Codecademy - how not to do a redesign
michalbures.comSome thoughts about the recent redesign of Codecademy's courses page I'm the cofounder of Codecademy. Unfortunately, there aren't comments allowed on the author's blog so I'll comment here (I'm emailing him as well so hopefully my comment gets posted to his blog). We've received a lot of feedback on our initial courses page redesign since a soft launch on Saturday. We're working on making it easier for our users to find what's important to them and to discover interesting courses among those available on Codecademy. I'd love to hear everyone else's feedback - we've been making incremental changes since the launch of the redesign (we work all the time) and we won't stop until it's incredibly easy to find the right courses. As the author mentions, we're starting with gradual changes. Thanks for your patience. Since you asked: When using the product, I see: "That's correct! Next Exercise" often. "Next Exercise" should probably look more like a button. It is not obvious that it is clickable, especially to the 6% of males who are color blind. Thanks for this. Added it as an issue in GitHub and we'll start working on it soon! It looks like the downvote police are out in full force - but I'm not backing down. The redesign is strong. The only concern I have is how the current layout will grow with the addition of more courses. Michal - why not permit some comments on your blog so we can bring the discussion to you? You made some strong statements that deserve a rebuttal. The layout was actually designed to facilitate the addition of more courses - we'll iterate based on feedback but also on our longer-term vision. Thanks again, calydon. I was doing each lesson weekly until I got too busy, and your site has since emailed me 3 times saying I should start my Code Year and presents me with info for week 1. I finished week 1 the day you launched, it doesn't seem to be checking my progress telling me to pick up where I left off. FTA> "You could say it isn't such a big deal. But if they don't care about this what else they don't care about? Quality of the courses? User experience?" This entire line of thinking really bugs the ever-loving crap out of me. Slamming the entire service based on a few misaligned elements? Pedantic much? Edit* I'd almost argue that the alignment was by design. Having the "start here" lined up with the middle bar implies that you would "start" by taking some action on that bar, since most of us read left to right. In this case, a bad cue. By breaking up that line, you cease going right and look down instead. I also find the tone of that post aggressive and a majority of the criticism unfounded. I agree with the criticism about lack of visual hierarchy. Feel as if the whole page doesn't really take the user's goals into account as much as it should. I'll try to send a detailed e-mail about my thoughts as soon as I get a free minute. Really appreciate that, dashN9ne. Looking forward to reading it as we fix things up. He's not slamming the entire service, he's slamming the redesign, and rightly so. The entire purpose of the site is to teach - and the changes to the design have obfuscated what course you're supposed to take next. The design is objectively not working as well as it could. We've heard comments from both sides of the table and we're working as fast as possible to create something that's easy to use for all of our users. Thanks for bearing with us. Couldn't agree more. As someone's who is using Codecademy to learn, I find myself hunting around for the way I got to that useful page with the week-by-week lessons all spelled out in a nice list. Unfortunately I end up guessing URLs until I get it right, as it seems there's no easy way to get there via the actual interface. Thanks, Karunamon. We most definitely do care about what's going on the site and that's why we're dedicating so much of our time and attention to making sure the user experience reflects that and is easy for users. I'd love to hear any other feedback you have. Feel free to email us. I think it looks great. Like the OP said, "The thing is that each individual part of the page is actually great." Each part is very clear, and important functions are easy to find. Keep up the good work and iterate! Taking a stand on something publicly takes courage so I don't want to be too dismissive, but respectfully, Michal, I disagree. I'm taking the Javascript courses and I barely noticed the page had been redesigned. (That's good design!) I had no trouble finding and walking right into what I wanted. The layout is clear, logical and looks good. The 'start here' tag is probably superfluous because it isn't needed. It's obvious where you should start, depending on what you're after. I immediately got that the HTML course material had been added, but really it seemed like not much more had changed. I think overall, your article was bad advice. The slight misalignment of a few elements should be corrected, but actually, why bother - NO ONE but someone with a bone to pick would notice something so trivial. Build, measure, learn - don't obsess over UI pedantry. Michal - I looked at your proposed redesign and found it cluttered, hard to read, and confusing.
