Per other recent discussion, the archives on-site here have kind of awkward usability and can be unapproachable for new users. Here's a set of ideas on how to improve it, a little scattered since writing it up in more detail would take even more time than it already has.

First, walking through things as they are now and pretending we're a newbie.

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This is really bad; it assumes the user knows exactly what they have and what programs work on it.




It's rare that you actually care how a given program is implemented, just that it does what you want. Implementation language should remain a filtering option, but should not be used by default- if you need it you can use it, otherwise you might not even notice it as an option.




This is becoming a lot of hierarchy. Try to get rid of it.




This page is kind of a wall of text, and it only sorts by name- very unhelpful. The little rating icons are slightly helpful, but much too small. There are two links to the details page, and showing the filename doesn't seem helpful- you don't care what the file you would download is called, and it's unclear that link is actually a download link.




The information here is okay, but organized weirdly. A couple highly-placed screenshots at the top with a big clearly-delineated download button would make this easier to understand. Descriptions are limited to plain text, where it may be helpful to allow links to be inserted. For that matter, we can do away with a dedicated screenshots section by allowing images or videos to be inlined in the description so we don't enforce a single organization for all programs where that may not be useful.

All of the things on this page seem to run together because there's no vertical separation (except around reviews). That's a relatively easy change.

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Let's think about how to better organize things.

The fixed filesystem hierarchy is really bad for browsing. Rich tagging!

Tagging

In the simplest form, consider a tag to be an arbitrary string. If you know which tags you're interested in, it's an easy search to find items with that tag. So how to discover what tags you care about? We provide a semi-fixed set of tags. For instance, the 8x tag might indicate anything that works with 8x-series calculators (83+, 83+ SE, 84+, 84+ SE).

To make it clearer what tags mean, we can permit more detailed descriptions and try to use obvious tag values that don't require explanation.

So now how do you discover tags? We could present a big list of them, but that's pretty bad. So we have a tag hierarchy (or more accurately, a set of parallel hierarchies).

Neat refinement of current semantics: have runs-on and works-with tags that correspond to platforms or calculators. For instance, rom8x works-with 8x calculators and runs-on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Because this is somewhat complex, let's look at the existing hierarchy and see how it maps onto a new tag hierarchy. For some kind of simplicity, I'll denote potential tags and their hierarchy with ->.

• 83plus: runs on->83p
  
  
  • asm: implemented in->z80 assembly
    
    
    • games: activity->game
      
    • graphics: I don't actually know what this is
      
    • levels: activity->game-><whatever game>
      
    • media: activity->media
      
      
      • audio: activity->media->audio
        
      • images: activity->media->images
      
      
    • programs: ???
      
    • shells: activity->launcher?
      
      
      • modules: activity->launcher-><shell>->extension?
        
      • old: ???
      
      
    • sound: activity->media->audio
    
    
  • basic: implemented in->TI-BASIC->Z80
    
    
    • ...

This means the browse interface becomes something more like a group of selection controls, where you can multiselect tags within the hierarchy, where each independent hierarchy is a separate section of selection controls. So you have a group of filtering controls allowing you to quickly drill down to programs for a given use or that runs on a given platform, then a sortable table or list of programs. Sort options might include:

• Most downloaded (default?)
  
• Most recent downloads
  
• Best rated
  
• Most recent

Details page

Make the download link prominent. Maybe a sidebar at the top containing that and some meta-information like the author link, statistics, etc.

Descriptions become rich text (think Markdown). Paragraphs and images allowed and encouraged. Have a single slot for a representative image or video which is shown first, and can be used on listing pages too.

We should support modern image formats. Animated gif is okay, but these days you'd like better things- native video is very nice because it's seekable, and it would allow authors to make fancier "marketing video" type things that are richer than simple animated screenshots.

For the purposes of organization, I'll go ahead and include the relevant section of my previous post here:


Additionally, I'd like to add that sorting by most downloads first might not be the best option, as that would cause the top downloaded programs to be downloaded the most, while newer programs of equal quality might sit further down on the page past where the average user reads. Perhaps we could use a system which highlights both new content and popular content at the same time as the default method, with the option to select order by popularity or by date uploaded.

