Hand Viewer Redesign Feedback

[Hilips]

Interesting. U been member of this Shark Tank subforum for longer time and you are sayin' this ?! It really seems ... this whole company .. doesn't care about good suggestions ... and just do random stuff. Still they act like "everything is cool, feedback is welcome, pls do this and that". I'm really starting to hugely dislike it ... (I alrdy said this on 2+2 forums).

The Hand History viewer (HHV) has been changed a couple of times since HM2 was released, and those changes were made based on users opinions. But no redesign or huge changes were made, just small things here and there. The all idea behind the design of HM2 HHV it's still present today: grey background with lighter grey fonts, that don't popup easily, line by line plays (corrected bellow), small cards, etc.

Basically, i assume, from outside, they wanted to move completely from the HH1 design that was very successful. Even today you'll see people making suggestion that mimic the old HM1 HHV, or PT4, which is a copy of HM1. All those suggestion, that have any resemblance from the old HM1 HHV were NOT implemented. I'm sure there is a reason for this.

I have used HM2 since it was in beta phase, and TODAY i can't get used to the HHV. I can use HM1 or PT4 HHV just fine, there must be a reason for this. It toke me a couple of months to get used to HM2, from years and years using HM1, but i finally stop opening HM1. So, yeh, this isn't just me being an old guy that doesn't like changes, there's definitely something not quite right with the HHV design.


Anyway, dissection, they welcome suggestions, and if there are a lot of people behind those suggestion they make it happen. Just takes time, which usually frustrate people and make them write stupid posts like... i sometimes do. Personally, and to be fair, i have made a hand full of suggestion/critics/etc over the years and they were implemented/corrected.


Edit:

My memory is not what it used to be. Here is one of the first version of HM2 vs HM1 HVV:




HM1 had line by line plays, and HM2 first HHV version had one line plays. I could almost swear that was the other way around.

Anyway, i was wrong about that but i'm not going to edit it. It is what it is.


Edit 2:

Then, this was the next improved version:

[dissection]

Anyway, dissection, they welcome suggestions, and if there are a lot of people behind those suggestion they make it happen. Just takes time, which usually frustrate people and make them write stupid posts like... i sometimes do. Personally, and to be fair, i have made a hand full of suggestion/critics/etc over the years and they were implemented/corrected.

Good, some HOPE at last !

Even monkey would come up with better design (same applies for the standard "old" one in HEM2 and the new one atm).

[morny]

Hi, thanks again for all the additional feedback.

First up i do really like the designs adk done, nice work on those and overall some good feedback we can work with. Dissection i really think you could be a great contributor here on the forums if you just toned down the posts a bit more. I took a decent bit of time to respond in detail to your post to try and explain the process and ask for more feedback but instead of more feedback you instead dissected my post to just re-iterate your disapproval with the design which i was already very aware of.

I realize we all need to let down our hair and not take things so seriously but posting pictures of toilets and links to the worlds worst design, cursing and saying things like a monkey would do a better design wouldn't fall under constructive criticism even if it was meant in a light mannered way. Maybe you feel that was needed to get our attention but i am less likely to give your post the same respect i did first time if this is going to be a typical reply.

Thankfully overall there was some good criticism and suggestion we can use to hopefully improve things further and i am not going to form an opinion on 1 post so I'm hoping we see more of the constructive and valuable feedback i have seen in other posts from you and to be fair it was only a couple of posts so maybe i am being a bit harsh in that view and it is just something you feel passionate about.

We clearly didn't hit the mark with our current design if some of the people in this thread feel so strongly and i respect the opinions in this thread quite a bit. That said i don't think its unreasonable to consider that there might be users who use the hand viewer very differently from you guys that might be happy with it. I do accept that people not coming to complain doesn't mean the design is good and vice versa but from my experience of the forums if it was really terrible or a problem to users we usually get a lot of complaints and i mean threads all over the forum etc.

That is why we tested the water with our beta release, we released it, got a lot back feedback and accepted we missed the mark, took another 2 weeks and worked on the feedback and got another build out, that did not got any bad feedback but only got 1 approval. For the most part people will go out of their way to complain quicker than compliment so we felt the improvements were well received in general. Maybe we were thinking too much from a visual improvement side and not enough from a practical use side, that is something we can learn from. The betting tiles was something that got a lot of positive feedback and were always trying to think of ways we can improve things for the users, plain text hand histories have been around for many years and we wanted to think a bit outside the box on a more visual way of displaying the action, it might not be for everyone and maybe something we end up having to make configurable.

Anyway, this is a quick concept mock of a current and proposed version, one of the major things i am take from the feedback is the betting tiles make it difficult to follow the action logically. What i am trying to get a better feel for is digging deeper into what you guys are saying is terrible, is it everything, the colors, the text style and size, the cards too small, the chevron dividers, the showdown and which are the ones that clearly stand out as the biggest issue. (I realize you have pointed out some of these things already but some of those are very much based on opinions i would more like to know what are the clearly obvious problems)

If it is all of the above then it is likely that we probably cannot meet in the middle. Is there a chance that with the proposed version below with wrapped text that its something you would use instead of the proposed HM1 hand viewer then this would be a perfect world as you would still have the additional features like the export in forum format etc that the HM1 hand viewer wont have. Maybe its just not possible to meet in the middle and we will need the two version, plain text and simple and pretty but less functional.

