improvement on the computer! However on the iPad (which is what most my group uses) it was a lot nicer before, because everything was on one page. It is much less convenient to have to hope between the different sections constantly during the game. If the iPad could get everything on one page similar to the computer layout, that would be awesome!

The "actions" section is getting truncated on the PDF export. You can see here:

I'm only a level 3 Aasimar Paladin, so I expect this issue to get worse as I level up...

Honestly, this update seems to be based entirely on survivor's bias.  70% of users use it on desktop? Either it's because they're playing online, or because the mobile/tablet versions weren't very navigable.  This version is designed to avoid scrolling, but honestly I'd be much happier with a tile-based, customizeable sheet.  The sidebar is awful for desktop.  It would work if it compressed the main screen in one direction or the other, but since it doesn't, it's just covering up information I need.

Also, please give me a way to track how many turns, not just uses, of bladesong (and other extended duration spells/abilities) I have left, and give me a button that will actually apply the bladesong bonuses to my speed/AC when it's active?

Items and racial features which give spells with a limited count currently add the spells to the spell list. and have a label such as "1 C" presumably for 1 charge.

However, after using the spell there is no visual indicator really that it is no longer usable. IMO everything should go lighter gray or the button should turn red and say "Used" or something obvious rather than just no longer allowing a press and instead opening up the description.

Quote from Greyfeather >>

The sidebar is awful for desktop.  It would work if it compressed the main screen in one direction or the other, but since it doesn't, it's just covering up information I need.

 Oi, just FYI there's a little button above that pop-out bar which confusingly only shows if your browser is currently is wide enough to see it.  Click that sucker.

how many people in this thread play on desktop vs mobile/tablet?   I wish there was a poll mechanism.  I guess its possible we are just the squeaky wheels.

Quote from XIX >>

Quote from Greyfeather >>

The sidebar is awful for desktop.  It would work if it compressed the main screen in one direction or the other, but since it doesn't, it's just covering up information I need.

 Oi, just FYI there's a little button above that pop-out bar which confusingly only shows if your browser is currently is wide enough to see it.  Click that sucker.

The limitations of "fixed" vs. "overlay" based on width create problems because the text gets too small to read!

Hey I really like how spells with a bonus action casting time are listed in a simple way on that tab in the Actions panel. Any chance we could get something similar for spells with casting time of one action on the Action tab? Even if it was right down the bottom. Would just make it so easy to select spells during combat, and help alleviate confusion I’ve seen in games where people accidentally plan to cast a bonus action spell as their action. Or the classic: not realising casting time is a minute or longer and trying to cast it in combat.

Need to add a beast master companion builder 

This has made the site unusable for me. I play using my phone during games and the mobile version completely removes any reason to use the site over paper and pencil. I'm really concerned about what the UX Design, Prototyping, and UX Research teams (or people) at Curse were doing when they designed this mobile experience. Just because ~30% of your users on mobile doesn't mean you completely destroy the experience for them. As a frontend engineer, this update is just baffling to me. It breaks so many design conventions and not to bring in an innovative or intuitive alternative.

Please, remove the unnecessary menus and bring back swiping to navigate for mobile experiences. Don't parcel out info in so many different sections on mobile. It's okay for mobile users to scroll down a little bit if necessary. Fix the lack of true responsiveness on the site. Users on tablet, mobile, and large screens all have issues with spacing. This means UX and your frontend team(s) all only checked this site on a similar screen size. Are y'all even conducting UX Research and running experiments to actually engage in data driven development?

I'm sorry to sound so knee jerk, but this has really ruined my ability to use this product while I'm playing and in that case, why wouldn't I just use pen and paper?

Quote from matsieftw >>

This has made the site unusable for me. I play using my phone during games and the mobile version completely removes any reason to use the site over paper and pencil. I'm really concerned about what the UX Design, Prototyping, and UX Research teams (or people) at Curse were doing when they designed this mobile experience. Just because ~30% of your users on mobile doesn't mean you completely destroy the experience for them. As a frontend engineer, this update is just baffling to me. It breaks so many design conventions and not to bring in an innovative or intuitive alternative.

Please, remove the unnecessary menus and bring back swiping to navigate for mobile experiences. Don't parcel out info in so many different sections on mobile. It's okay for mobile users to scroll down a little bit if necessary. Fix the lack of true responsiveness on the site. Users on tablet, mobile, and large screens all have issues with spacing. This means UX and your frontend team(s) all only checked this site on a similar screen size. Are y'all even conducting UX Research and running experiments to actually engage in data driven development?

I'm sorry to sound so knee jerk, but this has really ruined my ability to use this product while I'm playing and in that case, why wouldn't I just use pen and paper?

 Sorry to hear that, but I’ve found the opposite. Sure it takes some getting used to, and there are several kinks that are being ironed out, but I think Curse have done an incredible job considering the sheer complexity of the task they took on, in the timeframe they have done it in. I can’t think of any comparable websites that have pulled off anything similar, and done it so well. Maybe I’m just in the Goldilocks zone, being on iPad, iPhone and Safari on MacOS, it’s possible that’s what Curse primarily use. Bearing in mind this has only just been released too, things will definitely improve as time goes on. 

Quote from Arthognor >>

Quote from XIX >>

Quote from Greyfeather >>

The sidebar is awful for desktop.  It would work if it compressed the main screen in one direction or the other, but since it doesn't, it's just covering up information I need.

