Any chance of getting a "create new character" link back in the Creations menu? That was actually the main thing I used the menu for and it's really been throwing me off to not have it.
You'll find "Character Builder" in the Tools menu - different placement, but does the trick. Thanks!
Of course, general website standards do not always apply to specific websites and specific communities,
Yes yes they do apply. That's exactly why they are standards. If we were a community of hand amputees you'd have a point... At the moment we're a community of variously able bodied people who don't know what will happen when we click the mega menu. If we get our milliseconds right it will open, if we count them wrong it will open then close.
Edit: This is nothing personal, I just see you're current choice as a bad one, and would love for you guys to get back on track ( you were doing so damn well )
So a month or more ago BadEye, you mentioned a few times that "change reaction" was part of us not loving the new nav. I disagree that it was "change reaction", but wanted to give it a fair shake. Now over a month in using it almost daily I still have to say over all, for me, the new nav is not great.
Sorry. I do appreciate the work, and the fact that you are putting more things into the menus. But the big giant menu with things different sizes, in strange places. Just not great for me. And it's way less usable on mobile now than it was before. I'm still not convinced the hovers were an issue, long clicks on mobile generally kept them up so they worked great actually. And the menus still pop on hover, just now the menu covers half your page and you can accidentally hit that gigantic thing and cover up your screen which then causes you to have to make large mouse movements to get out of that hover.
Anyway, my $0.02. Certainly very much appreciate the work, and it's still a wonderful site that I use almost daily. So many thanks for all you and the rest of the team do.
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Though not currently a member, seeking admission to the really long and important signature club. Please consider this as a current CV.
So a month or more ago BadEye, you mentioned a few times that "change reaction" was part of us not loving the new nav. I disagree that it was "change reaction", but wanted to give it a fair shake. Now over a month in using it almost daily I still have to say over all, for me, the new nav is not great.
Sorry. I do appreciate the work, and the fact that you are putting more things into the menus. But the big giant menu with things different sizes, in strange places. Just not great for me. And it's way less usable on mobile now than it was before. I'm still not convinced the hovers were an issue, long clicks on mobile generally kept them up so they worked great actually. And the menus still pop on hover, just now the menu covers half your page and you can accidentally hit that gigantic thing and cover up your screen which then causes you to have to make large mouse movements to get out of that hover.
Anyway, my $0.02. Certainly very much appreciate the work, and it's still a wonderful site that I use almost daily. So many thanks for all you and the rest of the team do.
Of course, general website standards do not always apply to specific websites and specific communities,
Yes yes they do apply. That's exactly why they are standards. If we were a community of hand amputees you'd have a point... At the moment we're a community of variously able bodied people who don't know what will happen when we click the mega menu. If we get our milliseconds right it will open, if we count them wrong it will open then close.
Edit: This is nothing personal, I just see you're current choice as a bad one, and would love for you guys to get back on track ( you were doing so damn well )
I see you've taken my comment out of its context, which actually explains why the standard wasn't where we chose to go immediately for the menus. I am also glad that I don't live in a world where standards are always applied.
In the follow up to the comment you've picked out, I shared that we will keep an eye on the situation and adjust over time. The truth is, outside the handful of comments here in this thread, we have received zero other complaints from any of our myriad feedback sources. So I'm not too sure we need to get back onto any track since the vast majority of the community either 1) is good with the way the menu works now or 2) is not good with it but doesn't find it far off enough to provide feedback about it.
We could remove the hover in time as an A/B experiment to provoke feedback. We could change it over without testing since it's closer to the standard. Either way, we chose not to do it immediately because of the considerable feedback we did receive about not wanting to click any more times. As we do, we'll keep an eye on it and adjust if needed.
So a month or more ago BadEye, you mentioned a few times that "change reaction" was part of us not loving the new nav. I disagree that it was "change reaction", but wanted to give it a fair shake. Now over a month in using it almost daily I still have to say over all, for me, the new nav is not great.
