Our latest ni.com Improvements

[Maureen]

We launched a newly redesigned home page and navigation menu that reflect what our customers told us they need and want, and also build on new technology that can address future needs.

We have worked hard to put customer needs first, but we know there is still work to do. As we continue to evolve ni.com, we plan to improve the site so that it best serves how we support you as a valued NI customer.

We wanted to open the lines of communication to provide you with a direct feedback channel before the changes go live. If you have any thoughts about the new ni.com features, take a moment to add a comment below so we can share it with the ni.com Customer Experience team. Also, we encourage you to visit ni.com/changes to learn more about the changes. You can also share your thoughts about the new ni.com features through this form.

We appreciate hearing about your ni.com experience and how we can make improvements.

Regards,

Maureen Thormann

Sr. Digital Customer Experience Manager

[Maureen]

At NI, we are continually striving to make our website more usable for all our customers. Over the years we have developed an extremely large site with some great content but we regularly hear from many of our customers that they can’t navigate ni.com to find the information they need. 

Your feedback is extremely valuable and we would encourage you to continue to let us know as you see issues. Screen real estate is a  big issue and I will make sure to make our experience team is aware of it. We have toyed with some ideas, but were unable to get those into this launch. As we can address those, I will update this group. 

As far as the white space and large area in the header, we have several things to consider: 

1. Mobile. The new pages has been designed to support enhanced mobile browsing via tablets or mobile phones.  We are seeing more of our traffic come to ni.com via mobile devices.  This is following the global trend and we want to be able to support the needs of these customers.  

2. Globalization. Our site is available in 50+ countries. When we condense content on one line, we leave very little room for two important things: search and translations. Several of the languages we support are 25, 30, even 50% longer than English and we have to account for that need. 

3. Simplification.  We are working very hard to simplify our site per our customers requests and part of the way we are doing this is through consistency. We want our users to be able to anticipate what the site will look like /act like from page to page, so we want to have a very consistent experience for them. With that being said, we are already looking at ways we can keep the same experience, but potentially have different interactions of features (like the header staying and being able to roll out in this case).

Finally, I know we have released with some bugs that have been noted in this thread as well (like the enlarged text and sizing of the window). We have documented these and we need to address those. We are working through them as fast as we can.

[Albert.Geven]

Hi

Indeed the textsize does not hel to keep it small. The same text size as in the page and supoorting line height should already help. 
I'll wait and see. I use NI mainly on a laptop and indeed it seems a bit faster today.

[Munchuk]

Hi,

I like the new look, as always it will take some time to get use to the changes. The only thing that has come to my attention is that all of the text is justified hard up against the edge of my browser (chrome) (and therfore the edge of my screen) which makes it quite hard to read. there is a large white space to the right of this page, It would be nicer if this could be shared equaly acros the left and right and then the contect centred in the page.

[crossrulz]

Munchuk, shrink your window to be less than 1800 pixels wide and it looks a lot better.

[Munchuk]

Ahh ha,  Indeed it does, I have just noticed that if it is bigger that 1800, other things change, like the Yellow Kudos stars turn black and the tabs for Rich Text, HTML... as grey rather than blue.

It would be nice if it could look like this with a window size larger than 1800.

[PaulG.]

My issue here has always been font size and scaling of pages. Looks a little worse after this recent upgrade.

I used to zoom and be able to comfortably read the page without needing a scrollbar. Now I need the scrollbar to see the entire width of the page because I have to zoom one more time.

I thought there was a way to keep text properly scaled regardless of screen size? Some web pages seem to be able to do this and do it well.

[LiliMcDonald]

Hi everyone,

The issue with the maximized browser window losing all formatting on a widescreen monitor is a bug that we are working with Lithium to address. (example)

There are several other bugs we are working on addressing as well, including:

- Clicking on the new post link from the board view will scroll you to the bottom of the page (example)

- Quoted text appearing larger than normal

There also seems to be some issues when using mobile or when changing the zoom on the web browser. This is something NI will investigate further.