As for ratings, I feel that they currently aren't a very good metric of finding programs. Most programs only have 1 or 2 ratings on them, which would not portray an accurate idea of the program's quality. We should encourage users to rank programs more, and I feel that editable rankings would incentivize people to do that. Currently, I don't feel like giving a negative review if I feel that a game could improve in a future update, which is a lot of games.

I'll probably post more thoughts tomorrow; it's rather late for me.

I think that most of the proposed changes here would still be confusing to newcomers just looking for a game to put on their calc.

Instead of having a named folder representing what calc they have, just display a picture of the calc and its name. Include instructions on determining what the name of the calculator is for confused newcomers. Most people will be coming for CE games, and it's distinct enough from the other calcs that it should be fine.

I agree with the idea of getting rid of the Assembly and Basic categories. The README file should include instructions on how to run the program, at any rate. I also agree with the idea of tagging, but I think it's too complicated.

I think we should leave the current categories of math programs, games, graphics, etc, as they are.

Once the user tells us what they are looking for, show them popular programs in that category with lots of downloads, good reviews, and screenshots. Give them the option to sort for new programs, by number of reviews, by recent popularity, etc.

I also agree with the sentiment that nobody wants to look at walls of text. I would love to be able to use markup in my program description, but I think adding images is a bit too far. It will just clutter the page.

Instead, I propose that people can upload one screenshot that will show up on the downloads listing, in addition to the screenshots shown on the page. For existing programs, we can probably default to the first screenshot uploaded. Edit- commandblockguy suggested that it chooses the first static screenshot for reasons of size.

Unfortunately, this will have a large impact on page loading time, and it's pretty clear that search engines don't like pages that take ages to load. Because of this, an even stricter file size limit would be applied to this screenshot, but the limit for other screenshots (only shown on the downloads page) will be the same.

Thoughts?


Edit, would have made an actual fancy mock-up but I'm running low on time so here's one scrawled on the back of the homework I'm supposed to be doing. Click to enlarge.


Edit x2:
The menu where they select what kind of program they're looking for is the simplest menu and probably doesn't cause any confusion. It should stay, lest we cause further confusion.

If they're looking for math programs, don't lump that in with shells and such.

Edit x3: I did a mockup, here's the code. Click to enlarge either of the photos.




I think it looks reasonable, any ideas?

The mockup looks pretty good, though we also need to consider how it can scale down to phone-sized displays.

Your comments on complexity make sense, but they're not mutually exclusive with rich tagging; we just make the landing page behave a little differently, or even have a "simple" landing page that has that alternate presentation. I do think having a simple entry point that might basically be pictures of calculators would likely be helpful to beginners.

As you observe, ratings are not common enough to be very useful, so I think download count is the best overall predictor of "you'll want this." Perturbing ranking to avoid ossification might be useful, but there's a lot of prior art to draw from in trying to rank items in a list like this- this kind of wants to resemble a recommendation engine like you might find on the Reddit frontpage.

Handy references:

• https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/
• http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html

Whoop, thought I'd posted an update here!

I added a mobile view to my mock-up:


The updated gist.

If I have nothing better to do, I'll write a script to sort the files, using data attributes sent with the HTML, as the mock-up shows. I've done this much, might as well complete it

Nice. This looks really good.

Some suggestions for filters:
-popular (default)
-new
-most downloaded
-alphabetical
-author search

And I agree with what was stated earlier about having pictures for the calculators instead of the names, I downloaded several TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus CSE games when I was new before finding the ones for the CE. Also, when you get to the section where you pick from games, shells, etc. the name of the calculator is already shown at the top of the screen, so the “TI-84 Plus Assembly Games” seems a bit superfluous. Just make it “Games”, “Shells”, “Math”, etc.

EDIT- Having a place for a promotional video/trailer would be nice, too (possibly embedded from YT). This could be accessed from the “More info” in _iPhoenix_’s mock-up. Maybe there could also be a “User screenshots” section in the reviews page, like Amazon has. If there is no screenshot provided for the file, one of these could be displayed.

EDIT 2- Looks like Commandblockguy beat me to a lot of this stuff. His categories would be better, and I really like the rich text idea.

