I consider the Mega Menus to be an improvement! For those of you who can't wait for the other improvements (arranging and organizing), have a look at my post on making Chrome adapted for DDB.
Edit: While criticism is important, it sounds like everyone thinks this is the final design. As Adam mentioned: "We rapidly iterate internally and we have made it a part of our strategy to release things earlier to the community this year where we can get feedback quicker to overall save development time."
The little bit that I have used of the new layout on mobile...the only thing I dislike so far is that the source books and adventure books are no longer in alphabetical order
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Nykkan Fharngnarthnost: Dragonborn Monk (4)...Coliseum of Conquest (3) {1W-6L} [Brewer]
Hans Stormsong: Human Monk (1)...Colosseum of Conquest (3) {0W-1L}
I really don't like the Sources tab. Having the Adventures and Rulebooks separate was much easier to navigate. I am aware that they are ordered from Rulebook -> Adventure but having them on the same menu feels cluttered.
(Personal Opinion) Horizontal scrolling menus are no good. Firstly it doesn't seem very intuitive that you would be able to scroll through them at all, secondly, the formatting of having only 5 options on a page to select from makes it cumbersome. The images are too large and it's a very strange feeling to have the Sources page as the only one with different formatting than the other new tabs
The Tools tab is incredibly barebones right now, to the point of feeling unnecessary. It also doesn't feel right to have the Character Creator in a separate location from the list of created characters.
I do have some positives, however.
The Game Rules tab feels right. Other than personally missing the dropdown menu for ease of access, a lot of relevant information has landed in the right spot.
Again, mentioning the dropdown menu from before, I like that the selections are larger to avoid clicking the wrong page. Some are a bit too large for my liking, but again, that's personal preference.
My first impressions were not very positive. The impression from my players was also not very positive. The thing that I am most disappointed with is the Sources tab. Despite this, I'm still excited to see where these changes go. With all there is that I feel was made worse, there are notable improvements alongside them. If this gets refined I can see it being an overall improvement.
I address the primary reason the dropdown menus were a problem for so many people in the changelog entry for this update - the tendency for the mouse to "slip off" the menus was reported regularly as frustrating.
Sorry but can you point me towards the changelog entry? I can't seem to find anything relating to this in the forum or homepage. Maybe it's not pinned and lost somewhere, maybe I'm just blind :) For the actual topic, I posted some of this in another thread but this seems like the better place for it. I'll expand on a few things. For context, I'm on desktop.
Fellow web designer here. I can appreciate some of these navigation challenges because it's definitely an area I've gone back and forth on many times as well. I will say that comparing to the old menu, this feels like one step forward two steps back. My daily use involves navigating to things like classes or races, and getting to that content takes now more time because of the extra clicking and browsing required. I do think there's a better medium to be found by addressing the problems of the old menu and having the extra level of content accessible through the menu.
The "Sources" could use more work. Only showing five books per slide is going to get lengthy, slow and confusing order-wise considering the amount of books is only going up. Someone here pointed out that you can use your mouse scrollwheel to scroll through the different carousel slides, which I honestly never thought to try despite working with carousel elements a lot. That makes the browsing itself easier, but I don't think most people will ever think to try it as it basically overrides the normal site scrolling behavior on a single menu element.
I would prefer more compact views to get an overview with a quick glance so I can get to the content I'm actually looking for. I don't think the amount of content is so extensive you couldn't fit the books under a single megamenu view for example. If it seems like too much, then perhaps consider having the slides instead be categories divided for rulebooks and adventures. As a player I own all the rulebooks, but I have no need for adventure books. Currently the menu doesn't indicate what I already own or not, which could be fixed by adding a transparent black overlay with a buy button on top of the books I don't own. Extrapolate similar ideas for the other menu views like "Game Rules" for easily accessible 3rd level pages.
EDIT: I rarely used the book specific browsing on the old menu, so I didn't realize what I'm suggesting is partially how it apparently functioned before. Well, there you go heh.
