This new UI is awful

[gege hates anime]

just make old.backpack.tf once you finish the new site.

 

backpack is simple to use site that has made impact on trading by being that simple and efficient. this new modern thing just seems wack and not that fun to use.

 

we all are used to the old one sure, but it being new doesnt mean its good. the whole design is not pleasant to look at for me at all.

 

as many pointed out looks like a scam gambling site. if you double down and get tmartn to make an ad for new bp ill use it 

[Vrakos Anthrakir]

Wondering, what does this achieve over the current/old version?

[Colonel Johnson]

Site devs be like: "We forgot to pay the electricity bill".

[Vincentius]

A few things being missed in the new design

 

 

 

An updated look of this would be appreciated (click by class to to reduce lag so someone is not just shown everything at once, makes it easier so someone does not need to google names for a specific hat with what it currently looks like) 

Same goes with the effects, and updated version but sorted by year/generation to reduce lag on opening the page. 

- reason for these is that the new scroll tabs are far less efficient than the old design and is not user friendly.

 

Both of these are critical given that most traders or people who buy hats are not gonna go only through classifieds but also through histories.

Also basing the look off gambling sites is not a great look for a trading website imo, looks identical to blaze and a ton of cs gambling sites.

 

 

A few other things noticed, a lot of the buttons on searches are very picky on where you click or it wont register, might be good to make it so that anywhere in the button is clickable. (mostly within searches and not the main sidebar)

All suggestions are put as normal items in the profile instead of being specific on what it was, makes it hard to know what each suggestion is.

Timeline of the inventory needs a way to select value/item amount like it does currently since it currently overlaps and makes it hard to read specific times, also would be nice to be able to click it to go to the selected backpack history for convenience. 

Also there is an increase ram usage on the new site which is odd, might be something to look into, went from about 130mb to load the site to about 220mb, slight but worth mentioning.

 

Something todo with classifieds, a way to sort specific values like you can currently would be very nice, also preferably an option for keys/metal since always having to put in 270000 refined or something was a pain to keep track of.

Also if possible a way to sort the classifieds in "low to high" would be nice for buying as well since that's always nice to have the ability to do.

 

Also to do with the market pricelist, the ability to sort specific items as the normal classifies can with collectors/unusuals/stranges and possibly wears on weapons or type of weapons (rl/gl/minigun etc) would be a nice addition.

 

This was just based on a quick 10 minute look of the site, I can probably find some more but that will come after work.

[093]

i'm not the biggest fan of the new design but i'm really surprised at some of the ridiculous hate comments in here, it's nowhere near as bad as some people are implying

 

it needs some work on functionality and optimisation for sure, hopefully the bptf team can make the necessary changes and it'll eventually turn out to be a nice and much-needed overhaul

[roygbiv]

the drop down menu is bad. there is so much qualities and attributes items have now compared to 10 years ago. The extend search of 30 instead of 10 is much better, could even be like 50 or 100 please. 10 is disgustingly low currently.

 

The api wont sort how my backpack appears in tf2. This also has a disgusting 50 items per page when my backpack is 2300 items

 

Can it fix stuff like searching mulitlcass item or skins. the classified search and general search seems to be better.

[fisk]

2 hours ago, LstratosHF said:

Having to pick effects from a drop down menu, and then unpick them is also roughly 1 million times worse than the current classified search.

I'm not sure in what way it's worse? Can you explain in more detail? The old approach is opening a modal, then to an accordion with an unorganised list of buttons since we never added a text filter, selecting what you need and then closing it again.

 

2 hours ago, gege hates anime said:

just make old.backpack.tf once you finish the new site.

We already accounted for it.

 

2 hours ago, Vincentius said:

A few things being missed in the new design

 

 

 

An updated look of this would be appreciated (click by class to to reduce lag so someone is not just shown everything at once, makes it easier so someone does not need to google names for a specific hat with what it currently looks like) 

Same goes with the effects, and updated version but sorted by year/generation to reduce lag on opening the page. 

- reason for these is that the new scroll tabs are far less efficient than the old design and is not user friendly.

 

Both of these are critical given that most traders or people who buy hats are not gonna go only through classifieds but also through histories.

Also basing the look off gambling sites is not a great look for a trading website imo, looks identical to blaze and a ton of cs gambling sites.