Sorry. I do appreciate the work, and the fact that you are putting more things into the menus. But the big giant menu with things different sizes, in strange places. Just not great for me. And it's way less usable on mobile now than it was before. I'm still not convinced the hovers were an issue, long clicks on mobile generally kept them up so they worked great actually. And the menus still pop on hover, just now the menu covers half your page and you can accidentally hit that gigantic thing and cover up your screen which then causes you to have to make large mouse movements to get out of that hover.
Anyway, my $0.02. Certainly very much appreciate the work, and it's still a wonderful site that I use almost daily. So many thanks for all you and the rest of the team do.
I theorized that "change reaction" could have something to do with it and would be a reason we wouldn't make any knee-jerk reactions, but I would never suppose that would cover every outlook/view.
I'm not sure what you mean by the menus being less usable on mobile than before, because we haven't done anything to the mobile menus other than change some of the wording/categories. i.e. You should have everything on mobile that you had before. If this is not the case, then something has simply not been added back in properly and we can address that.
As for the rest, I appreciate you sharing your personal feedback, and we will always keep an eye on such feedback. The mega menu approach has been well-received by the bulk of the community, and - whether I like it or not - we are never going to be able to please everyone. I'm sorry you fall into that category with this feature. With a platform as big as D&D Beyond will grow into over time, there should be many other features/services that will be what you personally want to see, so I hope that will still mean DDB can do good things for you and your game.
my frustration Badeye is that in order to reduce click count you added unpredictable behavior. That behavior is why this interaction is not commonly used.
This is the last im going to say on this anyway. I'm just going to restore the old system and you can enjoy you're life with no standards.
I'm not sure what you mean by the menus being less usable on mobile than before, because we haven't done anything to the mobile menus other than change some of the wording/categories. i.e. You should have everything on mobile that you had before. If this is not the case, then something has simply not been added back in properly and we can address that.
So I should have been more clear. When I say mobile, I'm on a mobile device, but not a phone. On my android table, it uses the desktop site. It use to be amazingly useful. Now I've all but quit using the site from my tablet.
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I'm not sure what you mean by the menus being less usable on mobile than before, because we haven't done anything to the mobile menus other than change some of the wording/categories. i.e. You should have everything on mobile that you had before. If this is not the case, then something has simply not been added back in properly and we can address that.
So I should have been more clear. When I say mobile, I'm on a mobile device, but not a phone. On my android table, it uses the desktop site. It use to be amazingly useful. Now I've all but quit using the site from my tablet.
That clarifies one bit of the mystery, but I am still at a loss for what makes it "unusable" for you on your tablet.
The old menu should not have worked on a tablet, as hovering was the only option back then. Now you should be able to hover or click. Hence my confusion, because theoretically this should actually work well on large tablets.
Huh, that's... kinda awkward? When I want to create something I naturally gravitate to "Creations". And there's a long list of a million other things to start creating in there, so it seems pretty weird to me that "Create Character" isn't one of them. I guess it's no wonder I never found the link under "Tools" all this time. To me that just doesn't seem like an intuitive place to look. I'd love if you guys could consider adding a character creation link next to all the other ones.
So there I was. Playing the new Artificer test content in a gory one-shot session... in the heat of battle I needed one vital piece of info on the Artificer class, so I scrambled to look it up on my trusty phone AND...
Artificer is missing in the menu.
Could you guys please unhide it in small viewports? I was able to pull up the class page on my phone eventually by going to All Classes and scrolling way down to find it at the bottom, but it sure was frustrating for a second, especially seeing Blood Hunter in the menu, but no Artificer. -Thanks!
I'll start out by saying that I really like D&D Beyond. I use it daily, and it's really helped my understanding and appreciation of the game.
But regardless, I really think this navigation revamp was a mistake. I've lived with it for a few months now, and while I didn't think it was perfect before, it's now clear that the revamp was not an improvement.
I constantly forget where things are, lose my way, have to scan through numerous flyout menus, and finally realize that the item I was looking for ("Feats" most recently) was in one of the menus that I saw, but was shoved into the right side of the screen set atop a dim image. This is not a good navigation paradigm. The menu titles are confusing (I don't intuitively expect "backgrounds" or "feats" to be in "Game Rules"), they tend to bundle disparate elements via loose logic ("spells" living behind the same hover as "races" just feels awkward), and the scannability of the menus is VERY poor due to the different sizes and treatments applied seemingly at random (why are "classes" splayed out as a list, while "races" are a big banner-style button?).
