User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/We're updating the look of categories to improve your community's SEO/@comment-3218221-20181108024917

I certainly understand the need to make changes for the sake of SEO, but from a user/sysop standpoint...I'm not a fan of the current attempt, and my feedback will stem from this perspective. Frankly, the 'selling point' "There’s value in readers being able to explore categories visually" only served to remind me of all the reasons I never liked Category Exhibition (and was so glad to have Classic Category as the default).

As much as I dislike it, I can't deny that Exhibition certainly fits the "visual exploration" bill. This, though? If visual exploration is as much of a selling point as you're making it out to be, I fail to see how those tiny thumbnails help anyone in that regard. As onother commentor already pointed out, they're...not actually all that helpful. I strongly prefer Classic Category precisely because (save for the top eight 'most viewed" links) it lists its articles by name, not image.

On that note, not all articles have images on them. In Exhibition, these articles' thumbnails fill with 'text' -- here, they display nothing, and while understandable - it still makes for a disjointed appearance. The classic layout in its simplicity is thus uniform and nicer to look at.

This brings me to my bigger gripe, which is usability. The main reason I dislike the Category Exhibitions (bear with me) is how inefficient it was compared to the Classic Layout. The Classic layout allows for two hundred links per page, and the lack of images makes scrolling/navigation/finding your desired link pretty darn swift/easy. Exhibition displays 16 links per page due to the size of the tiles, meaning navigation takes far more time than with Classic Layout. (Please don't say "Well, users can just use the search bar!" Navigation/usability still matters.)

So far, Dynamic Categories comes off as unwieldy and cumbersome. Definitely not as unusable as Exhibition, I'll grant it that, but still...bulky. The Classic Layout doesn't just benefit from the lack of images, it benefits from having three columns, a small font, and small (but easily visible) alphabetical headers. It's compact. Compact! How wonderful. Please don't eschew compact design. I beg you.

Dynamic Categories splits the links into two columns as opposed to three, which I assume has something to do with how the alphabetical headers are now quite large (why?) This makes scrolling through a category with 100+ characters take longer than it does in Classic. And, again, less aesthetically nice. Did I mention the padding between links doesn't help (images fault)? Again, why eschew compactness? (Please don't say, "Well, that's what the sub-categories are for!" Navigation/usability still matters).

--Speaking of subcategories, filing them alphabetically is...awful from a user standpoint. Users can use subcategories for filtering parent categories; why wouldn't you keep them at the top like with Classic Layout? Including them in a list that's already a pain to scroll through sabotages their functionality. Yes, I read your point on subcategory displays, but is SEO worth ''this? ''It may be a SEO solution, but it's a navigation negation. To hear that there's no "technically feasible" way of maintaining that functionality is really disappointing.

(I assume you've tried this, so I may as well ask: would including a template displaying the subcategories in the category description hurt SEO? I honestly might just insert a template even if it does... Or, I suppose I could just insert a standard "this wiki recommends using the classic layout to navigate. To use the classic layout, click on the first icon in the top right" PSA." I think I will, in fact, do just that.)

Consider an example from a wiki I administrate, which currently has 157 articles in its Category:Characters. Now, a user could use the sub-categories to browse, and they well might do if they want to see while articles fall under that category. If they're just looking for a specific name or simply want to peruse the contents, they can easily accomplish this in the Classic Layout. The 'modern' layout makes using the category far less appealing. Takes longer to scroll through. Less links visible in a window at any given time vs the Classic Layout.

Before I tried actually using the alphabet sorting at the top, my guess was that clicking on a letter would maybe 'jump' you to the corresponding letter header (because scrolling through the category is genuinely just that much of a pain). Now that I've used it... I actually do see the point of it for categories with hundreds of articles (in classic layout, having it for a category with less than 200 articles would be sort of pointless), so for now I'll just say that I find the margin-bottom values for both the total number header and alphabet shortcuts needlessly large.