While we do respect and appreciate the opinions it would be unwise to assume that the views here are represented by all our customers so we will probably do a survey in the next while to try and get an overall opinion so we don't make changes to features that the majority of people currently like in the new design. I think its worth waiting a short while before such a survey as most people don't like change, so i think opinion after a week of using it would be very different to opinions the first day they used it. Once we take everything on board we will keep in touch on the proposed changes

p.s i realize the fonts differ, this was just a quick concept mock. PS adk, what fonts did you use in your design, i really like the clarity of those fonts

Current


Does removing the betting tiles and wrapping the text make a big difference, is the the key dislike here the betting tiles?

[Hilips]

Does removing the betting tiles and wrapping the text make a big difference, is the the key dislike here the betting tiles?

I like this one better. The reason is, i'm used to that action style in one line and specialty without those buttons with X/C/B/etc. This action style makes the window much shorter too, which is a good thing.

But again, i would change the fonts and the cards by street to something a little bigger. And the grey fonts to white. A white version (white background) of the HHV would be nice too, as an option.

Morny, have you tried that size fonts on a 27" monitor with 2560*1400 resolution? Personally, i think they are small. I can read it fine, but if i'm playing a couple of tables i want to just glance at it and see everything clearly. The fonts and the size used in abd mock up are better IMO.

[ADK]

First up i do really like the designs adk done, nice work on those

Unfortunately I can't take credit for those, those were designed by abd
If you could somehow change my username on here to be "ADK" that would be great (same as my 2+2).

Maybe we were thinking too much from a visual improvement side and not enough from a practical use side, that is something we can learn from.

This was also my immediate first thoughts when I saw the viewer.

plain text hand histories have been around for many years and we wanted to think a bit outside the box on a more visual way of displaying the action

This was the problem. It's a hand viewer. It's going to be mostly text.
For those reasons alone it should just be kept plain and simple so it is easy to read and quick to process.

There is absolutely no need to overcomplicate it and one of the main reasons I am assuming no one has changed the look of hand viewer in years.
ie. look at how good PT4's viewer looks (and more importantly how easy it is to process the hand history very quickly) and look how plain, simple and minimal it is - that's what you guys should be trying to achieve.

What i am trying to get a better feel for is digging deeper into what you guys are saying is terrible, is it everything, the colors, the text style and size, the cards too small, the chevron dividers, the showdown and which are the ones that clearly stand out as the biggest issue.

I read a complaint on the 2+2 HM2 thread today from a user who said he couldn't read/use the new HH viewer because he is color blind. I think that was a HUGE, huge oversight on the HM2 development/design team's part and probably summarizes the overall thought process behind the design of the viewer - sacrificing the practical usability of the viewer just to try and make it prettier / outside the box. It doesn't work.
IMO the colors are quite dull/miserable, it's very boring and looks like something from the 80's - Put it along side the PT4 viewer and tell me you don't feel the same.

Does removing the betting tiles and wrapping the text make a big difference, is the the key dislike here the betting tiles?

I can't believe you have to ask... YES!!! by about 1000% lol.
Names of players who are currently involved in the pot could stand out more, and stack sizes not so far to the right hand side.. I have to glance from one side all the way to other and back and forth.
But yes, that is already a huge improvement - it really does make the logical flow of it all much better and easier to process (but still nowhere near as good as the old HM2 viewer).

[dissection]

Does removing the betting tiles and wrapping the text make a big difference, is the the key dislike here the betting tiles?

Wohoooooou ! NOW WE ARE TALKING .. NOW WE ARE REALLY TALKING SIR !!!! This is clean and nice design. Not saying its best one, but definitely better than both old and new HEM2 HV !

HINT: WON = green, LOST = red ... SPLIT = maybe green ? or maybe white with black text ?

UPDATE: also make those lines sayin "X players xxpot" better to read ... brighter more like white ... also bigger font a bit (same as for cards as was many times mentioned here).

[dissection]

Hey and also consider fixing this:

handviewer.png

[abd]

I used Arial 14 font.

Yes! Remove betting tiles.
Little bit enlarge cards.
Flop\Turn\River\SD stripes is too bright, they distracted from the main information.

And I think it's not good for quick glance when displayed the same board cards on river, showdown and beside to the players. Thus several times show one and the same cards.

Sorry for my poor english. I hope you understand me.

[dissection]

I used Arial 14 font.
Flop\Turn\River\SD stripes is too bright, they distracted from the main information.

Hmmm, this is actually valid point. How about making them darker and make it lighter obv than background and little darker than those gray lines with cards ?

[morny]

Regarding the color blind issue we did design this hand viewer with the ability to swap in whatever deck you want, its not in there just yet but it was designed with that in mind and its something we will add, as mentioned this hand viewer update is still work in progress, as you can see from my mock the top and bottom sections are not designed yet, we held off on that because its tied to the new re-player work which will have the same export options. If you compare the old deck to this new deck i think you will agree the white on dark background look much better.

white font is definitely something we can do and actually was supposed to be in this version but looks like it was overlooked. We will try a bigger size font also and see what it looks like. As i said some sort of survey seems like a good idea and we can also share the new text only mock for opinions, with a big enough sample this information would be quite useful and revealing.

Anyway my question is if we did change the font to something more suitable and offer an option to switch to this text based version i mocked up above and below and had an option to make the card sizes configurable to 3 sizes, small, medium and large then would you guys still want the old HM1 hand viewer back or would this suffice.

The reason i ask is although we are planning to replicate the HM1 hand viewer it wont have the same options like export to forum format, click the player name to see the stats, hand notes, player notes, notecaddy notes etc and it feels a bit like a step back to introduce this rather than give you something pretty close but it still has all the extra functionality if needed.

For reference i have also included the light theme design as it currently looks vs the proposed text only look. Personally i am not a fan of the light theme but when it comes to colors opinions will vary quite considerably.