None of these issues are a disaster on their own, but all together they make for legitimately the most confusing navigation scheme I've used in years. I get it - there's a lot of stuff to navigate in D&D. It's not an easy job. But I can't help but feel that the nav revamp prioritized strained simplicity and aesthetics over actual clarity and usability. I would gladly deal with twice as many top-level nav items if they were named for the things that are used most often, or organized more by user intent. I would also GLADLY accept menus that weren't as pretty if it meant they were more scannable - I really can't stand the big dim image buttons intermixed with the text.
Again, I think dndb is great and I love using it. I think this menu system needs more thought, though.
I just want to drop in and say that overall, I think the new "mega-menus" are an improvement over the old menu system. For the most part, things are clear and prominent, and it's easy to navigate. Much easier than previously for me. (I mean... feats, races, classes, spells, backgrounds, etc... they're all aspects of the game rules. That seems pretty intuitive to me.) The one thing is that I don't know how much room their is to grow, if necessary. Certainly the sources menu will continue to become more crowded every six or so months.
The one thing I still would like would be that the sources that I have purchased access to be prominent. Even better, those sources which I haven't purchased should not even appear -- that's what the marketplace is for. There is zero reason for me to have all these other adventures even appear under the sources menu, since they do me no good. (I'm sure it's quite a bit of work to implement user-specific menus, but it seems doable.)
It's a bit easier for me to find Princes of the Apocalypse now than it was before, but nonetheless, I still have to look for it amidst the others.
I'm a new Beyond user, but in my limited time with it, there is one part that needs to be addressed.
The main window doesn't scale to fit the resolution of the screen.
That is to say, I'm looking at the main interface window for my wizard on my 27" 2k monitor, and all of the info is displayed in a box the size of an A4 piece of paper it the centre of the screen, with a 4" border of unused space surrounding it. I'm not bothered by the size of the font and all that, that is no issue, but needing to scroll down my spell list or inventory list when it could all easily fit onto the screen makes it feel quite cramped
Personally I like this but I'd REALLY like a way to grey-out options I haven't yet purchased or better-yet, exclude or move to the bottom/end of the lists.
Personally I like this but I'd REALLY like a way to grey-out options I haven't yet purchased or better-yet, exclude or move to the bottom/end of the lists.
I'd also really like grayed out/desaturated features when I don't have access to them yet. I love the encounter builder so far and had forgotten it was alpha to subs only while trying to help my friend prepare for his first time dm'ing. He wasn't subbed and didn't know he couldn't use this until after he clicked on it in the menu.
I wouldn't remove them, because having it there does create incentives for users to purchase if they can't outright access it (you are here for at least some profit).
Personally I am not a fan of the "hover brings up the menu" functionality. Let me click it, please. Otherwise the damn menus keep popping up in front of me while I am just moving my mouse around. Then there is a LOT of real estate on my screen that I have to move my mouse off of before it will go away. This is very distracting and annoying.
Is there a setting on my account settings or something that would allow me to turn this feature off? I don't see one, but that would allow you to leave this feature for those who want it, and let those of us who don't want it turn it off.
Thanks.
We appreciate the feedback on hover versus click, and your personal preference actually aligns with most of the UX research that is out there for general website standards.
Of course, general website standards do not always apply to specific websites and specific communities, and in this case, we have seen to this point after the initial mega menu release that a large portion of the feedback provided was "do not add more clicks, remove more," which led to us keeping hover in on desktop for now. We simply didn't want to add another click.
That's not to say that we won't change that stance in the future. We will likely even gather some direct feedback here, Twitter, Discord, etc. to guide that decision.
For the last few weeks, we wanted to change as few variables as we could while incorporating feedback in order to make sure we know what's working and what isn't.
Hope some of that made sense, it's late in my part of the world. Thanks!