Codecademy - here's a good example of when to ignore your vocal users. Thanks for your comments, calydon. I'm the cofounder of Codecademy - would love to hear your feedback via email (and on HN). For someone very vocal and direct about one specific designer's work, there seems to be a very obvious lack of work, a portfolio or a link to a Dribbble profile on his own site. As a designer myself, I'm always down for critiques and feedback (especially when it's a tough pill to swallow — this is what keeps me improving), but Michal, your post was overly critical and not constructive in any way. You mentioned your youth and ambition — being a designer is all about communication, whether in creating a product for your users, in pitching clients, in explaining functionality to an engineer, etc., and in my opinion, this is not the way to communicate with someone regarding their work, designer or not. Best of luck in learning this. Edit: here's an example of someone doing something similar in the right way: http://kyrobeshay.com. If the criticism has merit, the lack of a Dribbble profile (of all things) should not be used as a shield against critiques. I say that as a huge Dan Cederholm fan. To CodeAcademy's credit, they're doing a great job welcoming and acknowledging feedback without making any specific promises. The web is full to bursting with design critiques, but the ones that build a name for their authors always seem to have an air of "how the fuck did you screw this up!?" While these critiques are annoyingly divorced from workplace politics and not necessarily a great way to deal with clients, coworkers, or bosses, us huddled masses love a good controversy. Frankly, that's why I'm reading this thread - I love seeing someone assert their opinion with an argument stronger than "looks gross". And while this author's particular argument may be presented a bit thin, the underlying principles are sound. Every worthwhile engineer I've ever worked with appreciates concise, believable, REAL insight into why some designs work and some designs don't. Worthwhile engineers like learning things. Keep your confidence up, MichalBures. Keep writing. You're right, that's just what the Internet needs is another sensationalized and under-credentialed blogger. Great to see zds in here actively addressing comments. I was really surprised to find the site redesigned after not having picked it up in about a week (been to busy to walk through the rest of my missing tutorials). I have to agree with the sentiment currently, the redesign throws way too much in your face all at once and I can only imagine for a beginner that you would easily be pushed away from the site if it was your first time trying to get into it. For me, I would like to be asked up front which path I would like to take: Are you looking at applications or are you looking at web apps? After that only show me the lessons that relate to that path and pull back the rest of the site design to be as minimalist as possible. What would also be great is if I didn't have to bring up another tab just to look at the QA section when I get stuck trying to implement a solution. Finally, would love if the code panels were actually a bit bigger so that when you have a multi-line program you could view all of it at once. I don't know what is the most used resolution when viewing the site but I imagine you do have room to make the console bigger regardless. Love the product and I am definitely going to keep using it regardless of the design. Thanks, zdgman. Really appreciate the in-depth feedback here - it gives us a lot to go on for the future. We're going to simplify things for beginners and existing users. Many users have chosen their path (Code Year, for instance) so they're seeing different screens than the majority of HN users (depending on their use case). We'll start to show people relevant courses to them over time too. We're actually in the middle of changing some of the editor features to do what you mention and also to fix QA. Thanks again for your feedback. I'm here to answer questions (and you can reach us via email). Glad to hear it zds. Would be nice if you guys published a blog post in terms of where your road map was going. I know you all are probably buried under it in terms of work but even giving people a little bit of detail helps? Seems like you need a community manager to get the word out / gauge the performance for you guys:) I don't care much for alignment. I think it's nit picking for the most part. The simple list format you had before was much easier to understand than the new design. The new design does look prettier at first glance though, but it just becomes frustrating once I try to actually use it. It's very unclear which course I should take first. I get no sense of prerequisites. Different types of activities (ie. projects vs lessons) are mixed together. Thanks, valhallarecords. We're working on implementing a mix of the two designs. As it seems you've noticed, we've worked on pulling together "tracks" which are the lists from the former design along with new course listings. We're iterating based on a lot