NEW and Pretty: Minor Visual Changes :)

It's always pleasant and pleasantly surprising to see the place you've visited many times spark-up and shine a little brighter. Lately, more than a few nice little visual changes have been made to make Colnect easier on the eyes and even put a smile on your face sometimes.

These little gems include:

< Nicer flowing hover over color movement over lists (try it out! hover over a list).

< Rounded Buttons.

< Red glowing warning sign on deactivated members profiles.

< Enlarged writing in some pages, for comfort, and many more changes.

< An elegant new pop-up language menu.

Go look for them now, let's see if you could find some more :)

We also did not forget all those who see Colnect without logging in. There are many new flashing, popping, changing, surprising little hidden boxes for non-logged-in visitors. Go ahead, log out and browse around and see what happens! Then log back in and tell us what you've found.

Little touches in design can often create a significant difference in the experience. Let us know what you think of the new design!

The "Language Icon" initiative

Colnect is currently available is 25 languages and so there should be an easy way to let users choose their preferred language. To facilitate this, there's currently a big part of the welcome screen that shows the names of the different languages. The reason is that it's highly important that a user would see their language available when first visiting the site since for many people using their native tongue greatly improves usability. Having a big box with all language names is something I can get away with on the main page but not on every page of Colnect. The problem is not when registered members (who will have their preferred language loaded as they log in) but with new visitors. For this reason there's currently a selection box on the top and side menu which allows to change a language quickly for every page. A small issue remains: what do you write in this selection box? Currently, the English word 'Language' appears there. The word itself could have been translated to every language but seeing this word in a language you probably don't understand (if you understand it, why would you change your language?) won't be very helpful. This is not ideal but I have to assume every Internet users knows at lit a tiny bit of English (sorry all, but English is the web's most international language). I've considered the option of using flags but have ruled it out because: 1 - Flags represent countries, not languages. Consider English which is widely spoken in the US, UK and Canada. On the other hand, consider Canada which has both English and French as official languages. 2 - Adding 25 flag icons for every page is an extra communication load with no good justification.

A solution?

An interesting project I've came across is the 'Language Icon'. They've decided to create an international icon to mean the word "language". Here it is: It's supposed to look like a tongue [UPDATE: it has radically changed since this post was made!] though personally I don't find it resembling a tongue. If it'll catch on, however, it could be of great use to websites / application around the world. Kudos for the idea! I've already added this icon to Colnect V2, about to be released to the public soon, where you can find it on the side menu on internal pages.