 Oi, just FYI there's a little button above that pop-out bar which confusingly only shows if your browser is currently is wide enough to see it.  Click that sucker.

The limitations of "fixed" vs. "overlay" based on width create problems because the text gets too small to read!

 Yeah, that button doesn't show up for me.

Quote from matsieftw >>

As a frontend engineer, this update is just baffling to me. It breaks so many design conventions and not to bring in an innovative or intuitive alternative.

Please, remove the unnecessary menus and bring back swiping to navigate for mobile experiences. Don't parcel out info in so many different sections on mobile. It's okay for mobile users to scroll down a little bit if necessary. Fix the lack of true responsiveness on the site. Users on tablet, mobile, and large screens all have issues with spacing. This means UX and your frontend team(s) all only checked this site on a similar screen size. Are y'all even conducting UX Research and running experiments to actually engage in data driven development?

So, while I agree with many of your points here, and although I've voiced plenty of complaints over different things, including flouting CSS conventions, which leads to some of the problems you, I, and others have had with mobile versions, there are a lot of great features in the redesign. 

So to balance out the negatives I've pointed out, here is my big list of Kudos (after my incessant bug/rant posts)

1. The team seems to be very open to hearing some fairly hostile feedback, which is a great quality to have in a company, and will only serve to make them better.
2. I hear an openness to explore other ideas and opinions, even if they don't share them.  (Imagine what it would be like if politicians did the same).
3. The spell system, while a challenge as implemented for many (based on feedback here), is actually pretty great. The scaling spells in particular are great!
   
   1. It seems most of the complaints I read have to do with spell slots not being all visible at once, and the space for the list being arbitrarily small
   2. Both of the problems are very fixable.
4. The Actions tab is greatness!  It really helps to have a "stuff I can do" list.  Kudos on that.
5. I like that "everything's a link" which takes you to info about that thing!
6. Customizable.  Many more things are customizable! YAY
   1. Custom languages
   2. Custom attacks
   3. Custom actions
   4. etc.
   5. There are still bugs and missing settings (to hit modifier on general attack for example) but again, solvable.
7. Scripting descriptions are really great too, being able to have calculations within descriptions is a step in the right direction for on-line usability.
8. Descriptions of calculations like are available on the details for AC are likewise very helpful.
   1. I'd really like to see a whole lot more of this: Initiative, Darkvision, etc.
   2. There are still bugs, like Darkvision calculations, where showing the calculations could help catch bugs.
9. Customizable themes is great!  Customizable anything frankly, is a crowd pleaser.
10. Another big win for the team is that they have shown a willingness to be wrong.  To take assumptions they had and actually eat crow when they were wrong.  I've heard @BadEye mention on a couple of occasions that they determined they were wrong on this or that after seeing data prove things out.  Again, very valuable and helpful to have a humble attitude in software, it will only make them grow and get better!

Fortunately, many of these great features can be made better fairly easily, with minor-ish tweaks.  I honestly believe that much of folks problems with things on the site currently has to do with the layout rather than the features themselves.

I have absolutely no inside knowledge of how the code monkeys within dndbeyond are organized or what their current pain points are but here are some wild guesses:

1. There is tremendous pressure to deliver good working code (yay) so corners are cut to save time (boo).  These corners add to technical debt, which must be "paid off" as it were, later. (Technical debt being the delta between what you should have done and what you actually did). This is a common problem across all development and there is a level of acceptable debt to delivery, but if you don't manage it, it can bite you. In any case, They are probably are/were wrestling with a good bit of that after the initial launch.
2. I have no idea the overall level of experience of the team, juniors:seniors, etc.  There's a sweet spot, and as they grow, they may still be balancing that.  Again, a normal part of software/company growth.
3. Customer feedback and data collection.  While no, there weren't surveys, etc. nor Beta sites (would be a great idea, btw). They have, however, shown time and time again that they are collecting usage data and that they care. Not everyone does this well, so kudos to them on that.
   1. PS - Maybe a tool other than forums for data gathering would be helpful? Feature priority voting/tracking, etc?
4. CI/CD. Based on the time it took to deploy the update, and again, no inside knowledge here, only wild speculation, I'd venture to guess they aren't using CI/CD with, docker swarm/kubernetes.  Now I could be horribly wrong on that, but generally those tools once set up, it reduces deployment to a matter of minutes. MS tools are notoriously touchy with deployments and configurations as an alternate, negative example.
5. Automated Testing. For massive apps, a must.  Not sure what code coverage actually is, but there are several items (crashes on clicking to open descriptions for things comes to mind) that would probably be caught in an automated fashion prior to deployment. Also, writing automated testing is a bear, or can be. In some apps I've seen the tests add a good 50% to the time required for development! But it keeps the technical debt low in the long run.

In any case, dndbeyond devs, thank you for your hard work on the tool and I hope you take the community's (and my) criticism for what most of it is. A very committed community of people who care a great deal about the product you're making, which is a great position to be in.

And also... never, never used fixed positioning. We'll slap your hands. Also, we don't mind scrolling a little, let us. :)

Quote from XIX >>

And also... never, never used fixed positioning. We'll slap your hands. Also, we don't mind scrolling a little, let us. :)

Best post in thread.

Having said that, one minor thing I noticed last night about scrolling was this:

Notice how the last spell gets cut off? It's like, either fit it neatly to four or five, dammit!

/triggered

I believe they've acknowledged the issues with mobile and are onto fixing it. In fact, I think Badeye logged in while on holidays to comment on it!