Deployment of the new Deepchem Website

#1

Hello everyone. We hope to deploy the new website by the end of this week. We would like to know if there’s any feedback that we can work with, or improve something.

The link to the website demo can be found here.

Any feedback would be highly appreciated! Thank you!

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#2

This is the third time I’ve pointed out that all the animation makes the site unusable for many people. Each time I’m assured it will be fixed, but nothing has changed.

This site is literally unusable for many people. Simply looking at it for a few seconds is a painful experience for me.

It violates basic, essential principles of usability and accessibility. You should not even think about deploying it in this state.

#3

We are very sorry to hear this. We have actually tried to work on the issues raised by you. The following changes were made to solve the said issue:

  1. We have slowed down animation speed.
  2. We have introduced a toggle on the top right page, a pause button to halt all animations. Maybe you missed it. We’ll try to make it more prominent.
    Additionally, we are working on making the toggle setting persistent using browser cookies.

We’ll be happy to listen to any more suggestion you might have for us to solve the problem.

#4

Neither of those changes does anything to address the problem. We discussed this issue on a call a few weeks ago and we agreed to a plan of action. These are the changes we all agreed on.

  1. The banner should be static, not animated.
  2. The typing effect should be removed.
  3. The list of organizations should only scroll when the user clicks an arrow, not spontaneously.
#5

For 1 and 2, we’ve gotten subsequent feedback after the call from a few other folks that they strongly prefer animation to a purely static banner. We’re trying to balance the different feedback and definitely appreciate your input as we figure out a good path. Perhaps one way we could do this is to flip the button behavior and have static default (say with the atoms/typing frozen in place) and have a green button to start animation? This would enable us to address the accessibility concerns hopefully, but also keep animation for those who benefit.

#6

Do they prefer it because it’s more functional in any way, or do they just think it looks cooler?

#7

I think the main challenge is that we’re currently losing a lot of students and newcomers on our “funnel,” where they lose interest after seeing a functional but a bit old-fashioned site. A lot of people never even make it to our tutorials since the github directory confuses them for example. A slightly flashier site with a modern look and rendered tutorials could help convert more students into users/developers (or so we hope).

@ScienceStanley might have some good input here since he works with a lot of students and hears their feedback.

#8

Here are some articles discussing different types of motion sensitivities. They describe why this is a critical usability issue for many people.

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#9

Hello @peastman ,
Sorry for the inconvenience you had to face regarding the animations. We understand why it is such a critical usability issue for many people. Keeping this and your feedback in mind, we have implemented the following changes

  1. The banner, by default, is now static and does not have any moving parts.
  2. Just like the bouncing atoms animation, the typing effect is also turned off by default.
  3. The list of organisations do not scroll spontaneously by default, and move only when the user clicks the arrows.
  4. The animations, however, still exist, and can be turned on with the help of a play/pause button if the user wants so. I’d like to restate that the animations are off by default, and will only be turned on, if the user explicitly presses the play/pause button.

I hope that this addresses your concerns regarding the animations on the website.
The website demo with all of these changes implemented can be found here

We’d be happy to listen to any other feedback you might have for us.

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#10

That’s much much better. Thank you!

2 Likes
#11

We are all set now to turn on the new website. (All PRs merged in, and I can activate the build on github pages). I propose turning on the new website this Wednesday since it looks like there is no additional feedback. We will retain the ability to revert to the old website even after turning on the new website in case there are any unforeseen issues

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#12

We have just activated the new website. Please give it a try at www.deepchem.io! (You may need to refresh and clear your cache). We still have the ability to revert to the old-website if desired so please feel free to continue to offer feedback on this thread

#13

I found a very minor bug. Load the site, scroll down to the list of companies and universities, and click the right arrow. It scrolls to the left instead. It only happens the first time. After that, it scrolls to the right as expected. If instead your first click is on the left arrow, it rapidly scrolls through a bunch of logos, then ends up on a blank space.

#14

A couple other minor notes:

  • On the “From Developer’s Desk” section, can you add my name so it’s clear who the quote is from?
  • On the “What is DeepChem?” section, can you replace TensorFlow/Keras with Pytorch? Since we’re focusing on pytorch probably makes sense to highlight torch rather than tf/keras
#15

Hello @peastman,
We recreated the bug that you mentioned, and have noted its existence. We will surely fix the same in the upcoming versions. Thank you for pointing it out!

#16

Hello @bharath,
We have made the listed changes above. You can view the same at https://deepchem.io/about. Thank you for the improvements!