In more technical terms I'm not a fan of how delayed the hover menu appearing is because it makes it feel clunky, slow and non-responsive. It doesn't really matter how fast a page loads if the UX (user experience) itself feels sluggish. One of the reasons you may have it set up like this is to avoid not only the accidental slip off, but also so it doesn't instantly flicker on as you move your cursor around, but I would argue especially in this case the header is quite compact and not even fixed to the top so it's a non-issue. Or just remove hovers altogether and go for toggle menus and avoid all slip offs... I digress, safe to say it's a complicated issue with no perfect solutions :)
Hope this was useful feedback. I could go on forever since I can't avoid analyzing and instantly noticing these sorts of issues because of dealing with them myself.
tldr; More compact quick glance overviews and ease of access ftw
I address the primary reason the dropdown menus were a problem for so many people in the changelog entry for this update - the tendency for the mouse to "slip off" the menus was reported regularly as frustrating.
Sorry but can you point me towards the changelog entry? I can't seem to find anything relating to this in the forum or homepage. Maybe it's not pinned and lost somewhere, maybe I'm just blind :) For the actual topic, I posted some of this in another thread but this seems like the better place for it. I'll expand on a few things. For context, I'm on desktop.
The changelog is linked in the top bar, the icon to the left of the notification bell. You can also use this link. :)
The Major issue I have is the loss of the class spell lists. I loved those page where all the spells were on one page for a class. Made searching through spells very quick and love to have a way to get back to those.
The slip-off issue of the old menu was a pain in my backside. This is so much better than before for my use. I look forward to further improvements, and I trust the team to keep listening and keep enhancing game play at my table.
I was looking at the HTML for the new Mega Menus, and as I understand it the actual menu items are populated only once you hover the top menu. This is different from the old menu, and the current mobile menu, in which all menu items exist in the HTML code all the time.
Why is this of interest? Well, in theory, having the menu being populated on-the-fly means you can fetch user settings before doing so. So, in theory, you could on your user page perhaps choose which content you want to be shown in the menus, in which order etc. The front-end for this is kinda done (I'm only guessing!).
It has been said that the Mega Menu was required for other things going forward. Personally, I'm hoping that Content Management would include some option as to what goes into the menu.
As a more often player rather than dm who also doesn’t use home brew very often the extra navigation to get to my characters is inconvenient
I'm not sure what you mean here. Getting to the My Characters page is a hover and click just as it was before (and is hopefully larger/easier to click).
Previously, if I wanted to get to Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, I could do Rules -> Adventures-> Dragon Heist, and I'm there. Now I have to open sources, scroll through a small thumbnail list until I find what I want in some random order, and click it.
Mobile is bad too, this is going to make quick access of content very annoying to deal with. I get that as content grows, the previous format was getting out of control, but without someway to basically pin content we want to the top of the list, I really dislike what is in place now.
As I shared in the Changelog, mobile is in no way addressed and has updates incoming.
We really appreciate the feedback and will pay attention to what the broader community shares about the menus over the next couple of weeks, after "change reaction" wears down. At that point, we'll be able to assess and make adjustments as needed.
We are currently receiving far more positive feedback about the menus than negative - which I do not share to invalidate your feedback in any way - but to highlight that our broad hypotheses were correct. Now we will dig in on specific, actionable feedback and make adjustments back the other direction to see if we can optimize to make navigation the best it can be for the widest possible spectrum.
A great example of specific, actionable feedback is of the negative we have received, we see a theme emerging regarding the Sources menu - some of you want those sources consolidated and accessible by other means than scrolling through them. We will review and see what we can do about that.
Thanks!
Mobile is mostly the same, in terms of layout, but the shock was from the reordering of elements. I see now that the list is just different. Instead of being in alphabetical order, its in what seems to be essential reverse chronological order so newer titles are at the top, with the exception that some contents are just shoved to the bottom because they're not full releases. There no real intuitive way to know where your content is, unless you've memorized the release date of every book (which, I haven't!) and so while mobile doesn't include more time to reach the content like Desktop, actually finding the book you want in the list is now a crap shoot.
I think overall the redesign is not bad, but it shouldn't be harder to get to a specific adventures book. As a player, maybe its not as big a deal, but as a DM with the legendary bundle, its currently frustrating me more than making me interested in a bunch of new menus that don't offer anything. The Tools menu is literally "Twitch Extension" (which is not useful as we don't stream our games), Character Builder (which is rarely used), and "Encounter Builder! Coming Soon" which until it actually launches is just wasted space.