 

 

A few other things noticed, a lot of the buttons on searches are very picky on where you click or it wont register, might be good to make it so that anywhere in the button is clickable. (mostly within searches and not the main sidebar)

All suggestions are put as normal items in the profile instead of being specific on what it was, makes it hard to know what each suggestion is.

Timeline of the inventory needs a way to select value/item amount like it does currently since it currently overlaps and makes it hard to read specific times, also would be nice to be able to click it to go to the selected backpack history for convenience. 

Also there is an increase ram usage on the new site which is odd, might be something to look into, went from about 130mb to load the site to about 220mb, slight but worth mentioning.

 

Something todo with classifieds, a way to sort specific values like you can currently would be very nice, also preferably an option for keys/metal since always having to put in 270000 refined or something was a pain to keep track of.

Also if possible a way to sort the classifieds in "low to high" would be nice for buying as well since that's always nice to have the ability to do.

 

Also to do with the market pricelist, the ability to sort specific items as the normal classifies can with collectors/unusuals/stranges and possibly wears on weapons or type of weapons (rl/gl/minigun etc) would be a nice addition.

 

This was just based on a quick 10 minute look of the site, I can probably find some more but that will come after work.

On the subject of pricelists, the new pricelist offers the filtering you need to replicate the Unusuals/Effects pricelists, and even comes with item counters. So I'm stuck deciding what should be done with the Unusuals/Effects pricelists, as they seem to be a redundancy. They are quite historic, what with them existing as the idea of a spreadsheet was too limiting being just a quality-to-item matrix, and the pricegrid was not one of my favourite features.

 

It seems at this point the reason to keep these pages in is for SEO reasons, because as far as being used as an actual pricelist goes, it seems redundant. That said, the Unusuals pricelist has been sort of replaced with the variants pages (for hats, this will basically be a few straggler qualities and the rest being Unusuals you can sort). I'm also tempted to add effects pages in the same manner since these can be complemented with statistics in the same way the variants pages do.

 

If what you're looking for is a way to filter items by class easier, I'd like to work more on the almanac.

 

I've seen 'looks like a gambling site' mentioned a few times. I don't know. To me, it seems like stigma. I'm very much considering offering a light/dark mode switch after reorganising the styles, and I am keen to diverge from the current beta theme to keep it a little closer to the older style.

 

The market pricelist I never really knew what to do with. The one available on the new UI is basically equivalent with the old one. The reason it is so barebones is that we'd need to translate the item name into an item the site recognises in order to show more information. We have a way to find a market price for an item, just not the other way around. It's possible, just requires a little work.

 

A few of the other things you mentioned (e.g. unsure click regions on things) is on my radar.

 

20 minutes ago, roygbiv said:

the drop down menu is bad.

which?

[mechabubba]

Registered an account to reply to this.

For some constructive criticism;

- The actual UI is really fuckin chunky. Lots of padding on everything where it doesn't necessarily need it. I'd like to see some of these elements slimmed down, even if just by a tiny bit.

  - For some examples, the top bar does not need to be as tall as it is. Many elements in the backpack viewer take up a lot of padding, particularly the grey horizontal menu under my icon and name.

  - In general, a lot of valuable space is lost to this unnecessary padding. Why does the "latest changes" box in the new bp.tf only have 6 items, when the old one had 20?
- The key, ref, and MVM ticket price boxes are massive and take up most of the top half of the home screen. I like to look at the promoted listings and latest forum threads for interesting stuff, so this should move.

- New item sorting is kinda bad, not gonna lie.

  - I should be able to view a backpack via page. I know the feedback FAQ goes against this, but this includes empty inventory slots being displayed. A ton of people organize their backpacks based on this, including cached backpacks that won't be able to adapt to the new layout.

  - Even if this [my second comment on the above point] doesn't become the case, I like old bp.tf's almost "infinite scroll" thing with the backpack pages (even if I just sort by value most of the time); the buttons on a users backpack page are just an annoyance more than anything.

  - Also, the "rarity" sort for a backpacks expanded view should say "value" instead.

 

Some nitpicky stuff...

- Strange parts in an item hover box should be listed vertically instead of horizontally.

- image-rendering: crisp-edges for item images is stupid. It looks terrible. Here's what happens when I set it to auto !important;

(you may need to zoom in but its less grainy. its particularly apparent w/ the rocket launcher)

Maybe its an opinion, but that's a drastic improvement. Could just be me though.