Well it's been over a year. The hover still stinks. It is MASSIVE and takes up half of your screen. If you try driving the site with a laptop and a touchpad you will inadvertently hit it a high percentage of time when editing characters, searching for things, etc. Basically anything where you have to click *near* that thing. I've not been a fan since the start. And though it was implied, I'm still not adverse to change. Overall I like that the information is easier to get to. And though I'm not a fan of the massive buttons, I get it and that is fine. Just really would be nice to kill the hover and get a click instead. Maybe a user preference/switch? It's a serious ux issue for me when I'm on anything other than sitting at a desk with full mouse/keyboard.
Still love the site though!
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I had opened a topic on this and just saw this post so I am going to quote myself a little and add to the conversation:
I am having a bit of a hard time finding out which books I own. Could we have bought content somehow highlighted? Or even see only the books we own in the Sources?
I personally would only list bought content under Sources and maybe rename it to My Sources, Library etc., since sources can already be found in the Marketplace. This redundancy is definitely not needed. Also, I do not speak Italian and I do not want to see Manuele del Giocatore in my sources.
It's been a few years now with these menus and whilst I don't mind the design itself, I'm constantly finding the hover over popout to be incredibly distracting and annoying. I'm constantly having to get rid of unwanted menu popouts with extra mouse movement to the point where I really, really want there to be that 'extra' click when I actually want to access a menu. It turns out that it's not really extraneous when it's saving you a whole bunch of unnecessary mouse movement.
It's getting to the point where it's becoming so aggravating that I'm looking for some way to counter it. So I'm asking 'the community' if there are any solutions others have found like custom CSS or some sort of extension (Chrome) that stops these menus from popping out.
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You'll find "Character Builder" in the Tools menu - different placement, but does the trick. Thanks!
Yes yes they do apply. That's exactly why they are standards. If we were a community of hand amputees you'd have a point... At the moment we're a community of variously able bodied people who don't know what will happen when we click the mega menu. If we get our milliseconds right it will open, if we count them wrong it will open then close.
Edit: This is nothing personal, I just see you're current choice as a bad one, and would love for you guys to get back on track ( you were doing so damn well )
So a month or more ago BadEye, you mentioned a few times that "change reaction" was part of us not loving the new nav. I disagree that it was "change reaction", but wanted to give it a fair shake. Now over a month in using it almost daily I still have to say over all, for me, the new nav is not great.
Sorry. I do appreciate the work, and the fact that you are putting more things into the menus. But the big giant menu with things different sizes, in strange places. Just not great for me. And it's way less usable on mobile now than it was before. I'm still not convinced the hovers were an issue, long clicks on mobile generally kept them up so they worked great actually. And the menus still pop on hover, just now the menu covers half your page and you can accidentally hit that gigantic thing and cover up your screen which then causes you to have to make large mouse movements to get out of that hover.
Anyway, my $0.02. Certainly very much appreciate the work, and it's still a wonderful site that I use almost daily. So many thanks for all you and the rest of the team do.
Though not currently a member, seeking admission to the really long and important signature club. Please consider this as a current CV.
Other personalities... Burgee , The Colorless Knight, Fiorello, RW Goodbarrel, Dred, Evrik - Out of the Abyss & Dungeon of the Mad Mage
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This. ^.
I see you've taken my comment out of its context, which actually explains why the standard wasn't where we chose to go immediately for the menus. I am also glad that I don't live in a world where standards are always applied.
In the follow up to the comment you've picked out, I shared that we will keep an eye on the situation and adjust over time. The truth is, outside the handful of comments here in this thread, we have received zero other complaints from any of our myriad feedback sources. So I'm not too sure we need to get back onto any track since the vast majority of the community either 1) is good with the way the menu works now or 2) is not good with it but doesn't find it far off enough to provide feedback about it.
We could remove the hover in time as an A/B experiment to provoke feedback. We could change it over without testing since it's closer to the standard. Either way, we chose not to do it immediately because of the considerable feedback we did receive about not wanting to click any more times. As we do, we'll keep an eye on it and adjust if needed.