I feel like theres 2 different use cases for the site, as a DM and as a Player, and right now you're mixing Player focused options (Character Builder) with DM focused options (Encounter Builder) and it seems like a weird choice.
As an aside, instead of redesigning how the content is shown, are there any plans to actually change how the underlying features actually work? For instance, sharing my content in campaigns shares the actual adventure book as well. When can we restrict what content is actually shared with the players? Or modify which sources would actually be valid in a campaign, and have it link only those sources and character options? You mention iterating fast, but realistically very little functional change is seen on the site, and currently all we are seeing is layout changes without actually giving more control over the content we have unlocked.
I think listing all of the sources in a massive dropdown would be terrible. Before I saw the comment that you could scroll through the sources in the current dropdown instead of clicking the arrows, I would have said that the best way to get to a source that isn’t one of the decreed Big Five (well-chosen) is to just click on Sources and find the book you’re looking for.
Given that scrolling is an option, I think that it still needs work. First, it needs to be compatible with trackpad scrolling. As of now, trackpad scrolling in that menu is basically unusable. I would want to be able to scroll-swipe left and right on the trackpad to scroll through the options, hopefully scrolling smoothly through them instead of jumping five at a time. Also, replacing the little dots with something that looks more like a scroll bar would make me think “I should try scrolling in this view”.
I quite like the way the art grows in its frame to visually emphasize the option I’m hovering over. That’s nice. Fix the trackpad scrolling and I’ll be a happy camper indeed.
By in large, I find the changes a big improvement on my laptop. Just as awkward on mobile (in my case a 10.5" iPad Pro) as it has been recently, but I realize a "mobile pass" is still in the offing, so I'll be patient for improvements there. (I use my iPad for DDB far more than my laptop, so the problems with both the earlier menus and the mega menus on the iPad have been a big annoyance for me).
As many others have said, the one place on "desktop" that I'm struggling with is the Sources menu. In my case, I wouldn't say it is worse that before, but it's still problematic for me, I appreciate not "slipping off" the nested menus, but It's hard to find what I want. Splitting rules/crunch from adventures would be helpful. I'd also love to see some sort of custom sources menu that would only display content I've actually purchased. (Maybe with a toggle or something to show everything???). I have a fair number of the "rule" books but only one adventure; it's a pain hunting through all the adventures for the one I want. On my MacBook (Retina, 12", 2017, running Mojave) in Safari, the scrolling through the sources is too fast: they become a blur and there's no way to adequate control scroll speed to get where I want to go, so I have to resort to clicks.
To follow up on the custom sources menu idea: maybe that could be expanded to include other items, tied to our DDB account, so that if we are logged it, we see a custom menu populated with our most used resources/pages. I know we can create bookmarks in our browsers, but if it were possible to do it on the site level, we'd have access regardless of device or browser.
It is one extra click, before you could click my characters from the drop down no other steps now it is drop down, my creations, my characters it’s not a big deal but it is one of the most used functions as far as I’m aware
To give my two cents on this, here are my takeaways:
I dislike "My Characters" and "Character Builder" being in separated
Having the adventures organized in alphabetical order is strange, but understandable
Having rulebooks be under "Rules" seems like it would make more sense to me
Having the homebrew stuff under "Creations" makes sense, but it feels more logical to put a homebrew creation device under "Tools"
The whole UI just seems slower to use to me, and feels kinda clustered. I feel like a theme tool would be cool, so you can use the new style if you like it, the old one if you don't, while slowly adding new ones. But maybe all of this will change with time as everyone gets used to this new menu.
Thank you BadEye, this addresses a large number of the issues I was having (and all of my players) with the site in regards to usability.
However if I may put an oar in and add to the voices in this thread. The only problem I have with it now is it takes a long time to get to the "Homebrew" section. I am an avid user of Homebrew and I like to browse the monsters and equipment quite often. In order to reach that I now need to select Sources > Browse & Create Homebrew > Scroll to section > Click Browse.
This used to be a 2 click process, personally I found it very confusing and difficult to locate where I was meant to go to browse the homebrew content (now I know where it is, that's not a problem anymore, but initially I was very confused and thought you guys had removed the Homebrew section completely).