I love your concepts _iPheonix_! What about on mobile, or even the PC when the the program titles are super long like "Advanced Wait State Changer. (Make your CE 30% faster!)"? Will there be length restrictions to keep the page looking clean?

I agree, promotional videos for the programs would be pretty neat. What about auto-playing them? Would there be an option to turn that off? I know I sometimes tether to my phone when there's no WiFi around and I absolutely hate it when videos auto-play and burn up my data with no way to turn them off.

Finally, I think it'd be a good idea for there to be links to video tutorials for how to send the programs to your calculator and what to do if something doesn't work. Kerm, TI84CalcWiz, TI-Planet, and I already have some great tutorials, perhaps we could look into linking them to the Archive page? A drop down menu under a 'tutorials button might work. The only issue I foresee is if one of the videos is updated, the link would have to be changed.

I'm not a huge fan of this idea.

First off, I don't think it's right for Cemetech to officially sponsor tutorials like that. It just feels wrong to me.

Second off, if someone's tutorials don't make it in, it'll probably leave them felling bad. If we accept every one, we will have 800 billion redundant YouTube videos.


I guess having the ability to link a YouTube video to the page would be nice, but the videos can be edited after the fact to be spam/or contain inappropriate content, etc. It gets hard to moderate when there's an entire archives full of videos. I think the admins could better allocate their Cemetech-related free time than by watching endless amounts of program video ads. It would also slow down the review process.

Additionally, hosting images takes a lot of disk space on the server- I don't think user screenshots is a good use of that.

It could be a ton of fun to have a section of the website dedicated to tutorials and instructional videos about calculators. There's so much stuff that could be explained in a lot of detail, which is not always obvious when you're getting started. We could have the videos sorted into categories (like what calculator model the video applies to, or maybe a computer software section or whatever)
We could have the users chime in with suggestions as to what the videos should contain, and it would allow us to explain things in a lot of detail. Of course, videos could be updated with additional information every now and then and if necessary, the videos could link to other videos (for example, a video about axe could link to a basic video, since you are expected to already be comfortable with basic before jumping into axe).
The videos could be hosted on the site or we could make an official cemetech youtube account if we're lazy.

Create a Cemetech Youtube brand account. Allow the top Cemetech developers access to it to upload videos. This way, it's still a Cemetech video, but should be associated with the uploadee.

As to editing the YouTube videos, that would be pretty easy to handle. Just have a “Report video” button somewhere, or copy the videos over to the official Cemetech account, as Acagliano suggested earlier (under a promotional videos playlist or something). This would be a good way to get awareness out about the site, as well. This is a pretty niche community, and I think that a lot of the Cemetech programs are good enough to get promotional videos for them pretty high on the trending list. Just look at the Need for Speed Heat trailer- not many people play it, but still, it got #1 on trending for a few days.

And archives submissions are fairly rare when compared to forum posts and other activity, so this wouldn’t waste too much moderator time. If this is a big concern, there could be a time limit on the YT videos.

I guess I don't see why the promotional video has to be hosted on Cemetech or something, just post it to the site like normal and include a link in the description?

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Anywho, I added sorting to my mockup. I think I'm finished here for now.

Nice! Got any new screenshots to share?Because I don't feel like running the code myself...

We already have some of this in the resources section, but it's kind of awkward to find. That could stand to be improved some for sure, and it may be helpful to include a link to the resources page from the archives; even ticalc does this!


So improving the resources pages and linking to them basically handles what you suggest when combined with the forum for discussion.

I've only been able to quickly skim this thread so far, but the ideas expressed here sound similar to ones I had wanted to do for ticalc.org for so long.

The directory-based system just doesn't scale anymore, and it doesn't help sort out the complicated program-compatibility relationships among shells and the many TI calculator models that have come out over the years. Maintaining the archive organization has become increasingly difficult and messy as a result.

I'm imagining an archive page primarily based on the user entering keywords related to what kind of program they're looking for and having integrated filters available for program compatibility (determined by things such as calculator model, language, library usage, etc.) and then category/type/genre. Maybe there could even be information links providing explanations for the various “compatibility” categories. For instance, categories for a shell such as Doors or Cesium could have some sort of help bubble or link to an external page explaining all about what a shell is, the purpose of this particular one, and what is needed to run programs requiring this shell.