(For the third time: why forgo compactness? Why go for that unecessary padding/space? Why make the divide between the columns so big? Why? Why???)

If you're still reading this, then I have a question regarding the thumbnail previews. I assume that their heights have been truncated (from those of the other layouts) due to the thumbnails' implentation in the article lists, but... since the images aren't scaled to 'fit', the larger thumbnails of the trending articles look awkwardly cropped as a result. For the tiny thumbnails it doesn't matter so much since they're small and unhelpful anyway, but perhaps consider using the older dimensions for the trending articles? The Category:Characters category I linked earlier is a direct example of what I mean.

Since I'm back on the topic of images, I have another, more technical question about what this update means for image selection, if at all. This site has had a longstanding issue with Imageserving and thumbnail previews -- in which a thumbnail preview displays an image embedded in an article rather than the/an existing one in the article's infobox. (This issue is usually resolved by with an edit or null edit, aka triggering a rescan, but it's never been permanently resolved).

The wiki I administrate is no exception to this; heck, I was in correspondence with Kirkburn via this issue re: the wiki back in Jun 2017, and the wiki continues to experience said issue to this day. Given your emphasis throughout the article on visual exploration, does this update portend anything for your investigation into the preview issue?

I had a thought just now: I understand why it isn't possible to change the default layout for logged-out users (since the search engine crawls the logged-out form of the page) but what about giving us the option to make it default for all logged-in users? If a search engine depends on the logged-out view, does it matter so much if there's a default logged-in version?.

I dearly hope that such a thing is feasible, because...at the end of the day, the first two things you listed as 'key updates'? They're key updates to the Category Exhibition, I suppose, but they're actually core components of the still in-existence Classic Layout - aka the layout Exhibition was allegedly an 'improvement' of.

The idea that some of the key category layout updates are lesser restorations of the functionality lost in Exhibition is...painfully amusing, somehow. Displaying articles in a list? Classic layout does that, but better. Visual trending navigation at the top? Classic does that.

If you replaced the [prev/next 200 pages] count in the Classic layout with the [prev/next] navigation to appease pagination, would the subcategories issue be the only 'main' SEO issue with Classic layout? The Exhibition filters are an additional problem exclusive to Exhibition, not Classic.

I know this comment is very obviously pro-Classic, but it seems to me that your fixation with visual exploration is only hurting your latest SEO-courting attempt, a cumbersome hanger-on from Exhibition that has, as far as I can tell, practically nothing to do with SEO attraction and mostly to do with your idea of what users want. "Maintaining the same visual design" isn't a good thing if said visual design [Exhibition] isn't...great.

(It occurs to me that perhaps the tiny thumnail icons in the list are more geared toward...say, mobile users than desktop users? Suddenly this design choice makes more sense than it did before (aka "very little"), but I stil question how useful it actually is. Would it be possible to just...you know, not have the tiny thumbnails appear in the desktop version?

...Not keen on that? Then my suggestion is to use the compact, visual-light Classic Layout as your ideal/foundation, not drag the entrails of Exhibition kicking and screaming into a Dynamic layout that clearly would be better off without them. Excessive visuals are unnecessary. Excessive padding/empty space is unnecessary. The alphabet headers are far too oversized. These, at least, are easily changeable.

I don't know whether anyone will see this comment/care to read all of it, but I'll end by saying - thanks for still giving [logged-in] users the option to freely switch between the layouts. If anything, this update serves as another reason sysops can incentivize users to create accounts. "Want to see less ads? Want to be able to switch between categories? Create an account!" and so forth.

TL;DR: I think you're either solely underestimating how many people use categories for navigation purposes or knowingly ignoring it - except you can't be totally ignoring it, otherwise why add the alphabet shortcuts? Then again, filing the subcategories into the article list and making scrolling through the list a chore seem inherently anti-navigation, so... I'm a little at a loss (in more ways than one. Ha.). If this is "maintaining the same visual design," then I'm finding it hard to see said visual design in a promising light.