I theorized that "change reaction" could have something to do with it and would be a reason we wouldn't make any knee-jerk reactions, but I would never suppose that would cover every outlook/view.
I'm not sure what you mean by the menus being less usable on mobile than before, because we haven't done anything to the mobile menus other than change some of the wording/categories. i.e. You should have everything on mobile that you had before. If this is not the case, then something has simply not been added back in properly and we can address that.
As for the rest, I appreciate you sharing your personal feedback, and we will always keep an eye on such feedback. The mega menu approach has been well-received by the bulk of the community, and - whether I like it or not - we are never going to be able to please everyone. I'm sorry you fall into that category with this feature. With a platform as big as D&D Beyond will grow into over time, there should be many other features/services that will be what you personally want to see, so I hope that will still mean DDB can do good things for you and your game.
Thanks!
my frustration Badeye is that in order to reduce click count you added unpredictable behavior. That behavior is why this interaction is not commonly used.
This is the last im going to say on this anyway. I'm just going to restore the old system and you can enjoy you're life with no standards.
So I should have been more clear. When I say mobile, I'm on a mobile device, but not a phone. On my android table, it uses the desktop site. It use to be amazingly useful. Now I've all but quit using the site from my tablet.
Though not currently a member, seeking admission to the really long and important signature club. Please consider this as a current CV.
Other personalities... Burgee , The Colorless Knight, Fiorello, RW Goodbarrel, Dred, Evrik - Out of the Abyss & Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Site Rules & Guidelines || Tooltips || Homebrew FAQ || Snippet Codes || Syllvva's Guides
That clarifies one bit of the mystery, but I am still at a loss for what makes it "unusable" for you on your tablet.
The old menu should not have worked on a tablet, as hovering was the only option back then. Now you should be able to hover or click. Hence my confusion, because theoretically this should actually work well on large tablets.
Can confirm. It works well from my tablet.
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Huh, that's... kinda awkward? When I want to create something I naturally gravitate to "Creations". And there's a long list of a million other things to start creating in there, so it seems pretty weird to me that "Create Character" isn't one of them. I guess it's no wonder I never found the link under "Tools" all this time. To me that just doesn't seem like an intuitive place to look. I'd love if you guys could consider adding a character creation link next to all the other ones.
So there I was. Playing the new Artificer test content in a gory one-shot session... in the heat of battle I needed one vital piece of info on the Artificer class, so I scrambled to look it up on my trusty phone AND...
Artificer is missing in the menu.
Could you guys please unhide it in small viewports? I was able to pull up the class page on my phone eventually by going to All Classes and scrolling way down to find it at the bottom, but it sure was frustrating for a second, especially seeing Blood Hunter in the menu, but no Artificer. -Thanks!
I'll start out by saying that I really like D&D Beyond. I use it daily, and it's really helped my understanding and appreciation of the game.
But regardless, I really think this navigation revamp was a mistake. I've lived with it for a few months now, and while I didn't think it was perfect before, it's now clear that the revamp was not an improvement.
I constantly forget where things are, lose my way, have to scan through numerous flyout menus, and finally realize that the item I was looking for ("Feats" most recently) was in one of the menus that I saw, but was shoved into the right side of the screen set atop a dim image. This is not a good navigation paradigm. The menu titles are confusing (I don't intuitively expect "backgrounds" or "feats" to be in "Game Rules"), they tend to bundle disparate elements via loose logic ("spells" living behind the same hover as "races" just feels awkward), and the scannability of the menus is VERY poor due to the different sizes and treatments applied seemingly at random (why are "classes" splayed out as a list, while "races" are a big banner-style button?).
None of these issues are a disaster on their own, but all together they make for legitimately the most confusing navigation scheme I've used in years. I get it - there's a lot of stuff to navigate in D&D. It's not an easy job. But I can't help but feel that the nav revamp prioritized strained simplicity and aesthetics over actual clarity and usability. I would gladly deal with twice as many top-level nav items if they were named for the things that are used most often, or organized more by user intent. I would also GLADLY accept menus that weren't as pretty if it meant they were more scannable - I really can't stand the big dim image buttons intermixed with the text.