of this feedback. The author is really making the most of this. Sure, Its not the greatest redesign I've ever seen, but is it the worst? No. far from it. And his own redesign is not exactly an earth shattering improvement - some relatively minor tweaks (which work at this resolution well, but perhaps not others) only. I think there's a lot of truth in the criticisms but is the harsh tone really needed? Seems to me as though they're trying out small design changes, listening to feedback (as evidenced in this page) and improving things as they go along. Sounds like a good recipe to me. Thanks, tagawa. We're taking all the feedback here and making changes (some now, in fact!). The grammar of this post really detracts from the arguments. Here's my follow-up post http://michalbures.com/blog/follow-up-on-the-codecademy-post... Also I'd like to write it here too that I really appreciate and thank you for all the constructive comments. "Codecademy is about learning and teaching so something along the lines of What do you want to learn? would be more appropriate here." you mean exactly what Treehouse asks? Preface: I'm an interface designer with a background in human-computer interaction. I come from a family of teachers, so the processes of learning and teaching lessons is nothing new to me. The OP isn't wrong. This design has some major flaws, especially considering it's launch point for academic lessons. This design tries to provide many affordances through a simple layout and language, which unfortunately is one of it's core weaknesses. As a designer, I fully support providing users with affordances to help guide them through the navigation and (initial) experiences they have with a product. The design of user affordances can be very hard to scale in covering a swath of new experiences, specifically those for learning and teaching new lessons (languages, projects, etc). This is especially true in Codecademy's case. With teaching and learning a lesson, it's a journey of an experience with a story or narrative that we all generally share/follow. Knowing this and from experience the design of a learning and teaching experience is one that should be guided through the means of using clean and intuitive interactions, layouts, straightforward language, limited and specific color choices, clear and understandable iconography and most important the display of relevant and necessary information. The design of this page unfortunately doesn't follow much of what I've generally just stated. It lacks focus partially due to the language, the use of 5+ colors, general layout, ambiguous iconography, and the lack of sensibly presented information hierarchy and relevancy. You don't know which container to start with, and whether or not the content in one is relevant or has an impact on the other. It all starts with the left container and the yellow box stating 'Start Here!->'. If you start there and try to follow along you can either end up in the right column or continue further down the left column. This is where the navigation and understanding of this page falls apart. Path of the Right Container: If you go to the right container you are presented with a list of projects and lessons that can filtered in two different ways: Above the list is filtering by language/platform/all and to the immediate right of the list is filtering by lessons/games/misc/all as well as a search field. There too much filtering and currently unnecessary search field for a contained design and growing list of courses (currently at a total of 24). Better inline segmented of of the list (i.e. segment games from courses from misc as opposed to random ordering). There are plenty of other issues but let's continue on. Path of the left container: Continuing down the path of the left container your asked the only question of the page "Hello! What can we help you build?" Ideally I'd imagine this relates to a user finding and picking a project game or lesson in the right container. But, immediately below the question there is an instructional statement to 'Pick a track to start learning" where a user can select one of two answers 'Applications' or 'Websites'. If a user then clicks one they are taken away to a different page with out any feed forward affordance via language or visual queue at all. This makes you question what's the point of the right container with all those options if I'm going to be taken to a different page. Continuing on, just below these 'track' options is another section titled 'Up Next', which contains a course title and button to 'Continue course' that I've partially completed. Because it's titled 'Up Next' its misleading and now seems arbitrarily placed on the page with no connection to the content above or in the right container. General conclusion: Between the issues with language, layout, information hierarchy, relevancy and more, it seems like this design wasn't fully thought through or tested enough. As a designer who cares, this is troubling for a site offering an academic service with potential to charge its users. Even more so because I hope these same issues don't care over to other pages. It is kinda confusing. Agree with bad alignments