- Seeing some HTML entities not being correctly displayed.

- I can't differentiate between prof, spec, and basic ks items based on the circle icon.

  - The spell icons (that are displayed on the item icon) should be colored based on the color of the spell. This is already the case in the item hover box.

 

Some positive stuff...

- I like the item variants section.

 

All in all, I still prefer the old site. Not only is it easier to navigate but its got soul. But I think with some improvements there could be something good here. To clarify; I'm not a huge trader, simply a collector, so maybe I don't have much of a say in this. I mostly browse the site out of boredom. Regardless, I hope my criticisms are valuable. Thanks for your efforts, fisk.

 

Edit: discord.gg/backpacktf is an invalid link. Also repeated a few things people posted earlier, my b.

[roygbiv]

when i use classified search the drop down unusual menu shows me 5 effects that i can search a certain one which is nice.(the image is also really small here) Before i could see every single effect on one page.

 

I cant seem to see what fabs or killstreak kit effects are.

[LstratosHF]

42 minutes ago, fisk said:

I'm not sure in what way it's worse? Can you explain in more detail? The old approach is opening a modal, then to an accordion with an unorganised list of buttons since we never added a text filter, selecting what you need and then closing it again.

 

 

With the old layout you can remove an effect from a search in one click, now you have to search or scroll through a list to do the same. 

[elca]

From what I can tell there's no way to search for low craft numbers in the new UI. I'm also not sure if there's a way to search for all listings with a specific level but I could just be dumb.

Also, it just makes more sense to have backpack views as they would in game like the old design, instead of being forced to sort by something.

[stoutman245]

This is just a personal opinion of mine (and one I might add from someone who has zip to do with TF2 anymore) but I've always been one to loathe any "forced" User Interface update be it on Windows, my phone, Steam, a website, or even a favorite video game. Unrelated, but look at the recent HUD overhaul that Rainbow Six Siege got for example, it's repulsive! Moreover, I will always applaud any entity for not conforming to modern, minimalist? styles as this new backpack.tf interface would suggest. With that being said, I actually enjoy the overall appearance of the current beta build. Nothing is in-your-face or annoying to look at (save the font choice). Maneuverability around the site is more or less the same but with the new graphical changes, can slightly complicates things. The technical/coding side of things is beyond my comprehension so I won't comment there. Again, I don't really participate with anything Team Fortress 2 related nowadays but I still enjoy checking on the economy from time to time.

 

I do wonder about the possibility of having a URL along the lines of old.backpack.tf or backpack.tf/classic allowing users to view a legacy version of the site once the new redesign rolls out in full. Reddit has this feature and I imagine that bp.tf could too provided it wasn't a huge liability? I didn't see anyone else post this as a suggestion but it seems to be the fairest way to satisfy everyone if that matters.

[🔥Master Throne Crimson🔥]

4 hours ago, Vincentius said:

not anymore since I don't stalk everything like y'all seem to do with me, with the staff seemingly changing ever week I don't know if it was Billy this or Frank that.

 

Either way the site is beyond poorly designed for even a beta, even computer science students back in hs could do better

There's actually a huge lack of new staff since the old one is soooooo inactive

[🔥Master Throne Crimson🔥]

4 hours ago, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee said:

yeah but it shouldnt be that high for a simple webpage

Idk, doesn't seem to affect actual performance and just seems to be numbers so

[Arbiter]

It feels more like a Shady Crypto trading site than what it used to be like. New Redesign just feels worse. More menus to navigate for seemingly no reason on top of more scrolling to look for info. The old ui's main page had a little bit of everything right there to see. Prices of main currencies, promoted listing, news and threads, and even some of the latest changes without even having to scroll. New ui you have to scroll to even see the latest changes, and the size of everything just makes massive bloat. Do the graphs of the main currencies need to be that large? The latest changes also seem to look needlessly wide. 

 

The worst of the changes by far is the profile imo. The new one just loves menus to things, the new profile ui feels ugly, and the timeline is even uglier. Friends are in their own menu for some reason, i guess to make room for the needlessly massive logs? And i believe it's been said before but the new sorting of the backpack is yucky, although i believe it's tied to the whole empty space thing explained on the changes. I'm half inclined to not leave much feedback because i'll just be told im 'used to the old ui' but i think it's that the old ui felt fine, and just needed some polish, not an entire new design.