There are so many files out there these days that a lot of categories are needed to prevent an overwhelmingly long list in any particular area. But having tons of categories adds complexity and confusion and increases the chance of programs being classified inaccurately or inconsistently. I have found this an especially painful problem with managing ticalc.org's archives, and it just gets worse every time more categories are added. But then again, if a search box is used as the primary interface for browsing the archives, then perhaps it isn't necessary to have quite so many categories since users can just type keywords related to what they're looking for. Maybe a clever search algorithm could even use the keywords to infer when the user is looking for files of particular categories and show more of those toward the top of the list.

Overall, I think program compatibility is going to be one of the biggest challenges in making a good, user-friendly, usable search interface that makes it easy, especially for newcomers, to find appropriate software for their calculator setup and figure out how to make it work. TI's model-naming scheme probably hasn't helped, either; despite the descriptions on the top-level directories in the ticalc.org archives, I've still had to answer a lot of emails from users who try to run color 84+ BASIC programs on monochrome models or vice-versa and don't understand why text display is messed up. And with the limitations of ticalc.org's current system, there simply isn't a good way to arrange files by some of the compatibility characteristics. Usually, pure-BASIC programs will run fine on both the CE and CSE, so the two models actually share a BASIC directory on the site (which causes some weird, subtle quirks in other areas of the site because this arrangement was never done before and isn't expected by the data architecture). But now, there are BASIC programs requiring libs that only work on either the CSE or CE, which means more user confusion; yet separating the directories would lead to a lot of duplication for all the vanilla BASIC programs that do work on both. The ancient ticalc.org management system does not make dealing with this easy or fun at all. And this isn't the first time: There have been other issues like this in the past, such as whether to separate 83+/84+ programs when the 84+ was released, as well as those for the 89/92+/V200 family.

As mentioned on chat - I think the site could benefit from more streamlined searching functionality.

I think it would compliment the archives overhaul as well - making it easier for visitors to find programs they want.

The google powered search results are messy and it can be difficult to find what you need. Sometimes simpler is better.

If someone comes to Cemetech and searches for "Mario" they will get a a list of ads, then they will get the Oriam thread with links etc. If you click 'Downloads' then you get a confusing list of results.

Would it be better to have the actual file archive entries first? Perhaps a table of result links that has addition information about what it is you're about to click on: News article, Forum topic, Download etc along with date, platform, genre as well (for files).

Thoughts?

I've put together an improved file page that I think is much nicer, and to give people something concrete to play with I've uploaded it to the archives as a standalone HTML file that can be experimented on: http://ceme.tech/DL1985

Screenshot inline for the lazy:

I'm not quite sure what to do with the extra space in the left box, because it seems rather awkward as-is.

In regards to the empty space on the left, maybe you can move the Metadata title up a bit and include some stats about the author(s) or their avatars or something.

I don't know how easy that would be to implement and it is probably a dumb idea, but it is an idea nonetheless :3

Bringing some discussion back over here..

I think the breadcrumbs feel a little cluttered sitting right on top of the description, but the next most obvious place for them is under the file info (above versions) which seems more awkward. Otherwise I disagree that there's too much text.

Though thinking a little, not showing the archive contents by default (click something to expand it) would be nice.

I don't think ratings have a lot of value as they are now, just because most files don't have many ratings so the numbers are often not significant. Calling out the major numbers would be reasonable though (bold the total download counts, rating..).

It's specifically spaced out like this because cramming them together felt very cluttered. Calling out the major ones should handle this reasonably I think.

The goal here is to put the most important information up front. What does somebody browsing care about? They've already made the choice to look at this file in details; they want to read what you have to say about the program, see screenshots and download if they like what they see. That's the three things right at the top (excepting the breadcrumbs, which I noted above could use some work). Additional information like a view into what's inside and metadata including user ratings aren't really primary information, so get pushed further down.

I think you may have some reasonable points, but it seems like much of what you're saying is prioritizing things in a way that I don't think is correct. It might be easier to evaluate your comments with concrete suggestions.