Other than that, the menu makes a lot of sense, and I think as a whole this website is a most fabulous resource.
Thank you BadEye, this addresses a large number of the issues I was having (and all of my players) with the site in regards to usability.
However if I may put an oar in and add to the voices in this thread. The only problem I have with it now is it takes a long time to get to the "Homebrew" section. I am an avid user of Homebrew and I like to browse the monsters and equipment quite often. In order to reach that I now need to select Sources > Browse & Create Homebrew > Scroll to section > Click Browse.
This used to be a 2 click process, personally I found it very confusing and difficult to locate where I was meant to go to browse the homebrew content (now I know where it is, that's not a problem anymore, but initially I was very confused and thought you guys had removed the Homebrew section completely).
Other than that, the menu makes a lot of sense, and I think as a whole this website is a most fabulous resource.
While I agree the icons may be a tad incongruous with the rest of the revamp, the new homebrew section is much nicer and usable. I'm really happy with most of the improvements made at this point (although I still think being able to one click access a class from any page would be helpful).
The DM Screen mode may also serve my purpose whenever that is finished and released. Thanks for working hard to improve the tool; I appreciate it!
Edit: I swear when I posted this the latest change wasn't live. At this point I think everything is really usable! Thank you so much!
I consider the Mega Menus to be an improvement! For those of you who can't wait for the other improvements (arranging and organizing), have a look at my post on making Chrome adapted for DDB.
Edit: While criticism is important, it sounds like everyone thinks this is the final design. As Adam mentioned: "We rapidly iterate internally and we have made it a part of our strategy to release things earlier to the community this year where we can get feedback quicker to overall save development time."
Page Reference: Core Rules to DDB
Page Reference: DDB to PHB
Page Reference: DDB to DMG
Page Reference: DDB to MM
The little bit that I have used of the new layout on mobile...the only thing I dislike so far is that the source books and adventure books are no longer in alphabetical order
Nykkan Fharngnarthnost: Dragonborn Monk (4)...Coliseum of Conquest (3) {1W-6L} [Brewer]
Hans Stormsong: Human Monk (1)...Colosseum of Conquest (3) {0W-1L}
Longtime user, first-time poster.
I do have some positives, however.
My first impressions were not very positive. The impression from my players was also not very positive. The thing that I am most disappointed with is the Sources tab. Despite this, I'm still excited to see where these changes go. With all there is that I feel was made worse, there are notable improvements alongside them. If this gets refined I can see it being an overall improvement.
Sorry but can you point me towards the changelog entry? I can't seem to find anything relating to this in the forum or homepage. Maybe it's not pinned and lost somewhere, maybe I'm just blind :) For the actual topic, I posted some of this in another thread but this seems like the better place for it. I'll expand on a few things. For context, I'm on desktop.
Fellow web designer here. I can appreciate some of these navigation challenges because it's definitely an area I've gone back and forth on many times as well. I will say that comparing to the old menu, this feels like one step forward two steps back. My daily use involves navigating to things like classes or races, and getting to that content takes now more time because of the extra clicking and browsing required. I do think there's a better medium to be found by addressing the problems of the old menu and having the extra level of content accessible through the menu.
The "Sources" could use more work. Only showing five books per slide is going to get lengthy, slow and confusing order-wise considering the amount of books is only going up. Someone here pointed out that you can use your mouse scrollwheel to scroll through the different carousel slides, which I honestly never thought to try despite working with carousel elements a lot. That makes the browsing itself easier, but I don't think most people will ever think to try it as it basically overrides the normal site scrolling behavior on a single menu element.
I would prefer more compact views to get an overview with a quick glance so I can get to the content I'm actually looking for. I don't think the amount of content is so extensive you couldn't fit the books under a single megamenu view for example. If it seems like too much, then perhaps consider having the slides instead be categories divided for rulebooks and adventures. As a player I own all the rulebooks, but I have no need for adventure books. Currently the menu doesn't indicate what I already own or not, which could be fixed by adding a transparent black overlay with a buy button on top of the books I don't own. Extrapolate similar ideas for the other menu views like "Game Rules" for easily accessible 3rd level pages.