Also, I wanted to mention that while responsive design is cited as one of the reasons for the changes, we still have different desktop and mobile versions of the forums as they are hosted by Lithium. We are working on rolling out a responsive design for the community in the future.

Please continue to provide feedback and report any issues you may encounter. You can post feedback in the comment section of this blog post, or using this form.

Thank you,

[tst]

Do you not consider the fact that the header stays floating to be a bug? When I browse on my phone and request the desktop version, the header does disappear when scrolling down, indicating that's the intended behavior, but doesn't happen on FF, IE or Edge on my PC. Incidentally, the header pops back into view on the phone as soon as you scroll up a bit, which I would probably not like on the desktop with the current size of the header, because I regularly scroll up and would not want this huge header to pop into view until I get to the top of the page.

[Maureen]

We've heard your feedback loud and clear! We have released a non-sticky header for the forums and are working quickly to release the same for the community. We are still working on some of the bugs reported, as well as processing the feedback received. Please stay tuned for further updates.

Thank you,

Maureen Thormann

Sr. Digital Customer Experience Manager

[LiliMcDonald]

UPDATE

This issue is now fixed:

- Clicking on the new post link from the board view will scroll you to the bottom of the page (example)

[labman04]

Just today I've come acrosss a total of four example links that send me to a service unavailable page. 

I use the examples extensively to avoid re-inventing the wheel.  (especially when it seems like something that many people would have worked on at some point or another). 

When I try to navigate to these links:

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-36091

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-19943

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-7222

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-20473

I am sent to a page that reads:

Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

Reference #6.45a75b68.1453382152.279b009e

Is something going on with your example server? 

[LiliMcDonald]

Hi labman04 -- yes, the community is down right now but we are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. The pages affected would be any URLs that begin with decibel.ni.com.

I'll let you know when the issue is resolved.

Thanks,

Lili McDonald
Community Manager
National Instruments

[LiliMcDonald]

The user group community is now back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I also wanted to mention that these bugs on the forums are now resolved:
 
- Maximized browser window losing all formatting on a widescreen monitor
- Quoted text appearing larger than normal

Thank you,

Lili McDonald
Community Manager
National Instruments

[GerdW]

Hi,

we have a nice (and big) shopping cart symbol now. And it tells me all the time how many goods I stuffed into the cart.

But what is this:

1.

Yes, I'm in the LabVIEW forum and I don't want to shop at ni.com nor did I put anything into the cart. Fine so far.

2.

WTF? By going from LabVIEW forum into one of the discussion threads I stuffed 30 items into the cart? Why? When?

Ok, let's check the shopping cart:

Ok, you tell me there are 30 items in the cart. From an expired quote. From a quote of exactly 8 items? (And yes, the text is overlapping the exclamation sign.)

I guess I will do all my next shopping needs at NI directly by calling my local sales representative…

[GerdW]

Next hit:

I tried to color some text in a message: here.

Using the standard editor my try failed: the text didn't change it's color.

I had to switch to the HTML view and edit the HTML code "manually" to reach my goal.

I'm not an HTML expert, but why do I have to edit the span tag?

< font color="#FF0000" > < span style="font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; color: #ff0000;

Despite setting font color with the font tag I had to change the color in the span tag from #333333 to #ff0000 to have the text in red…

Even better: here the text coloring works fine without fiddling with HTML tags…

[LiliMcDonald]

Hi GerdW --

There have been some bugs involving the cart badge that the team is working on resolving. I have passed your particular use case along for further investigation.

As for the red font color, I was unable to reproduce this. However, I did check the HTML of your post and saw some things there that shouldn't be such as padding-left and span style. Whereas, the HTML for red font is typically: <font color="#FF0000">text color</font>

Is it possible you had copied/pasted text from elsewhere?

Thanks,

Lili