New website Product search tables

Hello Ben, 

Thank you for your feedback, however, E2E is for technical/engineering design issues. 

Please submit any website concerns using the website feedback link available at the bottom of any ti.com page: 

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Thank you,

~Leonard  

Ben I absolutely agree with you.

Leonard, I have submitted my feedback to the website link you have indicated (unfortunately limited to 800 chars), but if this is the incorrect place to discuss this matter as a community, could you please point us to the right place? If there is no other place and our only option is to send off blind feedback into a unidirectional web form without the ability to discuss and hear thoughts of our TI-product-using peers, could you please take my feedback right here to create such a place.

I think there are many engineers here that would agree that searching/researching/selecting products is a big part of the full engineering design process. It seems that E2E forum is the perfect place to discuss this and make including TI products in our designs even easier.
Perhaps together we can provide more refined feedback than is possible individually within an 800 char limit.

Building on Ben's points above, I've also immediately found the new product tables format/UI visually jarring and demonstrably inferior on first use.

However providing exact feedback is a little hard since the old version is now gone and we can’t do a side-by-side comparison.
Does anyone in the community have screen caps of the old interface?
Or could TI provide some internal screencaps or management presentations that compared old with new?
Perhaps these materials would also provide all the arguments as to why the new interface is unequivocally better and Ben and I are just crazy old EEs ;)

In any case, some things I have noticed about the new interface:

The table is now embedded in its own frame/zone/surface within the page which makes interacting with it far more difficult. Perhaps the old version was similar? But if it was, I can’t remember it being this difficult to navigate/scroll.
For instance, it seems that now I have to manually scroll the main website page to the perfect vertical scroll position to view the table in its entirety, before then switching to the table’s own internal scroll bars. Also when wheel scrolling you need to be sure your mouse cursor is within the embedded table surface, not the main page, or you'll scroll the wrong one. This is very annoying when this inevitably happens as it means you need to reposition the main page again before continuing to use the table --- as fun as it is, I don’t really want to be dancing a scroll bar jig every other moment.

I can't exactly recall the horizontal scrolling behaviour of the old version now that it's gone, but there certainly wasn't an issue with it. So the new version doesn't appear to have any advantage even for horizontal scrolling.
I fact I've just found a new disadvantage/bug: I can't even scroll to the right to the full extent using the new scroll bars, the only way to see the last 2.5 columns is to use mouse middle-click and drag.

This is a known issue with using custom scroll bars: they just don't plain work the same as the standard browser scroll bars (which your users are typically very familiar with since they use them all the time on other websites) and/or they have bugs since being driven by different code.
Case in point: About 50% of the time when I click-drag on your new custom scroll bars I get no scrolling (it just freezes), where this never happens with the standard browser bars.

All Filters pop-out:
Again I can't recall exactly, but I'm pretty sure the all-filters section was permanently popped out in the old version?
This is one of the most used features when I am searching/narrowing down products. Not only is hiding it behind an extra click quite annoying, having it pop-out requires the remainder of the table to be shoved over, moving all the data/text along with it. But my eyes were just looking at that text a moment ago and I want to move my eyeballs back to a particular column I was looking at ... except now it's moved and I have to visually find it again. How annoying!

Also extending Ben's comment about taking more screen real-estate: The categories within the filters sections now seem to only show 3-4 items at a time, with their own mini-scrollbars to view the rest (probably with their own buggy scrollbar implementation).
Please tell me why?
The all-filters section already has its own scroll bar, as well as the greater table, as well as the browser page! Did anyone stop to think that four layers of vertical scroll bars was too many?

Personally I also prefer the style of the old tables, which is subjective of course.
But it did seem to fit more data within the area it had. Now I see only about 6 products at a time and a huge amount of vertical whitespace between useful text.

You do get used to styles. But why change it TI? You have a bunch of EEs out here completely at ease with your old tables, some (like myself) using them heavily (and embarrassingly to admit: almost exclusively) during initial design work, but now having to deal with this change for no apparent advantage?
I think you’ve made a mistake and I certainly will start searching more broadly for products because of it.

What you can do: give an option to re-enable old tables (save the setting in a cookie so I always see the old). Then keep improving your new design until it’s actually better than the old and you can prove it.



Kind regards

Brian

Thank you for your feedback Brian, and Ben.  I will pass this on to the team involved with this function.

Regards,  

~Leonard