Again, I think dndb is great and I love using it. I think this menu system needs more thought, though.
I just want to drop in and say that overall, I think the new "mega-menus" are an improvement over the old menu system. For the most part, things are clear and prominent, and it's easy to navigate. Much easier than previously for me. (I mean... feats, races, classes, spells, backgrounds, etc... they're all aspects of the game rules. That seems pretty intuitive to me.) The one thing is that I don't know how much room their is to grow, if necessary. Certainly the sources menu will continue to become more crowded every six or so months.
The one thing I still would like would be that the sources that I have purchased access to be prominent. Even better, those sources which I haven't purchased should not even appear -- that's what the marketplace is for. There is zero reason for me to have all these other adventures even appear under the sources menu, since they do me no good. (I'm sure it's quite a bit of work to implement user-specific menus, but it seems doable.)
It's a bit easier for me to find Princes of the Apocalypse now than it was before, but nonetheless, I still have to look for it amidst the others.
I'm a new Beyond user, but in my limited time with it, there is one part that needs to be addressed.
The main window doesn't scale to fit the resolution of the screen.
That is to say, I'm looking at the main interface window for my wizard on my 27" 2k monitor, and all of the info is displayed in a box the size of an A4 piece of paper it the centre of the screen, with a 4" border of unused space surrounding it. I'm not bothered by the size of the font and all that, that is no issue, but needing to scroll down my spell list or inventory list when it could all easily fit onto the screen makes it feel quite cramped
Other than that, the functionality is brilliant
Personally I like this but I'd REALLY like a way to grey-out options I haven't yet purchased or better-yet, exclude or move to the bottom/end of the lists.
I'd also really like grayed out/desaturated features when I don't have access to them yet. I love the encounter builder so far and had forgotten it was alpha to subs only while trying to help my friend prepare for his first time dm'ing. He wasn't subbed and didn't know he couldn't use this until after he clicked on it in the menu.
I wouldn't remove them, because having it there does create incentives for users to purchase if they can't outright access it (you are here for at least some profit).
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Well it's been over a year. The hover still stinks. It is MASSIVE and takes up half of your screen. If you try driving the site with a laptop and a touchpad you will inadvertently hit it a high percentage of time when editing characters, searching for things, etc. Basically anything where you have to click *near* that thing. I've not been a fan since the start. And though it was implied, I'm still not adverse to change. Overall I like that the information is easier to get to. And though I'm not a fan of the massive buttons, I get it and that is fine. Just really would be nice to kill the hover and get a click instead. Maybe a user preference/switch? It's a serious ux issue for me when I'm on anything other than sitting at a desk with full mouse/keyboard.
Still love the site though!
Though not currently a member, seeking admission to the really long and important signature club. Please consider this as a current CV.
Other personalities... Burgee , The Colorless Knight, Fiorello, RW Goodbarrel, Dred, Evrik - Out of the Abyss & Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Site Rules & Guidelines || Tooltips || Homebrew FAQ || Snippet Codes || Syllvva's Guides
Hi there,
I had opened a topic on this and just saw this post so I am going to quote myself a little and add to the conversation:
I am having a bit of a hard time finding out which books I own. Could we have bought content somehow highlighted? Or even see only the books we own in the Sources?
I personally would only list bought content under Sources and maybe rename it to My Sources, Library etc., since sources can already be found in the Marketplace. This redundancy is definitely not needed. Also, I do not speak Italian and I do not want to see Manuele del Giocatore in my sources.
Kind regards.
It's been a few years now with these menus and whilst I don't mind the design itself, I'm constantly finding the hover over popout to be incredibly distracting and annoying. I'm constantly having to get rid of unwanted menu popouts with extra mouse movement to the point where I really, really want there to be that 'extra' click when I actually want to access a menu. It turns out that it's not really extraneous when it's saving you a whole bunch of unnecessary mouse movement.
It's getting to the point where it's becoming so aggravating that I'm looking for some way to counter it. So I'm asking 'the community' if there are any solutions others have found like custom CSS or some sort of extension (Chrome) that stops these menus from popping out.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.