[fabiospampinato]

I don't agree on the UX, the interface is _terrible_ in many ways:

1. I can't even scroll the page horizontally on Chrome.

2. There are 2 menus with a completely different interface.

3. The Android mobile app gives you a completely different experience, and I think there is no lobby, so I often pick a match from Chrome and then switch to the app (and of course the "Open in Mobile App" button doesn't work for me).

4. In general I find the UI is very confusing:

4a. There are 3 places where to write something about a match: your personal notes (never used this, I guess the value proposition here is that your notes will be stored along the match, but I don't think almost anybody cares about notes about games played last year for instance), the chat (which works only between the current 2 players, and you can't access it from the analysis page) and the spectators chat (I suppose this has a purpose for highly spectated matches and live commentary, but I could also run a separate browser where I'm not logged in and read that too so it sounds useless to me).

4b. The match history at the bottom of the chessboard is useless to me 99% of the times, as it's completely empty.

4c. Often the same information is displayed in different parts of the page, I already mentioned the menu problem, but also when playing you can see some infos about the players both on the left and the right column. All these things complicate the UI.

To close on a positive note the feature I like the most of lichess is probably the analysis page, super useful and well done.

[wolco]

You sound like you are working on a new ui. Can't wait to see it. Remember open source starts with the most vocal critic.

[colmvp]

I'm a designer by trade and I think Lichess is really well done. They've managed to pack a ton of features and have a game that works well for me on both mobile and web.

Certainly there are ways that it could be improved, but calling it "terrible" seems like a huge exaggeration to me and does practically warrant an illustrative alternative that would better suit the OP.

I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.

[drchiu]

Agreed. It's a pretty good UI considering the complexity. My 7 year old frequents there and gets around without any problems or asking how to use the site.

[fabiospampinato]

> I'm a designer by trade and I think Lichess is really well done.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. If you asked designers about the state of mobile UIs about 12 years ago I think many would have praised them, then it came the iPhone and they vanished completely.

I've only mentioned very clear examples in my post, would you, as a designer, put 2 completely different menus (with basically the same functionalities), whose buttons are visible at the same time, on an app? Would you want to have the app scrollable if needed or not?

> I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.

Of course, currently lichess.org is doing the opposite by the way.

My complain was about the mobile app being a _completely_ different experience. i.e. there isn't the lobby, the first thing you see after you go to lichess' homepage.

[kochthesecond]

Yeah, I am just a user, and I think they have a pretty good ux. The menues could be a bit less confusing, but the game experience is excellent.

[stronglikedan]

That's just silly. One can have valid criticisms yet not know how to apply them. If I find a car's human interface intuitive, would you expect me to know how to manufacture a car's dashboard?

[fabiospampinato]

Actually I am, or at least I was, then I started working on some other side projects, but I should resume the development this year.

[paulcole]

Care to share the progress you've made?

[fabiospampinato]

I'm not trying to make a different front-end for lichess but rather something similar to playok.com, from scratch, so it takes quite a bit of time. I haven't been working on the project for more than a year unfortunately, but so far:

- I've got the core UI framework mostly ready, unfortunately still undocumented but most components should be ready for production [1]

- Some core structures, like a Hierarchical State Machine implementation I made, should be good enough [2]

- I've implemented some games like tic-tac-toe and chess, but focusing mostly on the logic of the game rather than the UI or anything else really for now. I have a usable chessboard component but it's not really any good for production use.

- Database-wise pretty much everything still needs to be developed.

- The server/cloud infrastructure still needs to be developed.

- I still haven't quite figured out what the best way to push updates to the app is, given that you don't want to disrupt current games almost at all but you still want to push bug fixes to everyone.

[1] https://github.com/svelto/svelto

[2] https://github.com/fabiospampinato/HSM

[GNU_IS_Linux]

also you can't store more than 1 premove.

[kilburn]

This is a rules decision, not an interface limitation. You may or may not like it, but it is that way on purpose...

[krick]

Suprised to learn that. What can be the rationale for that? Honestly, it doesn't seem to make any sense, if you've already decided on how to proceed, it should be your right to do so (and your problem if you blunder).

[beebmam]

This right here is why I prefer other chess sites for very fast play. Just watch some of Benjamin Finegold's stream/videos for an example of how this works.

[nesyt]

That's not true. You can do conditional premoves on the analysis board.

[cristoperb]

That is only true for correspondence games. For other time controls you can only make a single premove.