I love visual design very much, but i'm not really sure about placing and scaling parts of UI. I mean there is much more information on "first screen" in the current variatoin. I mean you can see buttons, decks and news. In the beta however you are able to see much much less.
Well, to me it looks like someone wanted to use gimicks without regard of ho useful it would be. The old layout looks cleaner and appears more useful. Then again it seems that currently all websites try to become as user unfriendly as possible, so I guess you can call it modern.
While the new site looks pretty, I notice several features missing:1. Where is the card pop-up that shows the card when you mouse over a card name?2. Where is the personal inventory of cards? And likewise the auto-display on a card-pop-up as to whether a card is in my collection or not?3. Where is the deck display feature to highlight cards that are in my inventory or not?4. Where is the ability to show cards as a text name only instead of only as a graphic for keyword searching (via the browser not through your in-site search)?5. Is there a way to list decks as a test list with details instead of the graphic display? The graphic display takes up too much space and is hard to visually parse.6. It is possible to sort decks or cards by cost, dust, age, popularity?I think you have focused too much on the pretty and not enough on what your users actually need to use your site effectively. We want easy access to information, with lots of options for sorting and searching, we can live without flash, chrome, shine, and glitter.
Funny part: i have 16:9 13inch laptop and the "recent news" mosaic square (god, it's so hard to talk about UI in english xD) doesn't fully fit in my screen. It s bigger than it :D
The color of font used for the user name when logged in is almost illegible on my monitor.
The ad on the right of the Home screen seems to be covering the right-most deck and I can't see a way of removing it.The icons for the classes seem rather non-standard. Why not use the Hearthstone ones? Also, in the deck list, why not use the same icons Hearthstone uses to depict Standard vs Wild (the Kraken vs. the Infinity symbol)? It would be more easily recognisable. In fact, considering how bold and colourful the site is in general, the white on grey theme of the icons seems a little out of place. In the decklist itself, the horizontally scrolling cards at the bottom would be better if two-ofs weren't shown as two separate cards. Some other way of displaying the card and then an indication that there are two of them would be less clunky, I think. Having said that, I'm not sure how useful the scrolling list actually is. Assuming that we will eventually have a pop-up of the card when hovering over the main list (and I hope that is planned) I can't really see a need for the list at the bottom.When I click on the 'Read More' in the deck description box I assumed it would show a more detailed description. Instead it goes to the Comments box which was a bit unexpected. If it's going to go to comments I'd prefer it said 'Comments' rather than 'Read More' !As long as we're redesigning the deck list screen can I vote that we at least have the option of not breaking the deck list up into Class cards vs. Neutral cards? I much prefer to have all the cards in mana order as it makes it easier to compare with the way they are recorded in the Deck Tracker and in Hearthstone itself.
Following deitybob's post : 7. Is there a way to make a deck private?8. Is there a way to delete a deck?9. (goes with 5) Is there a way to make the UI fit in one screen? On lower vertical resolutions, you spend your time mouse-wheeling up and down between the cards and the search.10. Is there a way to start creating a deck with no class?All these are features that are on the live hearthhead website and which people except to still be there after the new website is launched.
In the deck builder there are filters you can toggle to show or unshow Class vs Neutral cards but I notice that selecting both and unslecting both have the same effect (all cards are shown). Similarly for the Minion/Spell/Weapon toggle. This seems a bit counter-intuitive. I think if you deselect everything it should show nothing not everything!Also, there's a bit of a lag in populating the screen after filtering in the deck builder. It may just be that you're using a less powerful test server but I thought I'd mention it in case there's a performance issue.
Just FYI, I started using Hearthhead because of the My Collection and ability to find decks that I could actually afford. As a F2P gamer, I didn't want to have to wade through a bunch of decks just to find one or two that I had the cards for. My collection's now (a lot) more robust, but here are the filters I want to be able to use when searching decks, in the order I'd value them:
Are there plans to allow you to login with your Battle.net account, like on the standard site?