Hiya!

This week, we've been working on some fixes for the problems people encountered. One of them was the navigation on the website when reading ODDfigures' Babu. There are a few things that bugged people:

- It's hard to figure out how it works;

- It doesn't feel intuitive enough;

- The scrolling is 'choppy' at some points;

- People want to be able to go back and forth between panels quickly when reading, the way it is now, inhibits this.

There, it's all out there. Now, to improve the navigation overall is going to take some more time (and more testing - should've done that before but hey, live and learn), but to get people on their way and fix the first problem, we've added a tutorial panel at the start of any chapter a new reader first views. After the first view, (hopefully) people will have gotten the hang of it and the tutorial panel won't show again. Of course, in the guide section of the website, people can review the tips on how to navigate Babu. We've also made some technical improvements that should reduce loading time a little.

Why did we choose to replace standard scrolling with our own navigation-system? Well, first off, normal scrolling was giving us trouble in combination with the fading panels. But besides that, we wanted to try to come up with a way to read Babu in a more 'immersive' way - not just a graphic novel on a website. Despite the start-up problems, we think we can improve our current system and get to a point that will make Babu more enjoyable to read. We've got more features planned, but before we get into that, we'll improve what we have now.

Anyway, a new part will be online in two weeks!

2018/03/11