[roseee]

I'll try to compile my major complaints:

- Backpack sorting is completely broken. I don't know why ANYONE would think a backpack viewer should render backpacks in such a fucked up way. Genuinely makes no sense. The current system is ideal. Why 60 items per page? Why hide the full view so much? Why break empty slots? Terrible, terrible system.

- Premium Search has improved functionality but the way you have to enable the section is pointless and clutters the screen so much. With the current Premium Search all you have to do is click on the section you want to search and change the value. Now you have to enable the section, which adds an absurd amount of clutter in that dropdown to enable it, THEN find wherever the fuck it is, and then change it. Doubles or triples time spent searching. Awful, awful UX.

- There's also no way to search craft numbers... but there is a way to search crate numbers?

- Default currency being USD rather than keys is off-putting given how a majority of this game is managed around the price of keys (which then fluctuate) - items that don't get repriced will end up seemingly fluctuating in price like this.

- Does anyone use the pricelist anymore? Why is this on the sidebar and why is it above anything else? The Trading section should be above Pricing.

- Most of the home page now is completely useless. I don't think a majority of traders give a shit about the historic price of refined or ToD tickets to be as important as promoted listings or new pricings; the way the current front page works is fine. No reason to change it.

 

Overall, I think you guys should absolutely be listening to your users rather than saying "Well, you'll get used to it!". This redesign is fundamentally flawed in so many ways, and I don't think anyone was asking for this for the most part. If you want to redesign your backpack viewer at the least, I recommend taking a look at how tf2tools does it, that's pleasant to look at, informative, and allows for proper sorting.
If you HAVE to redesign it, at the least keep an old.backpack.tf up indefinitely.

 

Edit: I stopped by the Discord and it seems like most of these are being worked on or getting hotfixes. I have faith in fisk to make this usable. Please fix backpack sorting though!

[car seat headrest]

my biggest complaints are the "Item Variants" section looking terrible, and the fact that you can't see the graph of how many of an item exist on the stats page

even if these were fixed though, I still wouldn't use the new UI; it's too complicated and too crowded

[FP jh34ghu43gu]

9 hours ago, lucco51 said:

would be nice to see the value of my stuff (changed from $ to keys) rather than the suggested range that got accepted - oither than that background seems less punchy than the original but it seems easy enough to use and thats my main concern - ease of use

You can change display values with the display preferences button. It's the monitor at the bottom of the nav bar to the left of the ?. I do think it should default to keys though.

 

9 hours ago, LstratosHF said:

Why are inventories sorted like I'm using a csgo trade extension and not in the way things are actually ordered in my backpack? 

As discussed in the discord and the FAQ they removed the empty slots due to reliability issues in getting inventories (aka fallback method doesn't return inventory slots). Due to overwhelming negative feedback they have stated they are going to bring it back. They already added page sorting back since I was last on the site ~16 hours ago; set sort to Inventory position and grouping to page.

 

9 hours ago, Vrakos Anthrakir said:

Wondering, what does this achieve over the current/old version?

Going to direct quote what I said in another thread: "So to paraphrase from the discord our lovely sole(?) dev fisk has completely reworked the backend to be actually, well, workable. You could think of it as akin to the TF2 codebase and how almost no one at valve wants to touch it because it's over a decade old and spaghetti'd to death." In short this achieves actually fixing bugs instead of letting bug reports go years without progress.

 

7 hours ago, roygbiv said:

This also has a disgusting 50 items per page when my backpack is 2300 items

There is an expanded view button next to the refresh button. It will remember your choice per browser in case you need the better performance on a different device. See the 2nd reply if you're missing the empty slots.

 

4 hours ago, Arbiter said:

The old ui's main page had a little bit of everything right there to see. Prices of main currencies, promoted listing, news and threads, and even some of the latest changes without even having to scroll. New ui you have to scroll to even see the latest changes, and the size of everything just makes massive bloat. Do the graphs of the main currencies need to be that large? The latest changes also seem to look needlessly wide. 

I agree with this, a mini view for the homepage would be nice.

 

3 hours ago, roseee said:

Why hide the full view so much? Why break empty slots? Terrible, terrible system.

This was done with performance in mind afaik, empty slots answered in my 2nd reply.