Pretty easy improvements I can do:

• Adjust the download button color (this is not the first "that's an odd choice of color" comment I've gotten on it)
  
• Bold major statistics
  
• Collapse the archive contents pane by default
  
• Add some padding after the breadcrumbs

Things I'm not going to change at this moment because there isn't a clear solution:

• Move the breadcrumbs somewhere else or make them less of a wall

I hadn't even thought about the breadcrumbs before, but it does look a little cramped upon closer inspection. I think it makes sense to keep them up there since breadcrumbs are usually under the title but above the content. Maybe you could collapse them so that only the directory the person came from (or the first directory, if none is provided) is initially shown, but they can see the other places the file is in if they expand the section.

As for too much text, I have to look all over the draft page you posted to find all the information. The big green button catches my eye, and I look for some quick, short information from top to bottom because I'm a lazy user. I think this is what users will see (in order):

• A giant download button, but I'm not sure if I want to press that yet.
  
• A description that's kinda long, I'll read that later. I'm looking for a lot of games, and I want to get this over with.
  
• Some screenshots that are pretty cool, but that's not really information- I want to make sure they didn't just take screenshots of the good parts.
  
• Archive contents, that's not what I'm looking for.
  
• Oh, finally some quick information about the file, like the rating and more. I want to make sure what I'm downloading isn't trash. This is quick and informative :P I've never heard of this author before, though, so I think I'm going to keep looking.
  
• A short link to the page. That's nice if I want to share it with my friends, but not really helpful right now.
  
• Nice, this file has been updated a few times.
  
• What other people think about the program, which can help me know if this program has major bugs.
  

Most of this is text I'm not going to read, and the information that's really going to help me decide at-a-glance is only the fifth thing I find. For what it's worth, I'm not entirely satisfied with how my mockup would guide users, but I definitely think that the stats should be closer to the download button.


I really, really liked the "your rating" part, where you could select and change your rating- it's much simpler and more intuitive, I think, than the old system.


That makes sense and I applied it to my mockup below.

Alright, here's my mockup with my tweaks to that page: a google drive link to my files and a screenshot link

Here's what I did:

• Moved the download button to the right side- in my opinion, this looks better, but it's an easy change to revert.
  
• Recolored the download button.
  
• Moved the Metadata and Statistics sections up to the top, near the download button.
  
• Replaced the redundant "upload date" information (you can get it in the versions section so there's no real reason to put it right next to the download, I think) with a file size that tells you the size of the whole file you're downloading.
  
• Bolded the rating score, as discussed above.
  
• Moved the reviews section into the "main" section, with the screenshots and the description. This is really the only section 90% of the people are going to care about, and I think that a listing of all of the files in the zip is side information most people aren't going to look at immediately. Additionally, this makes sure that long reviews don't stretch across the whole page, which is harder to read.
  
• Gave the review text a little bit of an indent because it looks better and is easier to read in my opinion.
  
• Modified the ordering of the versions section so that the oldest version is version 1 and the newest version is on the bottom.
  
• Adjusted the positioning of the headers in the archive contents section so that they don't shift by one pixel when you scroll down.
  
• Added a header to the description section.
  
• Added ID tags to the main headers so people can link to ex. the screenshot section by adding #screenshots to the URL. It's a small thing but it's really nice when you need it.
  
• Changed some of the colors for accessibility. Specifically, I felt that the links were a little hard for me to read against the background of the review header, so I made the review header a little brighter and the same color as the little hashing in the file breakdown. Since the breadcrumbs also use this background, it might be a good idea to change that too, but I didn't go that far.
  
• Removed "at" from the dates on the review header for consistency with posts, which don't do that.
  
• Probably a bunch of other tweaks I forgot about.
  

This is a bit beyond the intended scope of this post, but some form of paginating reviews for files with, say, more than 5 would probably be good.

Here are some changes I thought about but didn't do, but still might be worth considering:

• Add a section at the top with the file name as a header and move the author section into it, eliminating the metadata section entirely. (I did not do this because I'm not sure if anyone actually cares about who wrote the file all that much.)
  
• I think the download button would look nicer if it was aligned with the text in the description and had some space between it and the stats panel. This is easily done with a table, but the existing flexbox system is pretty nice. I achieved this mockup of a mockup with some invisible h2's but that's a lame hack. commandblockguy also suggested removing the metadata header.