EDIT: I rarely used the book specific browsing on the old menu, so I didn't realize what I'm suggesting is partially how it apparently functioned before. Well, there you go heh.
In more technical terms I'm not a fan of how delayed the hover menu appearing is because it makes it feel clunky, slow and non-responsive. It doesn't really matter how fast a page loads if the UX (user experience) itself feels sluggish. One of the reasons you may have it set up like this is to avoid not only the accidental slip off, but also so it doesn't instantly flicker on as you move your cursor around, but I would argue especially in this case the header is quite compact and not even fixed to the top so it's a non-issue. Or just remove hovers altogether and go for toggle menus and avoid all slip offs... I digress, safe to say it's a complicated issue with no perfect solutions :)
Hope this was useful feedback. I could go on forever since I can't avoid analyzing and instantly noticing these sorts of issues because of dealing with them myself.
tldr; More compact quick glance overviews and ease of access ftw
The changelog is linked in the top bar, the icon to the left of the notification bell. You can also use this link. :)
The Major issue I have is the loss of the class spell lists. I loved those page where all the spells were on one page for a class. Made searching through spells very quick and love to have a way to get back to those.
The slip-off issue of the old menu was a pain in my backside. This is so much better than before for my use. I look forward to further improvements, and I trust the team to keep listening and keep enhancing game play at my table.
I was looking at the HTML for the new Mega Menus, and as I understand it the actual menu items are populated only once you hover the top menu. This is different from the old menu, and the current mobile menu, in which all menu items exist in the HTML code all the time.
Why is this of interest? Well, in theory, having the menu being populated on-the-fly means you can fetch user settings before doing so. So, in theory, you could on your user page perhaps choose which content you want to be shown in the menus, in which order etc. The front-end for this is kinda done (I'm only guessing!).
It has been said that the Mega Menu was required for other things going forward. Personally, I'm hoping that Content Management would include some option as to what goes into the menu.
Page Reference: Core Rules to DDB
Page Reference: DDB to PHB
Page Reference: DDB to DMG
Page Reference: DDB to MM
I'm not sure what you mean here. Getting to the My Characters page is a hover and click just as it was before (and is hopefully larger/easier to click).
If I'm missing something, let me know, thanks!
Mobile is mostly the same, in terms of layout, but the shock was from the reordering of elements. I see now that the list is just different. Instead of being in alphabetical order, its in what seems to be essential reverse chronological order so newer titles are at the top, with the exception that some contents are just shoved to the bottom because they're not full releases. There no real intuitive way to know where your content is, unless you've memorized the release date of every book (which, I haven't!) and so while mobile doesn't include more time to reach the content like Desktop, actually finding the book you want in the list is now a crap shoot.
I think overall the redesign is not bad, but it shouldn't be harder to get to a specific adventures book. As a player, maybe its not as big a deal, but as a DM with the legendary bundle, its currently frustrating me more than making me interested in a bunch of new menus that don't offer anything. The Tools menu is literally "Twitch Extension" (which is not useful as we don't stream our games), Character Builder (which is rarely used), and "Encounter Builder! Coming Soon" which until it actually launches is just wasted space.
I feel like theres 2 different use cases for the site, as a DM and as a Player, and right now you're mixing Player focused options (Character Builder) with DM focused options (Encounter Builder) and it seems like a weird choice.
As an aside, instead of redesigning how the content is shown, are there any plans to actually change how the underlying features actually work? For instance, sharing my content in campaigns shares the actual adventure book as well. When can we restrict what content is actually shared with the players? Or modify which sources would actually be valid in a campaign, and have it link only those sources and character options? You mention iterating fast, but realistically very little functional change is seen on the site, and currently all we are seeing is layout changes without actually giving more control over the content we have unlocked.
I think listing all of the sources in a massive dropdown would be terrible. Before I saw the comment that you could scroll through the sources in the current dropdown instead of clicking the arrows, I would have said that the best way to get to a source that isn’t one of the decreed Big Five (well-chosen) is to just click on Sources and find the book you’re looking for.
Given that scrolling is an option, I think that it still needs work. First, it needs to be compatible with trackpad scrolling. As of now, trackpad scrolling in that menu is basically unusable. I would want to be able to scroll-swipe left and right on the trackpad to scroll through the options, hopefully scrolling smoothly through them instead of jumping five at a time. Also, replacing the little dots with something that looks more like a scroll bar would make me think “I should try scrolling in this view”.
