Feedback from Connor Shea

I didn’t want to spam the issue tracker with all the feedback I’ll be giving, so instead I’ll put it in this issue. This is in response to @fasterthanlime’s request on twitter for feedback. This is feedback on UI/UX mostly, but some of these gripes will be with things other than design.

The Good Stuff

• Tabs are 👍, nice choice adding those!
• Open source!
• The New Tab view is awesome (it’s probably too hidden, IMO it should be the Home view when you load the client)
• Big 👍 for the “Accessibility features” search filter
• Overall I quite like the design, although I will say the website at times doesn’t fit well with the client. I personally quite like the brighter, pink/white design of some parts of the website, so if you choose to unify on one “theme” I’d rather choose that.
• Using GitLab CI (What can I say, I’m a shill)

Issues

• I’m not logged into the store session when browsing on itch.io from the client, which is a bit annoying. It should be possible to add a X-ITCHIO-SESSION-KEY header or something similar with Electron (although I’m not 100% sure about that, also be sure to look into security implications).
• Clicking “Purchase or Donate money” for a free game gives me a 404 error (e.g. https://onagrostudios.itch.io/moira-demo/purchase)
• “Show in Finder, where is this item installed” text for games that have been installed sounds weird.
• “Check for update” should be “Check for updates”
• Collections aren’t syncing, and there’s no “Refresh” button as far as I can tell.
• It’d be nice if the itch.io store/browse page were auto-filtered to my platform. If a game doesn’t support OS X, then I’d rather than not see it as an option when on the OS X client.
• “Things you gave money to” isn’t necessarily true, since I downloaded some of them for free.
• Search is displayed everywhere, but doesn’t work in the store view. It only shows the currently-downloaded games.
• Go to the itch.io tab => click “All games” => note that the back button in the browser view doesn’t take me back to the home page. This is disorienting.
• The “All games” view hides the header bar, which is a weird choice given that the Search bar in the client itself doesn’t work.
• The Shopping Cart icon doesn’t fit with the rest of the icons (and is a bit ugly IMO), why not use the one from Google’s icon set?
• Probably don’t let me do this

Suggestions

• I should be logged in by default, having to click on my same user every time I open the client is annoying.
• I’d like to be able to “Close All Tabs” after I’ve been browsing for a while and have a bunch of tabs open.
• Add a “download” progress bar at the bottom of the client when downloading or updating a game.
• The Help icon would work better if it were in color, but since that’d go against the aesthetic of the client, it may be a better idea to just replace the icon. I really only understood it because I’d used Slack before 😛
• Move “Check for Updates” as well as the version number to the “itch” dropdown on OS X (and presumably Windows/Linux)

- When I'm in a collection I should see a "breadcrumb" that can be used to go back to the main Collections view. - The Collections view is very very simple right now. It should include the name of the collection, whether it's Public/Private (maybe a lock icon if it's private?), thumbnails of a few games in the Collection, - The dialog that opens on OS X (and Windows/Linux too) should have a list of my recently played games, Steam does this (and so does Atom if you need a reference implementation). - [ ] Back Button! I keep clicking things and then wanting to go back to the last view! - [ ] The buttons on the store page are very out-of-place, in my opinion. It'd look and work a lot better if it was in a horizontal row. ### CSS Feedback - I noticed you're switching your linters to Ruby. For SCSS Linting GitLab uses [the SCSS Lint gem](https://github.com/brigade/scss-lint) ([Here's our config](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/.scss-lint.yml), you can also look in the `doc/development/` folder for the Styleguide which includes rationale and whatnot. MIT Licensed, so go crazy!) - [ ] NEVER EVER USE `!important`, **EVER**. You _will_ regret it. Instead, did you know you can override other CSS by hacking the specificity?

Before:

.override-the-evil-item {
  color: $pretty-color !important;
}

.evil-overriding-item {
  color: $ugly-as-hell-color; // mwahahahaha
}

After:

.override-the-evil-item.override-the-evil-item {
  color: $pretty-color;
}

.evil-overriding-item {
  color: $ugly-as-hell-color; // it doesn't work D:
}

Alternatively, you could use div.override-the-evil-item which would automatically have a higher specificity and therefore take priority. Unless you’re overriding an external style library or (god help you) the browser, there’s never ever a reason to use !important that isn’t solved by specificity. See also this article.

I know you didn’t come here for CSS feedback, but I gave it anyway 😛

[fasterthanlime]

I checked a bunch of checkboxes from stuff that was fixed in the past year or so - looking good!

[connorshea]

😮 the mad man, congrats on v25!