 

44 minutes ago, car seat headrest said:

and the fact that you can't see the graph of how many of an item exist on the stats page

Yes, historical quantity data was nice for a few niche cases I had, although the fact it has been limited to 2 years for awhile now has always been a complaint of mine. IIRC there was some sort of data loss that brought about that change but I think that was in like 2016 so idk why it can't go back at least that far.

[roseee]

1 hour ago, FP jh34ghu43gu said:

This was done with performance in mind afaik, empty slots answered in my 2nd reply.

Even if it was done for performance issues, I don't get why this would be the default with a notice in a tooltip similar to the current one, i.e. "For faster inventory loading, disable full-view mode" or something along those lines.

 

Given the amount of people who have not figured out that the full-view button exists and asked about it, it should either be on by default or a much more noticeable button. That's the other main general complaint I have, so much empty space yet everything is compacted to an absurd amount. I have faith in fisk fixing my complaints but I might just write scripts to bypass some of these issues lol.

[FP jh34ghu43gu]

20 minutes ago, roseee said:

I don't get why this would be the default with a notice in a tooltip similar to the current one,

I also don't like it but you asked why and this is the reason afaik from the discord and FAQ

[Thunder Perfect Mind]

19 hours ago, XenonNSMB said:

My laptop fan should not have to turn on to render a team fortress 2 trading site. 

How bad is your laptop?

[Colonel Johnson]

17 hours ago, mechabubba said:

Registered an account to reply to this.

For some constructive criticism;

- The actual UI is really fuckin chunky. Lots of padding on everything where it doesn't necessarily need it. I'd like to see some of these elements slimmed down, even if just by a tiny bit.

  - For some examples, the top bar does not need to be as tall as it is. Many elements in the backpack viewer take up a lot of padding, particularly the grey horizontal menu under my icon and name.

  - In general, a lot of valuable space is lost to this unnecessary padding. Why does the "latest changes" box in the new bp.tf only have 6 items, when the old one had 20?
- The key, ref, and MVM ticket price boxes are massive and take up most of the top half of the home screen. I like to look at the promoted listings and latest forum threads for interesting stuff, so this should move.

- New item sorting is kinda bad, not gonna lie.

  - I should be able to view a backpack via page. I know the feedback FAQ goes against this, but this includes empty inventory slots being displayed. A ton of people organize their backpacks based on this, including cached backpacks that won't be able to adapt to the new layout.

  - Even if this [my second comment on the above point] doesn't become the case, I like old bp.tf's almost "infinite scroll" thing with the backpack pages (even if I just sort by value most of the time); the buttons on a users backpack page are just an annoyance more than anything.

  - Also, the "rarity" sort for a backpacks expanded view should say "value" instead.

 

Some nitpicky stuff...

- Strange parts in an item hover box should be listed vertically instead of horizontally.

- image-rendering: crisp-edges for item images is stupid. It looks terrible. Here's what happens when I set it to auto !important;

(you may need to zoom in but its less grainy. its particularly apparent w/ the rocket launcher)

Maybe its an opinion, but that's a drastic improvement. Could just be me though.

- Seeing some HTML entities not being correctly displayed.

- I can't differentiate between prof, spec, and basic ks items based on the circle icon.

  - The spell icons (that are displayed on the item icon) should be colored based on the color of the spell. This is already the case in the item hover box.

 

Some positive stuff...

- I like the item variants section.

 

All in all, I still prefer the old site. Not only is it easier to navigate but its got soul. But I think with some improvements there could be something good here. To clarify; I'm not a huge trader, simply a collector, so maybe I don't have much of a say in this. I mostly browse the site out of boredom. Regardless, I hope my criticisms are valuable. Thanks for your efforts, fisk.

 

Edit: discord.gg/backpacktf is an invalid link. Also repeated a few things people posted earlier, my b.

I saved the new site URL on my firefox main page and even the icon is blurry.

[eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee]

4 hours ago, Thunder Perfect Mind said:

How bad is your laptop?

it may mean the fan is broken or the laptop is a macbook

[eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee]

i noticed the new site gets better when shrinked to 90%

[mechabubba]

2 hours ago, Colonel Johnson said:

I saved the new site URL on my firefox main page and even the icon is blurry.

Think that's just because the favicon for next.backpack.tf is at a smaller resolution than classic backpack.tf; that shouldn't have anything to do with my post.

 

1 hour ago, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee said:

i noticed the new site gets better when shrinked to 90%

Noticed this too, haha. Way more usable.