I quite like the way the art grows in its frame to visually emphasize the option I’m hovering over. That’s nice. Fix the trackpad scrolling and I’ll be a happy camper indeed.
By in large, I find the changes a big improvement on my laptop. Just as awkward on mobile (in my case a 10.5" iPad Pro) as it has been recently, but I realize a "mobile pass" is still in the offing, so I'll be patient for improvements there. (I use my iPad for DDB far more than my laptop, so the problems with both the earlier menus and the mega menus on the iPad have been a big annoyance for me).
As many others have said, the one place on "desktop" that I'm struggling with is the Sources menu. In my case, I wouldn't say it is worse that before, but it's still problematic for me, I appreciate not "slipping off" the nested menus, but It's hard to find what I want. Splitting rules/crunch from adventures would be helpful. I'd also love to see some sort of custom sources menu that would only display content I've actually purchased. (Maybe with a toggle or something to show everything???). I have a fair number of the "rule" books but only one adventure; it's a pain hunting through all the adventures for the one I want. On my MacBook (Retina, 12", 2017, running Mojave) in Safari, the scrolling through the sources is too fast: they become a blur and there's no way to adequate control scroll speed to get where I want to go, so I have to resort to clicks.
To follow up on the custom sources menu idea: maybe that could be expanded to include other items, tied to our DDB account, so that if we are logged it, we see a custom menu populated with our most used resources/pages. I know we can create bookmarks in our browsers, but if it were possible to do it on the site level, we'd have access regardless of device or browser.
Trying to Decide if DDB is for you? A few helpful threads: A Buyer's Guide to DDB; What I/We Bought and Why; How some DMs use DDB; A Newer Thread on Using DDB to Play
Helpful threads on other topics: Homebrew FAQ by IamSposta; Accessing Content by ConalTheGreat;
Check your entitlements here. | Support Ticket LInk
I've shared a "Next Day" update summarizing our next steps here: https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/34115-mega-menu-feedback-review-and-next-steps?comment=1
Thanks!
It is one extra click, before you could click my characters from the drop down no other steps now it is drop down, my creations, my characters it’s not a big deal but it is one of the most used functions as far as I’m aware
To give my two cents on this, here are my takeaways:
The whole UI just seems slower to use to me, and feels kinda clustered. I feel like a theme tool would be cool, so you can use the new style if you like it, the old one if you don't, while slowly adding new ones. But maybe all of this will change with time as everyone gets used to this new menu.
I still think a customizable section where the player/DM can set up what he commonly uses would be nice.
Watch your back, conserve your ammo,
and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon!
Thank you BadEye, this addresses a large number of the issues I was having (and all of my players) with the site in regards to usability.
However if I may put an oar in and add to the voices in this thread. The only problem I have with it now is it takes a long time to get to the "Homebrew" section. I am an avid user of Homebrew and I like to browse the monsters and equipment quite often. In order to reach that I now need to select Sources > Browse & Create Homebrew > Scroll to section > Click Browse.
This used to be a 2 click process, personally I found it very confusing and difficult to locate where I was meant to go to browse the homebrew content (now I know where it is, that's not a problem anymore, but initially I was very confused and thought you guys had removed the Homebrew section completely).
Other than that, the menu makes a lot of sense, and I think as a whole this website is a most fabulous resource.
Seems this has been fixed now :-)
Page Reference: Core Rules to DDB
Page Reference: DDB to PHB
Page Reference: DDB to DMG
Page Reference: DDB to MM
While I agree the icons may be a tad incongruous with the rest of the revamp, the new homebrew section is much nicer and usable. I'm really happy with most of the improvements made at this point (although I still think being able to one click access a class from any page would be helpful).
The DM Screen mode may also serve my purpose whenever that is finished and released. Thanks for working hard to improve the tool; I appreciate it!
Edit: I swear when I posted this the latest change wasn't live. At this point I think everything is really usable! Thank you so much!
With the updates I see today (2019-03-06 11:51), all is good. This layout is much better than the one when this thread was started.