but more importantly there are just to many options that basically do the same thing. I find this type of page 1000x more useful ( the profile page as well), http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/javascript Several nice pages makes the cluttered http://www.codecademy.com/courses even more strange, which fails this first metric of UI, KISS. Thanks for pointing out what you do like - we're working on placing more emphasis on tracks. To be more specific. This page http://www.codecademy.com/courses, shows no hierarchy on where I am in the course, I think this is horrible UX. Compare that to this, http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/javascript, where I know exactly where I am in the process. I absolutely agree, new design is absolutely terrible. Hard to use and understand where the last lesson I left off at. I'll add that I gave up on Codeacademy a few weeks back because every time I visited the site from my email, it had a new design/format on the courses page. I got bored of figuring it out again each time, and the fact my Facebook Connect login never seemed to keep my progress from last time. It's a hard situation, because they clearly are improving the site and adding features to the courses (tracks etc.) that are welcome - perhaps CodeAcademy need to work on communicating what has changed to the users. For example, when I signed up it was really just one exercise after another, now it has tracks/courses/games/lessons. Maybe it is just a wording problem? Would love to hear your feedback - this is the first major redesign we've done of the Courses page and not much has changed before now. We'd love to take your thoughts into consideration as we redesign it. We'll also do a better job of fixing wording and explaining what's going on. Thanks again. Thanks for your feedback, ramatgan. I'm the co-founder of Codecademy. I'd love your feedback - can you email us? dick You're right, the redesign looks shoddy and inconsistent with modern layout conventions. Truth be told, they probably didn't hire a designer to do the work. We have a designer on staff (as another commenter mentions, the excellent Allison House - http://allisonhou.se). Design is a very big priority for us and this redesign is the first of many we'll make - it's an incremental process and we're focused on improving our designs until they're just right. I hope you'll bear with us as we fix this one. I understand that the post about your site ambushed you out of nowhere and you were immediately compelled to shift into damage control by flooding the thread about how hard you were working on your design problem and all the other lip service the community demands. It's an unexpected pain and I sympathize with anyone who has to go through it. However, shifting blame to one of your employees in an effort to cover your own ass for burping a lemon signals poor judgement and a lack of maturity on your part. To silence the critic, all you had to do was acknowledge the problem, allude to being "in development" and thank the over-eager Michal for pointing it out. Instead, you made it worse by exposing internals for a problem you should've taken responsibility for alone. Probably at the price of their reputation. Your job today is to seek them out and make a personal apology. Had it been a bug in the code, I highly doubt you would've named the entire dev team in a thread and pointed out the party responsible. They actually have a really awesome designer, http://allisonhou.se/, who is the lead designer there. I personally love the redesign. Thanks for your support, twog. No, they actually do not. The visual design is poor enough, not to mention the actual code implementation but the interface itself is even more disjointed and incoherent, using a varied mix of metaphorical elements on the view that have no implied structure, hierarchy or continuity. It's as if each part of the view was designed in isolation without regard for the others. That turkey wasn't ready to come out of the oven. I'd love to hear your feedback a bit more in-depth, jsavimbi - as mentioned, we do indeed have an in-house designer and design is a big priority for us. We'd love to hear what you think we can do better. Feel free to email us - contact (at) codecademy (dot) com. I'll read every email. > That turkey wasn't ready to come out of the oven. Like development, design works best by iteration. The overall concept isn't bad per se, the implementation looks to be haphazard and needs style, tone, ease of use and continuity. > what you think we can do better Iterate, iterate, iterate. Jsavimbi - without specific examples of what you're talking about, I call trolling. http://michalbures.com/blog/codecademy-how-not-to-do-a-redes... Michal did a sufficient job of providing examples right there, although I'd caution that very ambitious young man, programmer and designer not to use such an aggressive approach while still an SFSU student, photographer and soon to be entrepreneur (wtf does that mean?). I call not trolling simply because I agree with the premise that the redesign is half-baked. For me, the site design is a small matter after the jarringly cacophonous name.