> We have a lot of long-time users of the site, and we know that any major changes will cause them to have to relearn where things are and how to accomplish the things they already know how to do on v1. This kind of major change can be very annoying, so we’re working hard to make sure you only need to relearn things once.
Criticism by long-term members is not purely a matter of confusion. I highly dislike the change from a "tabular" and highly text-based design to the image centric infinite-scroll one we got now. Showing cover images of random unknown music makes no sense in my opinion, there is nothing to recognise and music does not show in images. The information density has been drastically reduced. Things are reduced to icons and everywhere there are transitions.
If archive.org is trying to change its audience (and contributors) then it might be a step into the right direction, but for me, the new design is a step in the wrong one.
There definitely are discovery problems but I don't see how the new design helps. It reminds me more of a random modern 10 second attention span site than a well thought out interface to a vast archive.
I stumbled onto the new design about a month ago. I had mixed reactions to it, one side of which was like yours: "Oh no, they're going to ruin it."
But then I found these amazing treasures that were so much better than what I was looking for [0].
The Internet Archive is so priceless, so special, and so impossibly good, that I have to trust the people who make it.
As long as they are "focused on how the site looks," there is nothing they could do to ruin it. Yes, the changes are pointless for someone who was already happy with it. But if they are able to bring more attention and support this way, then more power to them. Their #1 job is to keep it alive, and I'm sure this is motivated with that in mind.
As someone who likes to share data sets via IA, their hiding of the plain list of originally uploaded files behind a non-colored link that only gets highlighted on mouse over made me furious many times. I don't want to have to combine a simple "download my data there" with "then move the mouse there and see how it is actually a link and oh by the way the actual files I meant to link you to are available if you click that".
I totally understand their motivation and I think it is great to present the potentially popular parts of the archives to the public in an "experience". But it worsened my user experience and motivation as a contributor(!).
I really feel like the new design does a much better job for random browsing and discovery. I've come across stuff I never would have otherwise just scrolling around.
I think it does a bit better if you know the exact name of what you're looking for. I get a much better idea of how many duplicates or variants of an item are in the collection now.
However, I think it does a much worse job navigating to finding things you already know are there, but maybe don't quite know the name of. It's almost impossible to navigate to something if you just have partial knowledge of it, or generally know where it is in the archive but don't have specifics. I find this super frustrating.
I love archive.org more than just about anything else on the internet, and I'm willing to be patient with the new design as they flesh out the ideas. If they can fix the navigation issue I'd be relatively happy.
I think what archive.org needs more than this redesign is an organizational meta-layer on-top of the archive where volunteer "curators" can organize content spread all over the archive (or siloed under some random collection somewhere) into more familiar, library-like organizational structure.
For example, I like old computing magazines. However, archive.org doesn't have a "magazines" top-level hierarchy. If you search for "magazines" over on the right side-bar there's a "Magazine Rack" Collection, but it's not prominently places. And then the layer under that is a mishmash of "Collections" that include magazine genres, individual titles, etc. but no clear "computer magazine" collection. I poked around for a few minutes and still didn't find the collection for old computing magazines.
So I did another search for "computer magazines" and finally there's a collection of "Computer Magazine Archives".
However, this is probably incomplete, there's bound to be other magazines that are not part of this collection.
It'd be much easier if I could go
Texts/Magazines/Computers
and everything would be there by title, maybe set a filter for "English" or something and be off reading
But right now it's takes a dozen navigation clicks and a few searches to find the same, once you find a collection you end up bookmarking it in your browser because you'll probably forget the magic combination of searches and clicks that got you here.
It's tough though, they're doing an immense job with relatively few resources to organize everything. So I can live with some of the disorganization. It's still an amazing treasure trove.
I'm not sure where specifically you are referring to, but you can click on the "list view" under collections to remove the pictures and make it textual.
And that table view is a great addition! But still, everything focuses on graphics by default.
I meant things like https://archive.org/details/texts where random, weird icons are displayed that say very few things about their collections while using up quite a lot of space and visual attention.
Criticism by long-term members is not purely a matter of confusion. I highly dislike the change from a "tabular" and highly text-based design to the image centric infinite-scroll one we got now. Showing cover images of random unknown music makes no sense in my opinion, there is nothing to recognise and music does not show in images. The information density has been drastically reduced. Things are reduced to icons and everywhere there are transitions.
If archive.org is trying to change its audience (and contributors) then it might be a step into the right direction, but for me, the new design is a step in the wrong one.
There definitely are discovery problems but I don't see how the new design helps. It reminds me more of a random modern 10 second attention span site than a well thought out interface to a vast archive.