About the new website design

[tmpx]

(Hello, I'm a foreigner living in Sweden and for some years now I've relied on temperatur.nu for temperature readings for which I'm very thankful.
This is a quick message about your new website design which I noticed today. I tried to send this message via email but support@temperatur.nu seems to be inactive, so I created an account here for this purpose instead. Please excuse me for this message in English, thank you, and if this kind of message does not belong in this subsection, please move it accordingly so it reaches the right people. Thank you.)

MESSAGE:

Hello, I've been using your website for temperature reading for some years now and I think it's been a good service, thank you.
Today as I visited the site I noticed changes in its design. I think this design is inferior to the prior one for several reasons from which I'll mention 3: 1) This new design loads considerably slower than the last one for me, 2) The graphs are harder to read because there are less divisions on the chart, for pinpointing degrees, and 3) The centering/spacing/sizing? on this chart makes it less practical for reading it.

To me this makes the website now less practical and therefore not as useful as before.
I hope you take note and perhaps action.

Thank you.

[elf98]

Thank you for the feedback!

1. In general the page load time should be fast, but graph rendering is now done on the client which might impact the load time if a large dataset is requested. (year graph with comparison for example).

Also there will be a small delay if a favorite is set and / is accessed.

2. I'm aware that there are no subdivisions between the lines that have temperatures on the y-axis. This is something that I'll hopefully be able to tweak.

3. I do no not understand what you mean. Can you clarify?

My goal is to make the site more useful, not less!

Old interface can be reached here: www.temperatur.nu/old/6/

Thanks again for the feedback, highly appreciated!

[tmpx]

Hello and thank you for your fast reply.

1) Compared to the old webpage the load time is considerably, remarkably much slower now (about 7 or 8x slower). Maybe it's because the program needs to load on the client each time the page is loaded, or maybe it's for some other technical reason; fact is, however, it's much much slower. Now that I had a chance to compare the two, for example, load time for the old page is more or less <2 seconds, most likely 1 second and a fraction. Load time for the new one is in excess of 8 seconds (time between choosing the link on the browser and actually seeing a graph image or actual temperature number data (such as for example current temperature). Temperature data shows up very very fast on the old page, maybe a second or a fraction of it). This is for a week graph. A 7 second difference may not seem like much, but 7 seconds on each access add up to a great deal of time very fast.

2) The old graph is more practical (to me) from the perspective of someone who reads graphs habitually. For example, the font size and choice may be more stylish for the new graph, but there is something about the old graph which makes me read it in a more ordered way. Is it the 'monospace' font choice, which helps the mind to visually organize space better? Is it the entire visual organization and relationship between grid size, font size and overall spacing that does it? Is it color/style choice? Maybe. Also please note that the old graph had/has (subtle) degree increments in fives, with a dotted line for each degree; it has dotted lines for each day, apparently (for the week graph), and for every 5 degrees. There are different colors for different dotted lines. The old graph ranges from -5 degrees to 40 degrees (Celsius of course). The new graph goes from just below 0 to 32 degrees in four degree increments (?), and the numbers seem more 'cluttered'/cumbersome to me, for very fast reading purposes. The old graph has more information in it. Subtle and very strong details.

3) When I read information, I quickly 'scan' material from left to right. I suppose the eyes do this more or less automatically. Therefore, visual information on a webpage starting closer to the left margin will be faster to inspect, at least for me. The old webpage displays graph information starting closer to the left margin than the new one does. Same for the top margin.

For me, temperatur.nu has been a very practical tool. Good tools are there for quick, good use. At least this is how I see it.
If I had to put it in very simple terms I might say it like this: The new webpage might look more trendy/ 'modern' to me. The old one is a smarter choice.

Thank you for a link to the old interface. It is refreshing for me. I hope you can keep it running at least for now.
Once again, thank you.

[elf98]

Thanks for the updated information.

It is really strange that the new page loads so slow on your device.

When comparing using Google Chrome (and disabled ads) the DOM content is loaded in 0.2 seconds on the new page. With caching disabled it is increased to approx 0,6 seconds. And for the old page the numbers are 0.2/0,4 seconds instead.

What browser/device are you using when experiencing the slow load time?

[tmpx]

Hello again, I'm using Chrome on an android tablet, Samsung. I have good internet speed. I can download about 300MB of data in 20 seconds from a site I use, so to me that's a somewhat practical current measure of arbitrary download speed (subject to the site's transfer speed of course). I haven't counted the actual loaded bytes for each webpage from temperatur.nu, but from experience it seems to me the new webpage sends a lot more bytes than the old one does.

Thank you once again. I'm sorry to bring these things up with you. I'm sure you have a lot on your hands with keeping a good service running. I just thought I'd give you this feedback because I like excellence and I hope it might be useful to you at some point. Thank you.

[elf98]

Data shouldn't be a problem. On first load the apporx 3Mb is fetched. On the next loads it's just a few kb that is downloaded if you have not turned of caching in the browser.

Really sorry that it doesn't work as expected.

[tmpx]

Thank you for the great service and your kind support.

[elf98]

We've made som adjustments now, does the site load any faster?

[tmpx]

Hello again!

I tested the webpage again and got a load time of roughly >10 seconds now (time before any temperature data is presented). Tested it several times and at different hours and got similar results.

Thank you.

[mr.f]

Hi,

Happened to see this thread and thought I'd test on some of my devices to give you some additional points of comparison.

- Desktop computer ~1-2 s. reload time.
- Android phone ~4-5 s. (Moto G6)
- Samsung tablet ~8-9 s. (Tab A, 2018)

Firefox on all platforms.

So it seems the Samsung tablet is especially slow for me as well...

[elf98]

Do you mind trying chrome just for comparison?

[mr.f]

Yes, it was a difference. On Chrome both android devices loaded and rendered the page in about 4 s.

[tmpx]

I'm using a Samsung tablet running Chrome. I haven't tried it on PC so far. Thank you.

[tmpx]

I tested it on Firefox just now and got 24 secs on a first attempt. Second and third times it failed to load and I stopped waiting after about 100 seconds and 81 seconds, respectively. The old site loads and reloads on Firefox at about 4 seconds. Tried it about 3 times.

[elf98]

Really strange. When I try on Firefox it runs smoothly, but it is a pretty new phone.

We've made som more adjustments now, but I do not expect any drastic changes.